Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  Compared with the general austerity of life on Hela and the particular hardships of the badlands, it was a period of measured, tentative hope. It was one of those rare times when—albeit within tightly prescribed parameters—personal circumstances could change. The more sober-minded villagers did not allow themselves to show any visible signs of excitement, but privately they could not resist wondering if this was their turn for a change of fortune. They made elaborate excuses to allow themselves to travel out to the rendezvous point: excuses that had nothing to do with personal gain, but everything to do with the communal prosperity of the villages. And so, over a period of nearly three weeks, the villages sent out little caravans of their own, crossing the treacherous scabbed ground to rendezvous with the larger processions.

  Rashmika had planned to leave her home at dawn, while her parents were still sleeping. She had not lied to them about her departure, but only because it had never been necessary. What the adults and the other villagers did not understand was that she was as capable of lying as any of them. More than that, she could lie with great conviction. The only reason why she had spent most of her childhood not lying was because until very recently she had failed to see the point in it.

  Quietly she stole through the buried warrens of her home, treading with loping strides between shadowed corridors and bright patches beneath the overhead skylights. The homes in her village were almost all sunk below ground level, irregularly shaped caverns linked by meandering tunnels lined with yellowing plaster. Rashmika found the idea of living above ground faintly unsettling, but she supposed one could get used to it given time; just as one could eventually get used to life in the mobile caravans, or even the cathedrals that they followed. It was not as if life below ground was without its hazards, after all. Indirectly, the network of tunnels in the village was connected to the much deeper network of the digs. There were supposed to be pressure doors and safety systems to protect the village if one of the dig caverns collapsed, or if the miners penetrated a high-pressure bubble, but these systems did not always work as well as intended. There had been no serious dig accidents during Rashmika’s life, only near misses, but everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before another catastrophe of the kind her parents still talked about occurred. Only the week before, there had been an explosion on the surface: no one had been hurt, and there was even talk that the demolition charges had been let off deliberately, but it was still a reminder that her world was only ever one accident away from disaster.

  It was, she supposed, the price that the villages paid for their economic independence from the cathedrals. Most of the settlements on Hela lay near the Permanent Way, not hundreds of kilometres to the north or south of it. With very few exceptions the settlements near the Way owed their existence to the cathedrals and their governing bodies, the churches, and by and large they subscribed to one or other of the major branches of the Quaicheist faith. That was not to say that there was no one of faith in the badlands, but the villages were run by secular committees and made their living from the digs rather than the elaborate arrangement of tithes and indulgences which bound the cathedrals and the communities of the Way. As a consequence they were free of many of the religious restrictions that applied elsewhere on Hela. They made their own laws, had less restrictive marriage practices and turned a blind eye to certain perversions that were outlawed along the Way. Visits from the Clocktower were rare, and whenever the churches did send their envoys they were viewed with suspi-cion. Girls like Rashmika were allowed to study the technical literature of the digs rather than Quaicheist scripture. It was not unthinkable that a woman should find work for herself.

  But by the same token, the villages of the Vigrid badlands were beyond the umbrella of protection that the cathedrals offered. The settlements along the Way were guarded by a loose amalgamation of cathedral militia, and in times of crisis they turned to the cathedrals for help. The cathedrals held medicine far in advance of anything in the badlands, and Rashmika had seen friends and relatives die because her village had no access to that care. The cost to be paid for that care, of course, was that one submitted to the machinations of the Office of Blood-work. And once you had Quaicheist blood in your veins you couldn’t be sure of anything ever again.

  Yet she accepted the arrangement with the combination of pride and stubbornness common to all the badlanders. It was true that they endured hardships unknown along the Way. It was true that, by and large, few of them were fervent believers; even those of faith were usually troubled by doubt. Typically it was doubt that had driven them to the digs in the first place, to search for answers to questions that bothered them. And yet for all this, the villagers would not have had it any other way. They lived and loved as they pleased, and viewed the more pious communities of the Way with a lofty sense of moral superiority.

  Rashmika reached the final chamber of her home, the heavy bag knocking against the small of her back. The house was quiet, but if she kept very still and listened intently she was certain that she could hear the nearly subliminal rumble of the distant excavations, reports of drilling and digging and earth-moving reaching her ears through snaking kilometres of tunnel. Now and then there was a percussive thud or a fusillade of hammer blows. The sounds were so familiar to Rashmika that they never disturbed her sleep; indeed, she would have snapped awake instantly had the mining ceased. But now she wished for a louder series of noises to conceal the sounds she would inevitably make as she left her home.

  The final chamber contained two doors. One led horizontally into the wider tunnel network, accessing a thoroughfare that connected with many other homes and community cham-bers. The other door was set in the ceiling, ringed by handrails. At that moment the door was hinged open into the dark space above it. Rashmika opened a locker set into the smooth curve of the wall and removed her surface suit, taking care not to clatter the helmet and backpack against the three other suits hanging on the same rotating rack. She had to put the suit on three times a year during practice drills, so it was easy enough for her to work the latches and seals. Even then, it still took ten minutes, during which time she stopped and held her breath whenever she heard a sound somewhere in the house, whether it was the air-circulator clicking on and off or the low groan as a tunnel resettled.

  Finally she had the suit on and ready, with the read-outs on her cuff all safely in the green. The tank wasn’t completely full of air—there must have been a slow leak in the suit as the tanks were usually kept fully topped-up—but there was more than enough in there for her needs.

  But when she closed the helmet visor all she could hear was her own breathing; she had no idea how much sound she was making, or whether anyone else was stirring in the house. And the noisiest part of her escape was still to come. She would just have to be as careful and quick as possible, so that even if her parents did wake she could get to her meeting point before they caught up with her.

  The suit doubled her weight, but even then she did not find it difficult to haul herself up into the dark space above the ceiling door. She had reached the surface access airlock. Every home had one, but they varied in size. Rashmika’s was large enough for two adults at a time. Even so, she had to sit in a stooped position while she lowered the inner door back down and turned the manual wheel to lock it tight.

  In a sense, she was safe for a moment. Once she started the depressurisation cycle, there was no way her mother and father would be able to get into the chamber. It took two minutes for the lock to finish its business. By the time the lower door could again be reopened, she would be halfway across the village. Once she got away from the exit point, her footprints would quickly be lost amongst the confusion of marks left by other villagers as they went about their errands.

  Rashmika checked her suit again, satisfying herself that the readings were still in the green. Only then did she initiate the depressurisation sequence. She heard nothing, but as the air was sucked from the chamber the suit’s fabric swelled out between the concertin
a joints and it took a little more effort to move her limbs. A separate read-out around the faceplate of her helmet informed her that she was now in vacuum.

  No one had hammered on the bottom of the door. Rashmika had been a little worried that she might trip an alarm by using the lock. She was not aware that such a thing existed, but her parents might have chosen not to tell her, just in case she ever intended making this kind of escape. Her fears appeared to have been groundless, however: there was no alarm, no fail-safe, no hidden code that needed to be used before the door worked. She had run through this so many times in her imagination that it was impossible not to feel a small twinge of déjà vu.

  When the chamber was fully evacuated, a relay allowed the outer door to be opened. Rashmika pushed hard, but at first nothing happened. Then the door budged—only by an inch, but it was enough to let in a sheet of blindingly bright daylight that scythed against her faceplate. She pushed harder and the door moved higher, hinging back as it did so. Rashmika pushed through until she was sitting on the surface. She saw now that the door had been covered in an inch of recent frost. It snowed on Hela, especially when the Kelda or Ragnarok gey-sers were active.

  Although the house clock had said it was dawn, this meant very little on the surface. The villagers still lived by a twenty-six-hour clock (many of them were interstellar refugees from Yellowstone) despite the fact that Hela was a different world entirely, with its own complex cycles. A day en Hela was actually about forty hours long, which was the time it took Hela to complete one orbit around its mother world, the gas giant Hal-dora. Since the moon’s inclination to the plane of its orbit was essentially zero, all points on the surface experienced about twenty hours of darkness during each orbit. The Vigrid badlands were on the dayside now, and would remain so for another seven hours. There was another kind of night on Hela, for once in its orbit around Haldora the moon swung into the gas giant’s shadow. But that short night was only two hours long, brief enough to be of little consequence to the villagers. At any given time the moon was far more likely to be out of Haldora’s shadow than within it.

  After a few seconds, Rashmika’s visor had compensated for the glare and she was able to get her bearings. She extracted her legs from the hole and carefully closed the surface door, latching it shut so that it would begin pressurising the lower chamber. Perhaps her parents were waiting below, but even if that was the case they could not reach the surface for another two minutes, even if they were already wearing suits. It would take them even longer to navigate the community tunnels to reach the next-nearest surface exit.

  Rashmika stood up and began walking briskly but with what she hoped was no apparent sense of haste or panic. There was some more good fortune: she had expected to have to cross several dozen metres of unmarked ice, so that her trail would at first be easy to follow. But someone else had come this way recently, and their prints meandered away in a different direction from the one she intended to take. Anyone following her now would have no idea which set of prints to follow. They looked like her mother’s, for the shoe-prints were too small to have belonged to her father. What kind of business had her mother been on? It bothered Rashmika for a moment, for she did not recall anyone mentioning any recent trips to the surface.

  Never mind: there was bound to be an innocent explanation. She had enough to think about without adding to her worries.

  Rashmika followed a circuitous path between the black upright slabs of radiator panels, the squatting orange mounds of generators or navigation transponders and the soft snow-covered lines of parked icejammers. She had been right about the footprints, for when she looked back it was impossible to separate her own from the muddle of those that had been left before.

  She rounded a huddle of radiator fins and there it was, looking much like the other parked icejammers except that the snow had melted from the flanged radiator above the engine cowlings. It was too bright to tell if there were lights on inside the machine. There were fan-shaped arcs of transparency in the windscreen where the mechanical wiper blades had flicked aside the snow. Rashmika thought she saw figures moving behind the glass.

  Rashmika walked around the low, splayed-legged jammer. The black of its boat-shaped hull was relieved only by a glowing snake motif coiling along the side. The single front leg ended in a broad, upturned ski blade, with smaller skis tipping the two rear legs. Rashmika wondered if it was the right machine. She would look rather silly if she made a mistake now. She felt certain that there was no one in the village who would not recognise her, even though she had a suit on.

  But Crozet had been very specific in his instructions. With some relief she saw a boarding ramp was already waiting for her, lowered down into the snow. She walked up the flexing metal slope and knocked politely on the jammer’s outer door. There was an agonising moment and then the door slid aside, revealing another airlock. She squeezed into it—there was only room for one person.

  A man’s voice—she recognised it immediately as Crozet’s—came through on her helmet channel. “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Who is ‘me’?”

  “Rashmika,” she said. “Rashmika Els. I think we had an arrangement.”

  There was a pause—an agonising pause during which she began to think that, yes, she had made an error—when the man said, “It’s not too late to change your mind.”

  “I think it is.”

  “You could go home now.”

  “My parents won’t be very pleased that I came this far.”

  “No,” the man said, “I doubt that they’ll be thrilled. But I know your folks. I doubt that they’d punish you too severely.”

  He was right, but she did not want to be reminded of that now. She had spent weeks psyching herself up for this, and the last thing she needed was a rational argument for backing out at the final minute.

  Rashmika knocked on the inner door again, knuckling it hard with her gauntlet. “Are you going to let me in or not?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you’re certain. Once we leave the village, we won’t turn back until we meet the caravan. That’s not open to negotiation. Step inside, you’re committed to a three-day trip. Six if you decide to come back with us. No amount of pissing and moaning is going to make me turn around.“

  “I’ve waited eight years,” she said. “Three more days won’t kill me.”

  He laughed, or sniggered—she wasn’t sure which. “You know, I almost believe you.”

  “You should do,” Rashmika told him. “I’m the girl that never lies, remember?”

  The outer door closed itself, cramming her even further into the tight cavity of the lock. Air began to skirl in through grilles. At the same time she felt motion. It was soft and rhythmic, like being rocked in a cradle. The jammer was on the move, propelling itself with alternating movements of its rear skis.

  She supposed that her escape had begun the moment she crawled out of bed, but only now did it feel as if she was actually on her way.

  When the inner door allowed Rashmika into the body of the jammer, she snapped off her helmet and hung it dutifully next to the three that were already there. The jammer had looked reasonably large from the outside, but she had forgotten how much of the interior volume would be occupied by its own engines, generators, fuel tanks, life-support equipment and cargo racks. Inside it was cramped and noisy, and the air made her want to put the helmet back on again. She imagined she could get used to it, but she wondered if three days would be anywhere near enough time.

  The jammer lurched and yawed. Through one of the windows she saw the blazing white landscape tilt and tilt again. Rashmika reached for a handhold and was just beginning to make her way to the front when a figure stepped into view.

  It was Crozet’s son, Culver. He wore grubby ochre overalls, tools cramming the many pockets. He was a year or two younger than Rashmika, blond-haired and with a permanent look of malnourishment. He viewed Rashmika with lecherous intent.

  “Decided to stay aboard
after all, did you? That’s good. We can get to know each other a bit better now, can’t we?”

  “It’s only for three days, Culver. Don’t get any ideas.”

  “I’ll help you get that suit off, then we can go up front. Dad’s busy steering us out of the village now. We’re having to take a detour because of the crater. That’s why it’s a bit bumpy.”

  “I’ll manage my suit on my own, thank you.” Rashmika nodded encouragingly towards the icejammer’s cabin. “Why don’t you go back and see if your dad needs any help?”

  “He doesn’t need any help. Mother’s there as well.”

  Rashmika beamed approvingly. “Well, I expect you’re glad that she’s here to keep you two men out of trouble. Right, Culver?”

  “She doesn’t mind what we get up to, so long as we stay in the black.” The machine lurched again, knocking Rashmika against the metal wall. “Fact of the matter is, she mostly turns a blind eye.”

  “So I’ve heard. Well, I really need to get this suit off… would you mind telling me where I’m sleeping?”

  Culver showed her a tiny compartment tucked away between two throbbing generators. There was a grubby mattress, a pillow and a blanket made of slippery quilted silver material. A curtain could be tugged across for privacy.

  “I hope you weren’t expecting luxury,” Culver said.

  “I was expecting the worst.”

  Culver lingered. “You sure you don’t want any help getting that suit off?”

  “I’ll manage, thanks.”