Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  But he did not think he could have been out for long: his memories of the terrifying attack and the dizzying fall were very clear. The wonder of it, really, was not that he remembered those events, but that he was alive at all.

  Moving very gently in his restraints, he tried to survey the damage. The tiny ship creaked around him. At the limit of his vision, as far as he could twist his neck (which seemed not to be broken), he saw dust and ice still settling from one of the avalanche plumes. Everything was blurred, as if seen through a thin grey veil. The plume was the only thing moving, and it confirmed to him that he could not have been under for more than a few minutes. He could also see one end of the bridge, the marvellous eye-tricking complexity of scrolls supporting the gently curving roadbed. There had been a moment of anxi-ety, as he watched his ordnance rip away, when he had worried about destroying the thing that had brought him here. The bridge was huge, but it also looked as delicate as tissue paper. But there was no evidence that he had inflicted any damage. The thing must be stronger than it looked.

  The ship creaked again. Quaiche could not see the ground with any clarity. The ship had come to rest upside down, but lad it really reached the bottom of Ginnungagap Rift?

  He looked at the console but couldn’t focus on it properly. Couldn’t—now that he paid attention to the fact—focus on much at all. It was not so bad if he closed his left eye. The gee-force might have knocked a retina loose, he speculated. It was precisely that kind of fixable damage that the Daughter was prepared to inflict in the interests of bringing him back alive.

  With his right eye open he appraised the console. There was a lot of red there—Latinate script proclaiming systems defects—but also many blank areas where there should have been something. The Daughter had clearly sustained heavy damage, he realised: not just mechanical, but also to the cybernetic core of her avionics suite. The ship was in a coma.

  He tried speaking. “Executive override. Reboot.”

  Nothing happened. Voice recognition might be one of the lost faculties. Either that or the ship was as alive as she was ever going to be.

  He tried again, just to be on the safe side. “Executive override. Reboot.”

  But still nothing happened. Close down that line of enquiry, he thought.

  He moved again, shifting an arm until his hand came into contact with one of the tactile control clusters. There was discomfort as he moved, but it was mostly the diffuse pain of heavy bruising rather than the sharpness of broken or dislocated limbs. He could even shift his legs without too much unpleasantness. A screaming jag of pain in his chest didn’t bode well for his ribs, however, but his breathing seemed normal enough and there were no odd sensations anywhere else in his chest or abdomen. If a few cracked ribs and a detached retina were all he had suffered, he had done rather well. .

  “You always were a jammy sod,” he said to himself as his fingers groped around the many stubs and stalks of the tactile control cluster. Every voice command had a manual equivalent; it was just a question of remembering the right combinations of movements.

  He had it. Finger there, thumb there. Squeeze. Squeeze again.

  The ship coughed. Red script flickered momentarily into view where there had been nothing a moment before.

  Getting somewhere. There was still juice in the old girl. He tried again. The ship coughed and hummed, trying to reboot herself. Flicker of red, then nothing.

  “Come on,” Quaiche said through gritted teeth.

  He tried again. Third time lucky? The ship spluttered, seemed to shiver. The red script appeared again, faded, then came back. Other parts of the display changed: the ship explored her own functionality as she came out of the coma.

  “Nice one,” Quaiche said as the ship squirmed, reshaping her hull—probably not intentional, just some reflex adjustment back to the default profile. Rubble sputtered against the armour, dislodged in the process. The ship pitched several degrees, Quaiche’s view shifting.

  “Careful…” he said.

  It was too late. The Scavenger’s Daughter had begun to roll, keeling off the ledge where it had come to temporary rest. Quaiche had a glimpse of the floor, still a good hundred metres below, and then it was coming up to meet him, fast.

  SUBJECTIVE TIME STRETCHED the fall to an eternity.

  Then he hit the deck; although he didn’t black out, the tumbling series of impacts felt as if something had him in its jaws and was whacking him against the ground until he either snapped or died.

  He groaned. This time it seemed unlikely that he was going to get away so lightly. There was heavy pressure on his chest, as if someone had placed an anvil there. The cracked ribs had given in, most likely. That was going to hurt when he had to move. He was still alive, though. And this time the Daughter had landed right-way-up. He could see the bridge again, framed like a scene in a tourist brochure. It was as if Fate were rubbing it in, reminding him of just what it was that had got him into this mess in the first place.

  Most of the red parts on the console had gone out again. He could see the reflection of his own stunned-looking face hovering behind the fragmented Latinate script, deep shadows cutting into his cheeks and eye sockets. He had seen a similar image, once: the face of some religious figure burned into the fabric of an embalming shroud. Just a sketch of a face, like something done in thick strokes of charcoal.

  The indoctrinal virus grumbled in his blood.

  “Reboot,” he said, spitting crunched tooth.

  There was no response. Quaiche groped for the tactile input cluster, found the same sequence of commands, applied them. Nothing happened. He tried again, knowing that this was his only option. There was no other way to awaken the ship without a full diagnostic harness.

  The console flickered. Something was still alive; there was still a chance. As he kept on applying the wake-up command, a few more systems returned from sleep each time, until, after eight or nine tries, there was no further improvement. He didn’t want to continue for fear of draining the remaining avionics power reserves, or stressing the systems that were already alive. He would just have to make do with what he had.

  Closing his left eye, he scanned the red messages: a cursory glance told him that the Scavenger’s Daughter was going nowhere in a hurry. Critical flight systems had been destroyed in the attack, secondaries smashed during the collision with the wall and the long tumble to the ground. His beautiful, precious gem of a private spacecraft was ruined. Even the self-repair mechanisms would have a hard time fixing her now, even if he had months to wait while they worked. But he supposed he should be grateful that the Daughter had kept him alive. In that sense she had not failed him.

  He examined the read-outs again. The Daughter’s automated distress beacon was working. Its range would be restricted by the walls of ice on either side, but there was nothing to obstruct the signal from reaching upwards—except, of course, the gas giant he had positioned between himself and Morwenna. How long was it until she would emerge from the sunlit side of Haldora?

  He checked the ship’s oneworking chronometer. Four hours until the Dominatrix would emerge from behind Haldora.

  Four hours. That was all right. He could last that long. The Dominatrix would pick up the distress signal as soon as she came out from behind Haldora, and would then need an hour or so to get down to him. Ordinarily he would never have risked bringing the other ship so close to a potentially dangerous site, but he had no choice. Besides, he doubted that the booby-trap sentries were anything to worry about now: he had destroyed two of three and the third looked to have run out of power; it would surely have taken another pot shot at him by now if it had the means.

  Four hours, plus another one to reach him: five in total. That was all it would take until he was safe and sound. He would sooner have been out of the mess right now, this instant, but he could hardly complain, especially not after telling Morwenna that she had to endure six hours away from him. And that business about not sewing the relay satellites? He had to admit to h
imself now that he had been thinking less about Morwenna’s safety and more about not wanting to waste any time. Well, he was getting a dose of his own medicine now, wasn’t he? Better take it like a man.

  Five hours. Nothing. Piece of piss.

  Then he noticed one of the other read-outs. He blinked, opened both eyes, hoping that it was some fault of his vision. But there was no mistake.

  The hull was breached. The flaw must be tiny: a hairline crack. Ordinarily, it would have been sealed without him knowing about it, but with so much damage to the ship, the normal repair systems were inoperable. Slowly—slowly enough that he had yet to feel it—he was losing air pressure. The Daughter was doing her best to top up the supply with the pressurised reserves, but it could not continue this indefinitely.

  Quaiche did the sums. Time to exhaustion: two hours.

  He wasn’t going to make it.

  Did it make any difference whether or not he panicked? He mulled this over, feeling that it was important to know. It was not simply the case that he was stuck in a sealed room with a finite amount of oxygen slowly being replaced by the carbon dioxide of his exhalations. The air was whistling out through a crack in the hull, and the leak was going to continue no matter how quickly he used up the oxygen by breathing. Even if he only drew one breath in the next two hours, there would still be no air left when he came to take the next. It wasn’t depleting oxygen that was his problem, it was escaping atmosphere. In two hours he would be sucking on good hard vacuum, the kind some people paid money for. They said it hurt, for the first few seconds. But for him the transition to airlessness would be gradual. He would be unconscious—more than likely dead—long before then. Perhaps within the next ninety minutes.

  But it probably wouldn’t hurt not to panic, would it? It might make a slight difference, depending on the details of the leak. If the air was being lost as it made its way through the recycling system, then it would certainly help matters if he used it as slowly as possible. Not knowing where the crack was, he might as well assume that panic would make a difference to his life expectancy. Two hours might stretch to three… three to four if he was really lucky and prepared to tolerate a bit of brain damage. Four might, just might, stretch to five.

  He was kidding himself. He had two hours. Two and a half at the absolute limit. Panic all you like, he told himself. It was not going to make a shred of difference.

  The virus tasted his fear. It gulped it up, feeding on it. It had been simmering until now, but as he tried to hold the panic at bay it rose in him, crushing rational thought.

  “No,” Quaiche said, “I don’t need you now.”

  But maybe he did. What good was clarity of mind if there was nothing he could do to save himself? At least the virus would let him die with the illusion that he was in the presence of something larger than himself, something that cared for him and was there to watch over him as he faded away.

  But the virus simply did not care either way. It was going to flood him with immanence whether he liked it or not. There was no sound save his own breathing and the occasional patter of icy scree still raining down on him, dislodged from the high sides of the rift during his descent. There was nothing to look at except the bridge. But in the silence, distantly, he heard organ music. It was quiet now, but coming nearer, and he knew that when it reached its awesome crescendo it would fill his soul with joy and terror. And though the bridge looked much the way it had before, he could see the beginnings of stained-glass glories in the black sky beyond it, squares and rectangles and lozenges of pastel light starting to shine through the darkness, like windows into something vaster and more glorious.

  “No,” Quaiche said, but this time without conviction.

  AN HOUR PASSED. Systems gave up the ghost, portions of the red script dropping off the console. Nothing that failed was going to make much difference to Quaiche’s chances of survival. The ship was not going to put him out of his misery by blowing up, however painless and immediate that might have been. No, Quaiche thought: the Scavenger’s Daughter would do all in her power to keep him alive until that last ragged breath. The sheer futility of the exercise was completely wasted on the machine. She was still sending out that distress signal, even though he would be two or three hours dead by the time the Dominatrix received it.

  He laughed: gallows humour. He had always thought of the Daughter as a supremely intelligent machine. By the standards of most spacecraft—certainly anything that did not already have at least a gamma-level subpersona running it—that was probably the case. But when you boiled it down to essentials she was still a bit on the dim side.

  “Sorry, ship,” he said. And laughed again, except this time the laughing segued into a series of self-pitying sobs.

  The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin facades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn’t mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps.

  In his moment of greatest need, when he most desired that comfort, it had deserted him. He was just a godless man with a botched virus in his blood, running out of air, running out of time, on a world to which he had given a name that would soon be forgotten.

  “I’m sorry, Mor,” he said. “I screwed up. I really fucking screwed up.”

  He thought of her, so distant from him, so unreachable… and then he remembered the glass-blower.

  He hadn’t thought about the man for a long time, but then again it had been a long time since he had felt this alone. What was his name? Trollhattan, that was it. Quaiche had encountered him in one of the migrogravitic commercial atria of Pygmalion, one of Parsifal’s moons, around Tau Ceti.

  There had been a glass-blowing demonstration. The free-fall artisan Trollhattan had been an ancient Skyjack defector with plug-in limbs and a face with skin like cured elephant hide, cratered with the holes where radiation-strike melanomas had been inexpertly removed. Trollhattan made fabulous glass constructs: lacy, room-filling things, some of them so delicate that they could not withstand even the mild gravity of a major moon. The constructs were always different. There were three-dimensional glass orreries that stressed the eye with their aching fineness. There were flocks of glass birds, thousands of them, linked together by the tiniest mutual contact of wingtip against wingtip. There were shoals of a thousand fish, the glass of each fish shot through with the subtlest of colours, yellows and blues, the rose-tipped fins of a heartbreaking translucence. There were squadrons of angels, skirmishes of galleons from the age of fighting sail, fanciful reproductions of major space battles. There were creations that were almost painful to look at, as if by the very act of observation one might subtly unbalance the play of light and shade across them, causing some tiny latent crack to widen to the point where the structure became unsustainable. Once, an entire Trollhattan glasswork had indeed spontaneously exploded during its public unveiling, leaving no shard larger than a beetle. No one had ever been sure whether that had been part of the intended effect.

  What everyone agreed on was that Trollhattan artefacts were expensive. They were not cheap to buy in the first place, but the export costs were a joke. Just getting one of the things off Pygmalion would bankrupt a modest Demarchist state. They could be buffered in smart packing to tolerate modest accelerations, but every attempt to ship a Trollhattan artefact between solar systems had resulted in a lot of broken glass. All surviving works were still in the Tau Ceti system. Entire families had relocat
ed to Parsifal just to be able to possess and show off their own Trollhattan creation.

  It was said that somewhere in interstellar space, a slow-moving automated barge carried hundreds of the artefacts, crawling towards another system (which one depended on which story you listened to) at a few per cent of lightspeed, fulfilling a commission placed decades earlier. It was also said that whoever had the wit to intercept and pirate that barge—without shattering the Trollhattan artefacts—would be wealthy beyond the bounds of decency. In an era in which practically anything with a blueprint could be manufactured at negligible cost, handmade artefacts with watertight provenance were amongst the few “valuable” things left.

  Quaiche had considered dabbling in the Trollhattan market during his stay on Parsifal. He had even, briefly, hooked up with an artisan who believed he could produce high-quality fakes using miniature servitors to chew away an entire room-sized block of glass. Quaiche had seen the dry-runs: they were good, but not that good. There was something about the prismatic quality of a real Trollhattan that nothing else in the universe quite matched. It was like the difference between ice and diamond. In any case, the provenance part had been the killer. Unless someone killed off Trollhattan, there was no way the market would swallow the fakes.

  Quaiche had been sniffing around Trollhattan when he saw the demonstration. He had wanted to see if there was any dirt he could use on the glass-blower, anything that might make him open to negotiation. If Trollhattan could be persuaded to turn a blind eye when the fakes started hitting the market—saying he didn’t exactly remember making them, but didn’t exactly remember not making them either—then there might still be some mileage to be had out of the scam.

  But Trollhattan had been untouchable. He never said anything and he never moved in the usual artist’s circles.

  He just blew glass.