Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  Rashmika was more troubled by this than she cared to admit. On one level she wanted to slip away unnoticed, the way she had always planned it. But at the same time the more childish part of her craved some sign that her absence had been noted. She wanted to feel missed.

  When she had given the matter some further thought, she decided that her parents must be waiting to see what happened in the next few hours. She had, after all, not yet been away for more than half a day. If she had gone about her usual daily business, she would still have been at the library. Perhaps they were working on the assumption that she had left home unusually early that morning. Perhaps they had managed not to notice the note she had left for them, or the fact that her surface suit was missing from the locker.

  But after sixteen hours there was still no news.

  Her habits were erratic enough that her parents might not have worried about her absence for ten or twelve hours, but after sixteen—even if by some miracle they had missed the other rather obvious clues—there could be no doubt in their minds about what had happened. They would know she was gone. They would have to report it to the authorities, wouldn’t they?

  She wondered. The authorities in the badlands were not exactly known for their ruthless efficiency. It was conceivable that the report of her absence had simply failed to reach the right desk. Allowing for bureaucratic inertia at all levels, it might not get there until the following day. Or perhaps the authorities were well informed but had decided not to notify the news channels for some reason. It was tempting to believe that, but at the same time she could think of no reason why they would delay.

  Still, maybe there would be a security block around the next corner. Crozet didn’t seem to think so. He was driving as fast and-as nonchalantly as ever. His icejammer knew these old ice trails so well that he merely seemed to be giving it vague suggestions about which direction to head in.

  Towards the end of the first day’s travel, when Crozet was ready to pull in for the night, they picked up the news channel one more time. By then Rashmika had been on the road for the better part of twenty hours. There was still no sign that anyone had noticed.

  She felt dejected, as if for her entire life she had fatally overestimated her importance in even the minor scheme of things in the Vigrid badlands.

  Then, belatedly, another possibility occurred to her. It was so obvious that she should have thought of it immediately. It made vastly more sense than any of the unlikely contingencies she had considered so far.

  Her parents, she decided, were well aware that she had left. They knew exactly when and they knew exactly why. She had been coy about her plans in the letter she had left for them, but she had no doubt that her parents would have been able to guess the broad details with reasonable accuracy. They even knew that she had continued to associate with Linxe after the scandal.

  No. They knew what she was doing, and they knew it was all about her brother. They knew that she was on a mission of love, or if not love, then fury. And the reason they had told no one was because, secretly, despite all that they had said to her over the years, despite all the warnings they had given her about the risks of getting too close to the churches, they wanted her to succeed. They were, in their quiet and secret way, proud of what she had decided to do.

  When she realised this, it hit home with the force of truth.

  “It’s all right,” she told Crozet. “There won’t be any mention of me on the news.”

  He shrugged. “What makes you so certain now?”

  “I just realised something, that’s all.”

  “You look like you need a good night’s sleep,” Linxe said. She had brewed hot chocolate: Rashmika sipped it appreciatively. It was a long way from the nicest cup of hot chocolate anyone had ever made for her, but right then she couldn’t think of any drink that had ever tasted better.

  “I didn’t sleep much last night,” Rashmika admitted. “Too worried about making it out this morning.”

  “You did grand,” Linxe said. “When you get back, everyone will be very proud of you.”

  “I hope so,” Rashmika said.

  “I have to ask one thing, though,” Linxe said. “You don’t have to answer. Is this just about your brother, Rashmika? Or is there more to it than that?”

  The question took Rashmika aback. “Of course it’s only about my brother.”

  “It’s just that you already have a bit of a reputation,” Linxe said. “We’ve all heard about the amount of time you spend in the digs, and that book you’re making. They say there isn’t anyone else in the villages as interested in the scuttlers as Rashmika Els. They say you write letters to the church-sponsored archaeologists, arguing with them.”

  “I can’t help it if the scuttlers interest me,” she said.

  “Yes, but what exactly is it you’ve got such a bee in your bonnet about?”

  The question was phrased kindly, but Rashmika couldn’t help sounding irritated when she said, “I’m sorry?”

  “I mean, what is it you think everyone else has got so terribly wrong?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I’m as interested in hearing your side of the argument as anyone else’s.”

  “Except deep down you probably don’t care who’s right, do you? As long as stuff keeps coming out of the ground, what does anyone really care about what happened to the scuttlers? All you care about is getting spare parts for your icejammer.”

  “Manners, young lady,” Linxe admonished.

  “I’m sorry,” Rashmika said, blushing. She sipped on the hot chocolate. “I didn’t mean it like that. But I do care about the scuttlers and I do think no one is very interested in the truth of what really happened to them. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the Amarantin.”

  Linxe looked at her. “The what?”

  “The Amarantin were the aliens who evolved on Resurgam. They were evolved birds.” She remembered drawing one of them for her book—not as a skeleton, but as they must have looked when they were alive. She had seen the Amarantin in her mind’s eye: the bright gleam of an avian eye, the quizzical beaked smile of a sleek alien head. Her drawing had resembled nothing in the official reconstructions in the other archaeology texts, but it had always looked more authentically alive to her than those dead impressions, as if she had seen a living Amarantin and they had only had bones to go on. It made her wonder if her drawings of living scuttlers had the same vitality.

  Rashmika continued, “Something wiped them out a million years ago. When humans colonised Resurgam, no one wanted to consider the possibility that whatever had wiped out the Amarantin might come back to do the same to us. Except Dan Sylveste, of course.”

  “Dan Sylveste?” Linxe asked. “Sorry—also not ringing any bells.”

  It infuriated Rashmika: how could she not know these things? But she tried not to let it show. “Sylveste was the archaeologist in charge of the expedition. When he stumbled on the truth, the other colonists silenced him. They didn’t want to know how much trouble they were in. But as we know, he turned out to be right in the end.”

  “I bet you feel a little affinity with him, in that case.”

  “More than a little,” Rashmika said.

  * * *

  RASHMIKA STILL REMEMBERED the first time she had come across his name. It had been a casual reference in one of the archaeological texts she had uploaded on to her compad, buried in some dull treatise about the Pattern Jugglers. It was like lightning shearing through her skull. Rashmika had felt an electrifying sense of connection, as if her whole life had been a prelude to that moment. It was, she now knew, the instant when her interest in the scuttlers shifted from a childish diversion to something closer to obsession.

  She could not explain this, but nor could she deny that it had happened.

  Since then, in parallel with her study of the scuttlers, she had learned much about the life and times of Dan Sylveste. It was logical enough: there was no sense in studying the scuttlers in isolation, since the
y were merely the latest in a line of extinct galactic cultures to be encountered by human explorers. Sylveste’s name loomed large in the study of alien intelligence as a whole, so a passing knowledge of his exploits was essential.

  Sylveste’s work on the Amarantin had spanned many of the years between 2500 and 2570. During most of that time he had either been a patient investigator or under some degree of incarceration, but even while under house arrest his interest in the Amarantin had remained steady. But without access to resources beyond anything the colony could offer, his ideas were doomed to remain speculative. Then Ultras had arrived in the Resurgam system. With the help of their ship, Sylveste had unlocked the final piece of the puzzle in the mystery of the Amarantin. His suspicions had turned out to be correct: the Amarantin had not been wiped out by some isolated cosmic accident, but by a response from a still-active mechanism designed to suppress the emergence of starfaring intelligence.

  It had taken years for the news to make it to other systems. By then it was second or third hand, tainted with propaganda, almost lost in the confusion of human factional warfare. Independently, it seemed, the Conjoiners had arrived at similar conclusions to Sylveste. And other archaeological groups, sifting through the remains of other dead cultures, were coming around to the same unsettling view.

  The machines that had killed the Amarantin were still out there, waiting and watching. They went by many names. The Conjoiners had called them wolves. Other cultures, now extinct, had named them the Inhibitors.

  Over the last century, the reality of the Inhibitors had come to be accepted. But for much of that time the threat had remained comfortably distant: a problem for some other generation to worry about.

  Recently, however, things had changed. There had long been unconfirmed reports of strange activity in the Resurgam system: rumours of worlds being ripped apart and remade into perplexing engines of alien design. There were stories that the entire system had been evacuated; that Resurgam was now an uninhabitable cinder; that something unspeakable had been done to the system’s sun.

  But even Resurgam could be ignored for a while. The system was an archaeological colony, isolated from the main web of interstellar commerce, its government a totalitarian regime with a taste for disinformation. The reports of what had happened there could not be verified. And so for several more decades, life in the other systems of human-settled space continued more or less unaffected.

  But now the Inhibitors had arrived around other stars.

  The Ultras had been the first to bring the bad news. Communications between their ships warned them to steer clear of certain systems. Something was happening, something that transgressed the accepted scales of human catastrophe. This was not war or plague, but something infinitely worse. It had happened to the Amarantin and—presumably—to the scuttlers.

  The number of human colonies known to have witnessed direct intervention by Inhibitor machines was still fewer than a dozen, but the ripples of panic spreading outwards at the speed of radio communications were almost as effective at collapsing civilisations. Entire surface communities were being evacuated or abandoned, as citizens tried to reach space or the hopefully safer shelter of underground caverns. Crypts and bunkers, disused since the dark decades of the Melding Plague, were hastily reopened. There were, invariably, too many people for either the evacuation ships or the bunkers. There were riots and furious little wars. Even as civilisation crumbled, those with an eye for the main chance accumulated small, useless fortunes. Doomsday cults flourished in the damp, inviting loam of fear, like so many black orchids. People spoke of End Times, convinced that they were living through the final days.

  Against this background, it was hardly any wonder that so many people were drawn to Hela. In better times, Quaiche’s miracle would have attracted little attention, but now a miracle was precisely what people were looking for. Every new Ultra ship arriving in the system brought tens of thousands of frozen pilgrims. Not all of them were looking for a religious answer, but before very long, if they wanted to stay on Hela, the Office of Blood-work got to them anyway. Thereafter, they saw things differently.

  Rashmika could not really blame them for coming to Hela. Had she not been born here, she sometimes thought she might well have made the same pilgrimage. But her motives would have been different. It was truth she was after: the same drive that had taken Dan Sylveste to Resurgam; the same drive that had brought him into conflict with his colony and which, ultimately, had led to his death.

  She thought back to Linxe’s question. Was it really Harbin driving her towards the Permanent Way, or was Harbin just the excuse she had made up to conceal—as much from herself as anyone else—the real reason for her journey?

  Her reply that it was all to do with Harbin had been so automatic and flippant that she had almost believed it. But now she wondered whether it was really true. Rashmika could tell when anyone around her was lying. But seeing through her own deceptions was another matter entirely.

  “It’s Harbin,” she whispered to herself. “Nothing else matters except finding my brother.”

  But she could not stop thinking of the scuttlers, and when she dozed off with the mug of chocolate still clasped in her hands, it was the scuttlers that she dreamed of, the mad permutations of their insectile anatomy shuffling and reshuffling like the broken parts of a puzzle.

  RASHMIKA SNAPPED AWAKE, feeling a rumble as the icejammer slowed, picking up undulations in the ice trail.

  “I’m afraid this is as far as we can go tonight,” Crozet said. “I’ll find somewhere discreet to hide us away, but I’m near my limit.” He looked drawn and exhausted to Rashmika, but then again that was how Crozet always looked.

  “Move over, love,” Linxe said to Crozet. “I’ll take us on for a couple of hours, just until we’re safe and sound. You can both go back and catch forty winks.”

  “I’m sure we’re safe and sound,” Rashmika said.

  “Never you mind about that. A few extra miles won’t hurt us. Now go back and try to get yourself some sleep, young lady. We’ve another long day ahead of us tomorrow and I can’t swear we’ll be out of the woods even then.”

  Linxe was already easing into the driver’s position, running her thick babylike fingers over the icejammer’s timeworn controls. Until Crozet had mentioned pulling over for the night, Rashmika had assumed that the machine would keep travelling using some kind of autopilot, even if it had to slow down a little while it guided itself. It was a genuine shock to learn that they would be going nowhere unless someone operated the ice-jammer manually.

  “I can do a bit,” she offered. “I’ve never driven one of these before, but if someone wants to show me…”

  “We’ll do fine, love,” Linxe said, “It’s not just Crozet and me, either. Culver can do a shift in the morning.”

  “I wouldn’t want…”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Culver,” Crozet said. “He needs something else to occupy his hands.”

  Linxe slapped her husband, but she was smiling as she did it. Rashmika finished her now-cold chocolate drink, dog-tired but glad that she had at least made it through the first day. She was under no illusions that she was done with the worst of her journey, but she supposed that every successful stage had to be treated as a small victory in its own right. She just wished she could tell her parents not to worry about her, that she had made good progress so far and was thinking of them all the time. But she had vowed not to send a message home until she had joined the caravan.

  Crozet walked her back through the rumbling innards of the icejammer. It moved differently under Linxe’s direction. It was not that she was a worse or even a better driver than Crozet, but she definitely favoured a different driving style. The icejammer flounced, flinging itself through the air in long, weightless parabolic arcs. It was all quite conducive to sleep, but a sleep filled with uneasy dreams in which Rashmika found herself endlessly falling.

  SHE WOKE THE next morning to troubling and yet strangely welcom
e news.

  “There’s been an alert on the news service,” Crozet said. ‘The word’s gone out now, Rashmika. You’re officially missing and there’s a search operation in progress. Doesn’t that make you feel proud?“

  “Oh,” she said, wondering what could have happened since the night before.

  “It’s the constabulary,” Linxe said, meaning the law-enforcement organisation that had jurisdiction in the Vigrid region. “They’ve sent out search parties, apparently. But there’s a good chance we’ll make the caravan before they find us. Once we get you on the caravan, the constabulary can’t touch you.”

  “I’m surprised they’ve actually sent out parties,” Rashmika said. “It’s not as if I’m in any danger, is it?”

  “Actually, there’s a bit more to it than that,” Crozet said.

  Linxe looked at her husband.

  What did the two of them know that Rashmika didn’t? Suddenly she felt a tension in her belly, a line of cold trickling down her spine. “Go on,” she said.