Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  Dismayed, his enthusiasm for the whole thing waning in any case, Quaiche had lingered long enough to watch part of the demonstration. His cold, dispassionate interest in the practical matter of the value of Trollhattan’s art had quickly given way to awe at what was actually involved.

  Trollhattan’s demonstration involved only a small work, not one of the room-filling creations. When Quaiche arrived, the man had already crafted a wonderfully intricate free-floating plant, a thing of translucent green stem and leaves with many horn-shaped flowers in pale ruby; now Trollhattan was fashioning an exquisite shimmering blue thing next to one of the flowers. Quaiche did not immediately recognise the shape, but when Trollhattan began to draw out the incredibly fine curve of a beak towards the flower, Quaiche saw the hummingbird. The arc of amber tapered to its point a finger’s width from the flower, and Quaiche imagined that this would be it, that the bird and the plant would float next to one another without being connected. But then the angle of the light shifted and he realised that between the tip of the beak and the stigma of the plant was the finest possible line of blown glass, a crack of gold like the last filament of daylight in a planetary sunset, and that what he was seeing was the tongue of the hummingbird, blown in glass.

  The effect had surely been deliberate, for the other onlookers noticed the tongue at more or less the same moment. No suggestion of emotion flickered on the parts of Trollhattan’s face still nominally capable of registering it.

  In that moment, Quaiche despised the glass-blower. He despised the vanity of his genius, judging that studied and total absence of emotion to be as reprehensible as any display of pride. Yet he also felt a vast upwelling of admiration for the trick he had just seen performed. How would it feel, Quaiche wondered, to import a glimpse of the miraculous into everyday life? Trollhattan’s spectators lived in an age of miracles and wonders. Yet that glimpse of the hummingbird’s tongue had clearly been the most surprising and wonderful thing any of them had seen in a long time.

  It was certainly true for Quaiche. A sliver of glass had moved him to the core, when he was least expecting it.

  He thought now of the hummingbird’s tongue. Whenever he was forced to leave Morwenna, he always imagined a thread of stretching molten glass, tinged with gold and spun out to the exquisite thinness of the hummingbird’s tongue, connecting himself to her. As the distance increased, so did the thinness and inherent fragility of the tongue. But as long as he was able to hold that image in mind, and consider himself still linked to her, his isolation did not seem total. He could still feel her through the glass, the tremors of her breathing racing along the thread.

  But the thread seemed thinner and frailer now than he had ever imagined it, and he didn’t think he could feel her breathing at all.

  He checked the time: another half-hour had passed. Optimistically, he could not have much more than thirty or forty minutes’ of air left. Was it his imagination or had the air already begun to taste stale and thin?

  Hela, 2727

  RASHMIKA SAW THE caravan before the others did. It was half a kilometre ahead, merging on to the same track they were following, but still half-hidden by a low series of icy bluffs. It appeared to move very slowly compared to Crozet’s vehicle, but as they got closer she realised that this was not true: the vehicles of the caravan were much larger, and it was only this size that made their progress seem at all ponderous.

  The caravan was a string of perhaps four dozen machines stretching along nearly a quarter of a kilometre of the trail. They moved in two closely spaced columns, almost nose-to-tail, with no more than a metre or two between the back of each vehicle and the front of the one behind it. In Rashmika’s estimation, no two of them were exactly alike, although in a few cases it was possible to see that the vehicles must have started off identically, before being added to, chopped about or generally abused by their owners. Their upper structures were a haphazard confusion of jutting additions buttressed with scaffolding. Symbols of ecclesiastical affiliation had been sprayed on wherever possible, often in complicated chains denoting the shifting allegiances between the major churches. On the rooftops of many of the caravan machines were enormous tilted surfaces, all canted at the same precise angle by gleaming pistons. Vapour puffed from hundreds of exhaust apertures.

  The majority of the caravan vehicles moved on wheels as tall as houses, six or eight under each machine. A few others moved on plodding caterpillar tracks, or multiple sets of jointed walking limbs. A couple of the vehicles used the same kind of rhythmic skiing motion as Crozet’s icejammer. One machine moved like a slug, inching itself along via propulsive waves of its segmented mechanical body. She had no idea at all how a couple of them were propelled. But regardless of their mismatched designs, all the machines were able to keep exact pace with each other. The entire ensemble moved with such coordinated precision that there were walkways and tunnels thrown across the gaps between them. They creaked and flexed as the distances varied by fractions of a metre, but were never broken or crushed.

  Crozet steered his icejammer alongside the caravan, using what remained of the trail, and inched forwards. The rumbling wheels towered above the little vehicle. Rashmika watched Crozet’s hands on the controls with a degree of unease. All it would take would be a slip of the wrist, a moment’s inattention, and they would be crushed under those wheels. But Crozet looked calm enough, as if he had done this kind of thing hundreds of times before.

  “What are you looking for?” Rashmika asked.

  “The king vehicle,” Crozet said quietly. “The reception point—the place where the caravan does business. It’s normally somewhere near the front. This is a pretty big lash-up, though. Haven’t seen one like this for a few years.”

  “I’m impressed,” Rashmika said, looking up at the moving edifice of machinery towering above the little jammer.

  “Well, don’t be too impressed,” Crozet said. “A cathedral—a proper cathedral—is a bit bigger than this. They move slower, but they don’t stop either. They can’t, not easily. Like stopping a glacier. Near one of those mothers, even I get a bit twitchy. Wouldn’t be half so bad if they didn’t move…”

  “There’s the king,” Linxe said, pointing through the gap in the first column. “Other side, dear. You’ll have to loop around.”

  “Fuck. This is the bit I really don’t like.”

  “Play it safe and come up from the rear.”

  “Nah.” Crozet flashed an arc of dreadful teeth. “Got to show some bloody balls, haven’t I?”

  Rashmika felt her seat kick into the back of her spine as Crozet applied full power. The column slid past as they overtook the vehicles one by one. They were moving faster, but not by very much. Rashmika had expected the caravan to move silently, the way most things did on Hela. She couldn’t exactly hear it, but she felt it—a ramble below audible sound, a chorus of sonic components reaching her though the ice, through the ski blades, through the complicated suspension systems of the icejammer. There was the steady rumble of the wheels, like a million booted feet being stamped in impatience. There was the thud, thud, thud, as each plate of the caterpillar tracks slammed into ice. There was the scrabble of picklike mechanical feet struggling for traction against frosty ground. There was the low, groaning scrape of the segmented machine, and a dozen other noises she couldn’t isolate. Behind it all, like a series of organ notes, Rashmika heard the labour of countless engines.

  Crozet’s icejammer had gained some distance from the leading pair of machines, which had dropped back behind them by perhaps twice their own length. Batteries of floodlights shone ahead of the caravan, bathing Crozet’s vehicle in harsh blue radiance. Rashmika saw tiny figures moving behind windows, and even on the top of the machines themselves, leaning against railings. They wore pressure suits marked with religious iconography.

  The caravans were a fact of life on Hela, but Rashmika admitted to only scant knowledge of how they operated. She knew the basics, though. The caravans were the mobile agents of
the great churches, the bodies that ran the cathedrals. Of course, the cathedrals moved—slowly, as Crozet had said—but they were almost always confined to the equatorial belt of the Permanent Way. They sometimes deviated from the Way, but never this far north or south.

  The all-terrain caravans, however, could travel more freely. They had the speed to make journeys far from the Way and yet still catch up with their mother cathedrals on the same revolution. They split up and re-formed as they moved, sending out smaller expeditions and merging with others for parts of their journeys. Often, a single caravan might represent three or four different churches, churches that might have fundamentally different views on the matter of the Quaiche miracle and its interpretation. But all the churches shared common needs for labourers and component parts. They all needed recruits.

  Crozet steered the icejammer into the central part of the path, immediately ahead of the convoy. They had encountered a slight upgrade now, and the slope was causing the icejammer to lose its advantage of speed compared to the caravan, which merely rolled on, oblivious to the change in level.

  “Be careful now,” Linxe said.

  Crozet flicked his control sticks and the rear of the icejammer swung to the other side of the procession. The nose followed, and with a thud the skis settled into older grooves in the ice. The gradient had sharpened even more, but that was all right now—Crozet no longer needed to keep ahead of the caravan. Slowly, therefore, but with the unstoppable momentum of land sliding past a ship, the lead machines caught up with them.

  “That’s the king, all right,” Crozet said. “Looks like they’re ready for us, too.”

  Rashmika had no idea what he meant, but as they drew alongside, she saw a pair of skeletal cranes swinging out from the roof, dropping metal hooks. A jaunty pair of suited figures rode down on the cable lines, one standing on each hook. Then they passed out of view, and nothing happened for several further seconds until she heard heavy footsteps stomping around somewhere on the roof of the jammer. Then she heard the clunk of metal against metal, and a moment later the motion of the icejammer was dreamily absent. They were being winched off the ice, suspended to one side of the caravan.

  “Cheeky sods do it every time,” Crozet said. “But there’s no point arguing with ‘em. You either take it or leave it.”

  “At least we can get off and stretch our legs for a bit,” Linxe said.

  “Are we on the caravan now?” Rashmika asked. “Officially, I mean?”

  “We’re on it,” Crozet said.

  Rashmika nodded, relieved that they were now out of reach of the Vigrid constabulary. There had been no sign of the investigators, but in her mind’s eye they had only ever been one or two bends behind Crozet’s icejammer.

  She still did not know what to make of the business of the constabulary. She had expected some fuss to be made if the authorities discovered she had run away. But beyond a request for people to keep a lookout for her—and to return her to the badlands if they found her—she had not expected any active efforts to be made to bring her back. It was worse than that, of course, since the constabulary had got it into their heads that she’d had something to do with the explosion in the demolition store. She guessed they were assuming that she was running away because she had done it, out of fear at being found out. They were wrong, of course, but in the absence of a better suspect she had no obvious defence.

  Crozet and Linxe, thankfully, had given her the benefit of the doubt: either that or they just didn’t care what she might have done. But she had still been worried about a constabulary roadblock bringing the icejammer to a halt before they reached the caravan.

  Now she could stop worrying—about that, at least.

  It only took a minute for a docking arrangement to be set up. Crozet appeared to have precious little say in the matter, for without him doing anything that Rashmika was aware of, the air in the vehicle gusted, making her ears pop slightly. Then she heard footsteps coming aboard.

  “They like you to know who’s boss,” Crozet told her, as if this needed explaining. “But don’t be afraid of anyone here, Rashmika. They put on a show of strength, but they still need us badlanders.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Rashmika told him.

  A man bustled into the cabin as if he had left on some minor errand only a minute earlier. His wide froglike face had a meaty complexion, the bridge of skin between the base of his flat nub of a nose and the top of his mouth glistening with something unpleasant. He wore a long-hemmed coat of thick purple fabric, the collars and cuffs generously puffed. A lopsided beret marked with a tiny intricate sigil sat lopsidedly on the red froth of his hair, while his fingers were encumbered by many ornate rings. He carried a compad in one hand, its read-out screen scrolling through columns of numbers in antique script. There was, Rashmika noticed, a kind of construction perched on his right shoulder, a jointed thing of bright green columns and tubes. She had no idea of its function, whether it was an ornament or some arcane medical accessory.

  “Mr. Crozet,” the man said by way of welcome. “What an unexpected surprise. I really didn’t think you were going to make it this time.”

  Crozet shrugged. Rashmika could tell he was doing his best to look nonchalant and unconcerned, but the act needed some work. “Can’t keep a good man down, Quaestor.”

  “Perhaps not.” The man glanced at the screen, pursing his lips in the manner of someone sucking on a lemon. “You have, however, left things a tiny bit late in the day. Pickings are slim, Crozet. I trust you will not be too disappointed.”

  “My life is a series of disappointments, Quaestor. I think I’ve probably got used to it by now.”

  “One devoutly hopes that is the case. We must all of us know our station in life, Crozet.”

  “I certainly know mine, Quaestor.” Crozet did something to the control panel, presumably powering down the icejammer. “Well, are you open for business or not? You’ve really been working hard to polish that lukewarm welcome routine.”

  The man smiled very thinly. “This is hospitality, Crozet. A lukewarm welcome would have involved leaving you on the ice, or running you over.”

  “I’d best count my blessings, then.”

  “Who are you?” Rashmika asked suddenly, surprising herself.

  “This is Quaestor…” Linxe said, before she was cut off.

  “Quaestor Rutland Jones,” the man interrupted, his tone ac-torly, as if playing to the gallery. “Master of Auxiliary Supplies, Superintendent of Caravans and other Mobile Units, Roving Legate of the First Adventist Church. And you’d be?”

  “The First Adventists?” she asked, just to make sure she had heard him properly. There were many offshoots of the First Adventists, a number of them rather large and influential churches in their own right, and some of them had names so similar that it was easy to get them confused. But the First Ad-ventist Church was the one she was interested in. She added, “As in the oldest church, the one that goes all the way back?”

  “Unless I am very mistaken about my employer, yes. I still don’t believe you have answered my question, however.”

  “Rashmika,” she said, “Rashmika Els.”

  “Els.” The man chewed on the syllable. “Quite a common name in the villages of the Vigrid badlands, I believe. But I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an Els this far south.”

  “You might have, once,” Rashmika said. But that was a little unfair: though the caravan her brother had travelled on had also been affiliated to the Adventists, it was unlikely that it had been this one.

  “I’d remember, I think.”

  “Rashmika is travelling with us,” Linxe said. “Rashmika is… a clever girl. Aren’t you, dear?”

  “I get by,” Rashmika said.

  “She thought she might find a role in the churches,” Linxe said. She licked her fingers and neatened the hair covering her birthmark.

  He put down the compad. “A role?”

  “Something technical,” Rashmika said. She had
rehearsed this encounter a dozen times, always in her imagination having the upper hand, but it was all happening too quickly and not the way she had hoped.

  “We can always use keen young girls,” the quaestor said. He was digging in a chest pocket for something. “And boys, for that matter. It would depend on your talents.”

  “I have no talents” Rashmika said, transforming the word into an obscenity. “But I happen to be literate and numerate. I can program most marques of servitor. I know a great deal about the study of the scuttlers. I have ideas about their extinction. Surely that can be of use to someone in the church.”

  “She wonders if she couldn’t find a position in one of the church-sponsored archaeological study groups,” Linxe said.

  “Is that so?” the quaestor asked.

  Rashmika nodded. As far as she was concerned, the church-sponsored study groups were a joke, existing only to rubber-stamp current Quaicheist doctrine regarding the scuttlers; but she had to start somewhere. Her real goal was to reach Harbin, not to advance her study of the scuttlers. However, it would be much easier to find him if she began her service in a clerical position—such as one of the study groups—rather than with lowly work like Way repair.

  “I think I could be of value,” she said.

  “Knowing a great deal about the study of a subject is not the same as knowing anything about the subject itself,” the quaestor told her with a sympathetic smile. He pulled his hand from his breast pocket, a smaHpinch of seeds between forefinger and thumb. The jointed green thing on his shoulder stirred, moving with a curious stiffness that reminded Rashmika of something inflated, like a balloon-creature. It was an animal, but unlike any that Rashmika—in her admittedly limited experience-remembered seeing. She saw now that at one end of its thickest tube was a turretlike head, with faceted eyes and a delicate, mechanical-looking mouth. The quaestor offered his fingers to the creature, pursing his lips in encouragement. The creature stretched itself down his arm and attacked the pinch of seeds with a nibbling politeness. What was it? she wondered. The body and limbs were insectile, but the elongated coil of its tail, which was wrapped around the quaestor’s upper arm several times, was more suggestive of a reptile. And there was something uniquely birdlike about the way it ate. She remembered birds from somewhere, brilliant crested strutting things of cobalt blue with tails that opened like fans. Peacocks. But where had she ever seen peacocks?