Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  Yet for much of the last century there had been a market for the relics. Partly this was because none of the other extinct cultures—the Amarantin, for instance—had left behind a comparable haul of day-to-day objects. Those cultures had been so thoroughly exterminated that almost nothing had survived, and the objects that had were so valuable that they remained in the care of large scientific organisations like the Sylveste Institute. Only the scuttlers had left behind enough objects to permit private collectors to acquire artefacts of genuine alien origin. It didn’t matter that they were small and unglamorous: they were still very old, and still very alien. And they were still tainted by the tragedy of extinction.

  No two relics were ever quite alike, either. Scuttler furniture, even scuttler dwellings, exhibited the same horror of similarity as their makers. What had begun with their anatomies had now spread into their material environment. They had mass production, but it was a necessary end-stage of that process that every object be worked on by a scuttler artisan, until it was unique.

  The churches controlled the sale of these relics to the outside universe. But the churches themselves had always been uncomfortable with the deeper question of what the scuttlers represented, or how they slotted into the mystery of the Quaiche miracle. The churches needed to keep up the drip-feed supply of relics so that they had something to offer the Ultra traders who visited the system. But at the same time there was always the fear that the next scuttler relic to be unearthed would be the one that threw a spanner into the midst of Quaicheist doctrine.

  It was now the view of almost all the churches that the Hal-doran vanishings were a message from God, a countdown to some event of apocalyptic finality. But what if the scuttlers had also observed the vanishings? It was difficult enough to decipher their symbols at the best of times, and so far nothing had been found that appeared to relate directly to the Haldora phenomenon. But there were a lot of relics still under Hela’s ice, and even those that had been unearthed to date had never been subjected to rigorous scientific study. The church-sponsored archaeologists were the only ones who had any kind of overview of the entire haul of relics, and they were under intense pressure to ignore any evidence that conflicted with Quaicheist scripture. That was why Rashmika wrote them so many letters, and why their infrequent replies were always so evasive. She wanted an argument; she wanted to question the entire accepted view of the scuttlers. They wanted her to go away.

  Thus it was that the buyers in the caravan affected an air of tolerant disapproval while Crozet turned on the hard sell.

  “It’s a plate cleaner,” Grozet said, turning a grey, cleft-tipped, bonelike object this way and that. “They used it to scrape dead organic matter out of the gaps between their carapacial sections. We think they did it communally, the way monkeys pick ticks out of each other’s hair. Must have been very relaxing for them.”

  “Filthy creatures.”

  “Monkeys or scuttlers?”

  “Both.”

  “I wouldn’t be too harsh, mate. Scuttlers are paying your wages.”

  “We’ll give you fifty ecumenical credit units for it, Crozet. No more.”

  “Fifty ecus? Now you’re taking the piss.”

  “It’s a revolting object serving a revolting function. Fifty ecus is… quite excessively generous.”

  Crozet looked at Rashmika. It was only a glance, but she was ready for it when it came. The system they had arranged was very simple: if the man was telling the truth—if this really was the best offer he was prepared to make—then she would push the sheet of paper a fraction closer to the middle of the table. Otherwise, she would pull it towards her by the same tiny distance. If the man’s reaction was ambiguous, she did nothing. This did not happen very often.

  Crozet always took her judgement seriously. If the offer on the table was as good as it was going to get, he did not waste his energies trying to talk them up. On the other hand, if there was some leeway, he haggled the hell out of them.

  In that first negotiating session, the buyer was lying. After a rapid-fire back and forth of offer and counter-offer, they reached an agreement.

  “Your tenacity does you credit,” the buyer said with visible bad grace, before writing him out a chit for seventy ecus that was only redeemable within the caravan itself.

  Crozet folded it neatly and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. “Pleasure doing business, mate.”

  He had other scuttler plate cleaners, as well as several things that might have served some entirely different function. Now and then he came back to the negotiation sessions with something that Linxe or Culver had to help him carry. It might be an item of furniture, or some kind of heavy-duty domestic tool. Scuttler weapons were rare, appearing to have had only ceremonial value, but they sold the best of all. Once, he sold them what appeared to be a kind of scuttler toilet seat. He only got thirty-five ecus for that: barely enough, Crozet said, for a single servo-motor.

  But Rashmika tried not to feel too sorry for him. If Crozet wanted the best pickings from the digs, the kinds of relics that picked up three- or four-figure payments, then he needed to rethink his attitude towards the rest of the Vigrid communities. The truth of the matter was that he liked scabbing around on the perimeter.

  It went on like that for two days. On the third, the buyers suddenly demanded that Crozet be alone during the negotia-tions. Rashmika had no idea if they had guessed her secret. There was, as far as she was aware, no law against being an adept judge of whether people were lying or not. Perhaps they had just taken a dislike to her, as people often did when they sensed her percipience.

  Rashmika was fine with that. She had helped Crozet out, paid him back a little more in addition to the scuttler relics for the help he had given her. He had, after all, taken an extra, unforeseen risk when he found out about the constabulary pursuing her.

  No: she had nothing bad on her conscience.

  Ararat, 2675

  KHOURI PROTESTED AS they took her away from the capsule into the waiting infirmary. “I don’t need an examination,” she said. “I just need a boat, some weapons, an incubator and someone good with a knife.”

  “Oh, I’m good with a knife,” Clavain said.

  “Please take me seriously. You trusted Ilia, didn’t you?”

  “We came to an arrangement. Mutual trust never had much to do with it.”

  “You respected her judgement, though?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Well, she trusted me. Isn’t that good enough for you? I’m not making excessive demands here, Clavain. I’m not asking for the world.”

  “We’ll consider your requests in good time,” he said, “but not before we’ve had you examined.”

  “There isn’t time,” she said, but from her tone of voice it was clear she knew she had already lost the argument.

  Within the infirmary, Dr. Valensin waited with two aged medical servitors from the central machine pool. The swan-necked robots were a drab institutional green, riding on hissing air-cushion pedestals. Many specialised arms emerged from their slender chess-piece bodies. The physician would be keeping a careful eye on the machines while they did their work: left alone, their creaking circuits had a nasty habit of absent-mindedly switching into autopsy mode.

  “I don’t like robots,” Khouri said, eyeing the servitors with evident disquiet.

  “That’s one thing we agree on,” Clavain said, turning to Scorpio and lowering his voice. “Scorp, we’ll need to talk to the other seniors about the best course of action as soon as we have Valensin’s report. My guess is she’ll need some rest before she goes anywhere. But for now I suggest we keep as tight a lid on this as possible.”

  “Do you think she’s telling the truth?” Scorpio asked. “All that stuff about Skade and her baby?”

  Clavain studied the woman as Valensin helped her on to the examination couch. “I have a horrible feeling she might be.”

  AFTER THE EXAMINATION, Khouri fell into a state of deep and apparently dreamless sl
eep. She awakened only once, near dawn, when she summoned one of Valensin’s aides and again demanded the means to rescue her daughter. After that they administered more relaxant and she fell asleep for another four or five hours. Now and then she thrashed wildly and uttered fragments of speech. Whatever she was trying to say always sounded urgent, but the meaning never quite cohered. She was not properly awake and cognizant until the middle of the morning.

  By the time Dr. Valensin deemed that Khouri was ready for visitors, the latest storm had broken. The sky above the compound was a bleak powder-blue, marbled here and there by strands of feathered cirrus. Out to sea, the Nostalgia for Infinity gleamed shades of grey, like something freshly chiselled from dark rock.

  They sat down on opposite sides of her bed—Clavain in one chair, Scorpio in another, but reversed so that he sat with his arms folded across the top of the backrest.

  “I’ve read Valensin’s report,” Scorpio began. “We were all hoping he’d tell us you were insane. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “And that gives me a really bad headache.”

  Khouri pushed herself up in the bed. “I’m sorry about your headache, but can we skip the formalities and get on with rescuing my daughter?”

  “We’ll discuss it when you’re up on your feet,” Clavain said.

  “Why not now?”

  “Because we still need to know exactly what’s happened. We’ll also need an accurate tactical assessment of any scenario involving Skade and your daughter. Would you define it as a hostage situation?” Clavain asked.

  “Yes,” Khouri replied, grudgingly.

  “Then until we have concrete demands from Skade, Aura is in no immediate danger. Skade won’t risk hurting her one asset. She may be cold-hearted, but she’s not irrational.”

  Guardedly, Scorpio observed the old man. He appeared as alert and quick-witted as ever, yet to the best of Scorpio’s knowledge Clavain had allowed himself no more than two hours of sleep since returning to the mainland. Scorpio had seen that kind of thing in other elderly human men: they needed little sleep and resented its imposition by those younger than themselves. It was not that they necessarily had more energy, but that the division between sleep and waking had become an indistinct, increasingly arbitrary thing. He wondered how that would feel, drifting through an endless succession of grey moments, rather than ordered intervals of day and night.

  “How much time are we talking about?” Khouri said. “Hours or days, before you act?”

  “I’ve convened a meeting of colony seniors for later this morning,” Clavain said. “If the situation merits it, a rescue operation could be underway before sunset.”

  “Can’t you just take my word that we need to act now?”

  Clavain scratched his beard. “If your story made more sense, I might.”

  “I’m not lying.” She gestured in the direction of one of the servitors. “The doctor gave me the all-clear, didn’t he?”

  Scorpio smiled, tapping the medical report against the back of his chair. “He said you weren’t obviously delusional, but his examination raised as many questions as it answered.”

  “You talk about a baby,” Clavain said before Khouri had a chance to interrupt, “but according to this report you’ve never given birth. Nor is there any obvious sign of Caesarean surgery having been performed.”

  “It wouldn’t be obvious—it was done by Conjoiner medics. They can sew you up so cleanly it’s as if it never happened.“ She looked at each of them in turn, her anger and fear equally clear. ”Are you saying you don’t believe me?“

  Clavain shook his head. “I’m saying we can’t verify your story, that’s all. According to Valensin there is womb distension consistent with you having very recently been pregnant, and there are hormonal changes in your blood that support the same conclusion. But Valensin admits that there could be other explanations.”

  “They don’t contradict my story, either.”

  “But we’ll need more convincing before we organise a military action,” Clavain said.

  “Again: why can’t you just trust me?”

  “Because it’s not only the story about your baby that doesn’t make sense,” Clavain replied. “How did you get here, Ana? Where’s the ship that should have brought you? You didn’t come all the way from the Resurgam system in that capsule, and yet there’s no sign of any other spacecraft having entered our system.”

  “And that makes me a liar?”

  “It makes us suspicious,” Scorpio said. “It makes us wonder if you’re what you appear to be.”

  “The ships are here,” she said, sighing, as if spoiling a carefully planned surprise. “All of them. They’re concentrated in the immediate volume of space around this planet. Remon-toire, the Zodiacal Light, the two remaining starships from Skade’s taskforce—they’re all up there, within one AU of this planet. They’ve been in your system for nine weeks. That’s how I got here, Clavain.”

  “You can’t hide ships that easily,” he said. “Not consistently, not all the time. Not when we’re actively looking for them.”

  “We can now,” she said. “We have techniques you know nothing about. Things we’ve learned… things we’ve had to learn since the last time you saw us. Things you won’t believe.”

  Clavain glanced at Scorpio. The pig tried to guess what was going through the old man’s mind and failed.

  “Such as?” Clavain asked.

  “New engines,” she said. “Dark drives. You can’t see them. Nothing sees them. The exhaust… slips away. Camouflaging screens. Free-force bubbles. Miniaturised cryo-arithmetic engines. Reliable control of inertia on bulk scales. Hypometric weapons.” She shivered. “I really don’t like the hypometric weapons. They scare me. I’ve seen what happens when they go wrong. They’re not right.”

  “All that in twenty-odd years?” Clavain asked, incredulously.

  “We had some help.”

  “Sounds as if you had God on the end of the phone, taking down your wish list.”

  “It wasn’t God, believe me. I should know. I was the one who did the asking.”

  “And who exactly did you ask?”

  “My daughter,” Khouri said. “She knows things, Clavain. That’s why she’s valuable. That’s why Skade wants her.”

  Scorpio felt dizzy: it seemed that every time they scratched back one layer of Khouri’s story, there was something even less comprehensible behind it.

  “I still don’t understand why you didn’t signal your arrival from orbit,” Clavain said.

  “Partly because we didn’t want to draw attention to Ararat,” Khouri said. “Not until we had to. There’s a war going on up there, understand? A major space engagement, with heavily stealthed combatants. Any kind of signalling is a risk. There’s also a lot of jamming and disruption going on.”

  “Between Skade’s forces and your own?” ,

  “It’s more complicated than that. Until recently, Skade was fighting with us, rather than against us. Even now, aside from the personal business between Skade and myself, I’d say we’re in what you might call a state of uneasy truce.”

  “Then who the hell are you fighting?” Clavain asked.

  “The Inhibitors,” Khouri said. “The wolves, whatever you want to call them.”

  “They’re here?” Scorpio asked. “Actually in this system?”

  “Sorry to rain on your parade,” Khouri said.

  “Well,” Clavain said, looking around, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but that certainly puts a dent in my day.”

  “That was the idea,” Khouri said.

  Clavain ran a finger down the straight line of his nose. “One other thing. Several times since you arrived here you’ve mentioned a word that sounds like ‘hella.’ You even said we had to get there. The name means nothing to me. What is its significance?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even remember saying it.”

  Chapter Twelve

&nb
sp; Hela, 2727

  QUAESTOR JONES HAD been warned to expect a new guest aboard his caravan. The warning had come straight from the Permanent Way, with the official seals of the Clocktower. Shortly afterwards, a small spacecraft—a single-seat shuttle of Ultra manufacture shaped like a cockleshell—came sliding over the procession of caravan vehicles.

  The ruby-hulled vehicle loitered on a spike of expertly balanced thrust, hovering unnervingly while the caravan continued on its way. Then it lowered, depositing itself on the main landing pad. The hull opened and a vacuum-suited figure stepped from the vehicle’s hatch. The figure hesitated, reaching back into the cockpit for a walking stick and a small white case. Cameras tracked him from different viewpoints as he made his way down into the caravan, opening normally impassable doors with Clock-tower keys, shutting them neatly behind him. He walked very slowly, taking his time, giving the quaestor the opportunity to exercise his imagination. Now and then he tapped his cane against some component of the caravan, or paused to run a gloved hand along the top of a wall, inspecting his fingers as if for dust.

  “I don’t like this, Peppermint,” the quaestor told the creature perched on his desk. “It’s never good when they send someone out, especially when they only give you an hour’s warning. It means they want to surprise you. It means they think you’re up to something.”

  The creature busied itself with the small pile of seeds the quaestor had tipped on to the table. There was something engrossing about just watching it eat and then clean itself. Its faceted black eyes—in the right light they were actually a very dark, lustrous purple—shone like rare minerals.

  “Who can it be, who can it be… ” the quaestor said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Here, have some more seeds. A stick. Who do we know who walks with a stick?”

  The creature looked up at him, as if on the verge of having an opinion. Then it went back to its nibbling, its tail coiled around a paperweight.