Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  He leaned across the table, Palfrey’s stench hitting him like a wall. “A word of this meeting to anyone,” he said, “and you won’t be working in effluent management any more. You’ll be part of the problem.”

  Scorpio pushed himself up from the chair, intending to leave Palfrey alone with his thoughts.

  “You haven’t asked me about this,” Palfrey said, offering Scorpio the battered silver helmet.

  Scorpio took it from him and turned it in his hands. It was heavier than he had expected. “I thought it belonged to you.”

  “You thought wrong. I found it down there in the junk, when the apparition had gone. I don’t think it was there before.”

  Scorpio took a closer look at the helmet. Its design appeared very old. Above the small rectangular porthole of the faceplate were many rectangular symbols containing blocks of primary colour. There were crosses and crescents, stripes and stars.

  The pig wondered what they meant.

  Hela, 2727

  NOW THAT SHE had time on her hands, Rashmika used it to explore the caravan. Although there was a great deal of space to investigate inside, she quickly found that one compartment in the caravan was much like another. Wherever she went she encountered the same bad smells, the same wandering pilgrims and traders. If there were variations on these themes they were too dull and nuanced to interest her. What she really wanted was to get outside, on to the roof of the procession.

  It was many months since she had seen Haldora, and now that the gas giant had finally crept above the horizon as the caravan narrowed the distance to the cathedrals of the Way, she was struck by a desire to go outside, lie on her back and just look at the huge planet. But the first few times she tried to find a way to the roof, none of the doors would open for her. Rashmika tried different routes and times of the day, hoping to slip through a gap in the caravan’s security, but the roof was well protected, presumably because there was a lot of sensitive navigation equipment up there.

  She was backtracking from one dead end when she found her way blocked by the quaestor. He had his little green pet with him, squatting on his shoulder. Was it Rashmika’s imagination or was there something wrong with one of its fore-limbs? It ended in a green-tipped stump that she did not remember seeing before.

  “Can I help you, Miss Els?”

  “I was just exploring the caravan,” she said. “That’s allowed, isn’t it?”

  “Within certain restrictions, yes.” He nodded beyond her, to the door she had found blocked. “The roof, naturally, is one of the places that are out of bounds.”

  “I wasn’t interested in the roof.”

  “No? Then you must be lost. This door only leads to the roof. There’s nothing up there to interest you, take my word for it.”

  “I wanted to see Haldora.”

  “You must have seen it many times before.”

  “Not recently, and never very far above the horizon,” she said. “I wanted to see it at the zenith.”

  “Well, you’ll have to wait for that. Now… if you don’t mind.” He pushed past her, his bulk pressing unpleasantly against her in the narrow squeeze of the corridor.

  The green creature tracked her with his faceted eyes. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” it intoned.

  “Where are you going, Quaestor? You’re not wearing a suit.”

  “Run along now, Miss Els.”

  He did something that he obviously did not want her to see, reaching into a shadowed alcove next to the door that a casual visitor would never have noticed. He tried to be quick about it, to hide the gesture. She heard a low click, as if some hidden mechanism had just snapped open.

  The door worked for him. He stepped through. In the red-lit space beyond she glimpsed emergency equipment and several racked vacuum suits.

  SHE CAME BACK several hours later, when she was certain that the quaestor had returned inside the caravan. She carried her own surface suit in a collapsed bundle, sneaking it through the rumbling innards of the caravan. She tried the door: it was still blocked to her. But when she slipped her hand into the alcove that the quaestor had not wanted her to see she found a concealed control. She applied pressure and heard the click as the locking mechanism relaxed. Presumably there was some further fail-safe that would have prevented the inner door from opening if the outer one was also open. That was not the case now, however, and the door yielded to her as it had to the quaestor. She slipped into the lock, secured the inner door behind her and changed into her own suit. She checked the air, satisfying herself that there was enough in the reservoir, and feeling a moment of déjà vu as she remembered making the same check before leaving her home.

  She recalled how the reservoir had not been completely full, as if someone had used her suit recently. She had thought little of it at the time, but now a cluster of thoughts arrived in quick, uneasy succession. There had been foot-prints in the ice around the surface lock, suggesting that someone had used the lock as well as the suit. The prints had been small enough to belong to her mother, but they could just as easily have belonged to Rashmika.

  She remembered the constabulary, too, and their suspicion that she had had something to do with the sabotage. She hadn’t helped her case by running away shortly afterwards, but they wouldn’t have come after her unless they had some additional evidence to link her to the act.

  What did it mean? If she had been the one who had blown up the store of demolition charges, surely she’d have some memory of doing it. More to the point, why would she have done such a pointless thing? No, she told herself, it couldn’t have been her. It was just an unfortunate set of coincidences.

  But she could not dismiss her doubts that easily.

  Ten minutes later she was standing under airless sky astride the back of the huge machine. The business with the sabotage still troubled her, but with an effort of will she forced her thoughts on to more immediate matters.

  She thought back to what had happened in the corridor, when the quaestor had found her. Convenient, that. Of all the possible entrances to the roof he had bumped into her at precisely the one she had been trying. More than likely he had been spying on her, observing her peregrinations through his little rolling empire. When he had spoken to her he had been hiding something. She was certain of that: it had been written on his face, in the momentary elevation of his eyebrows. His own guilt at spying on her? She doubted that he had the chance to spy on many girls her age, so he was probably making the most of it, him and that horrible pet of his.

  She didn’t like the idea of him watching her, but she would not be on the caravan for very long and all she really cared about now was exploring the roof. If he had been observing her, then he would have had plenty of chances to stop her when she was changing into her own suit and finding the steps that led up to the roof. No one had come, so perhaps his attention had been elsewhere, or he had decided it was not worth his bother to stop her going where she wanted.

  Quickly she forgot all about him, thrilled to be outside again.

  Rashmika had never seen a vanishing. Two had occurred in her lifetime, once when Haldora was visible from the badlands, but she had been in classes at the time. Of course, she knew that the chances of seeing anything were tiny, even if one had the extreme good fortune to be out On the ice when it happened. The vanishings lasted for only a fraction of a second. By the time you knew one had happened, it was always too late. The only people who had ever seen one happen—with the exception of Quaiche, of course, who had started it all—were those who made it their duty to observe Haldora at every possible moment. And even then they had to pray that they did not blink or look away at that critical instant. Deprived of sleep by drugs and elective neurological intervention, they were half-mad to begin with.

  Rashmika could not imagine that kind of dedication, but then she had never felt the slightest inclination to join a church in the first place. She wanted to observe a vanishing because she still clung to the notion that it was a rational natura
l phenomenon rather than evidence of divine intervention on the cosmic scale. And in Rashmika’s view it would be a shame not to be able to say one had seen something so rare, so wondrous. Consequently, ever since she was small, and whenever Haldora was high, she would try to devote some time each day to watching it. It was nothing compared to the endless hours of the cathedral observers, and the statistical odds against seeing anything did not bear contemplation, but she did it anyway, cheerfully ignoring such considerations while chiding those who did not share her particular brand of scientific rationalism.

  The caravan’s roof was a landscape of treacherous obstructions. There were crouching generator boxes, radiator grilles and vanes, snaking conduits and power lines. It all looked very old, patched together over many years. She made her way from one side to the other, following the course of a railed catwalk. When she reached the edge she looked over, appalled at how far down the ground was and how slowly it now appeared to move. There was no one else up here, at least not on this particular machine.

  She looked up, craning her neck as far as the awkward articulation of the helmet joint permitted. The sky was full of counter-moving lights. It was as if there were two celestial spheres up there, two crystal globes nested one within the other. As always the effect was immediately dizzying. Nor-mally the sense of vertigo was little more than a nuisance, but this high up it could easily kill her.

  Rashmika tightened her grip on the railing and looked back down at the horizon again. Then, steeled, she looked up once more.

  The illusion that she stood at the centre of two spheres was not entirely inaccurate. The lights pinned to the outermost sphere were the stars, impossibly distant; pinned to the innermost sphere were the ships in orbit around Hela, the sunlight glinting off the polished perfection of their hulls. Occasionally one or other would flicker with the hard gemlike flash of steering thrust as the Ultra crews trimmed their orbits or prepared for departure.

  At any one time, Rashmika had heard, there were between thirty and fifty ships in orbit around Hela, always coming and going. Most were not large vessels, for the Ultras distrusted Haldora and preferred to hold their most valuable assets much further out. In general those she saw were in-system shuttles, large enough to hold frozen pilgrims and a modest team of Ultra negotiators. The ships that flew between Hela and orbit were usually even smaller, for the churches did not allow anything large to approach Hela’s surface.

  The big ships, the starships—the lighthuggers—made only very rare visits to Hela’s orbit. When they did, they hung in the sky like ornaments, sliding along invisible tracks from horizon to horizon. Rashmika had seen very few of those in her lifetime; they always impressed and scared her at the same time. Her world was a froth of ice lathered around a core of rubble. It was fragile. Having one of those vessels nearby—especially when they made main-drive adjustments—was like holding a welding torch close to a snowball.

  The vertigo returned in waves. Rashmika looked back towards the horizon, easing the strain on her neck. The old suit was dependable, but it was not exactly engineered for sightseeing.

  Here, instead, was Haldora. Two-thirds of it had risen above the horizon now. Because there was no air on Hela, nothing to blur features on the horizon, there were very few visual cues to enable one to discriminate between something a few dozen kilometres away and something nearly a million kilometres beyond that. The gas giant appeared to be an extension of the world on which she stood. It looked larger when it was near the horizon than the zenith, but Rashmika knew that this was an illusion, an accidental by-product of the way her mind was wired together. Haldora loomed about forty times larger in the sky of Hela than the Moon did in the skies of Earth. She had always wondered about this, for it implied that the Moon was really not a very impressive thing compared to Haldora, in spite of the Moon’s prominence in Earth literature and mythology.

  From the angle at which she saw it, Haldora appeared as a fat crescent. Even without the suit’s contrast filters slid down, she made out the bands of equatorial coloration that striped the world from pole to pole: shades of ochre and orange, sepia and buff, vermilion and amber. She saw the curlicues and flukes where the colour bands mingled or bled; the furious scarlet eye of a storm system, like a knot in wood. She saw the tiny dark shadows of the many smaller moons that wheeled around Haldora, and the pale arc of the world’s single ring.

  Rashmika crouched down until she was sitting on her haunches. It was as uncomfortable as trying to look up, but she held the posture for as long as she was able. At the same time she kept on looking at Haldora, willing it, daring it to vanish, to do that which had brought them all here in the first place. But the world simply hung there, seemingly anchored to the landscape, close enough to touch, as real as anything she had ever seen in her life.

  And yet, she thought, it does vanish. That it happened—that it continued to happen—was not disputed, at least not by anyone who had spent any significant time on Hela. Look at it long enough, she thought, and—unless you are unlucky—you will see it happen.

  It just wasn’t her turn today.

  Rashmika stood up, then made her way past the point where she had emerged, towards the rear of the vehicle. She was looking back along the procession of the caravan now, and she could see the other machines rising and falling in waves as they moved over slight undulations in the trail. The caravan was even longer than when she had first arrived: at some point, without any fanfare, a dozen more units had tagged on to the rear. It would keep growing until it reached the Permanent Way, at which point it would fragment again as various sections were assigned to specific cathedrals.

  She reached the limit of the catwalk, at the back of the vehicle. There was an abyss between her and the next machine, spanned only by a flimsy-looking bridge formed from many metal slats. It had not been apparent from the ground, but now she saw that the distance—vertical and horizontal—was changing all the while, making the little bridge lash and twist like something in pain. Instead of the stiff railings she now held, there were only metal wires. Down below, halfway to the ground, was a pressurised connector that puffed in and out like a bellows. That looked much safer.

  Rashmika supposed that she could go back inside the caravan and find her way to that connector. Or she could pretend that she had done enough exploring for one day. The last thing she needed to do was start making enemies this early in her quest. There would be plenty of time for that later on, she was certain.

  Rashmika stepped back, but only for a moment. Then she returned to the bridge and spread her arms apart so that each hand could grip one of the wire lines. The bridge writhed ahead of her, the metal plates slipping apart, revealing an awful absence. She took a step forwards, planting one booted foot on the first plate.

  It did not feel safe. The plate gave beneath her, offering no hint of solidity.

  “Go on,” she said, goading herself.

  She took the next step, and both feet were on the bridge. She looked back. The lead vehicle pitched and yawed. The bridge squirmed under her, throwing her from one side to the other. She held on tightly. She wanted desperately to turn back, but a small, quiet voice told her she must not. The voice told her that if she did not have the courage to do this one simple thing, then she could not possibly have the courage to find her brother.

  Rashmika took another step along the bridge. She began to cross the gap. It was what she had to do.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ararat, 2675

  BLOOD BUSTLED INTO the conference room, a huge number of rolled-up maps tucked beneath his arms. He placed the maps on the table and then spread one of them wide, the map flattening itself obediently. It was a single sheet of thick creamy paper as wide as the table, with the slightly mottled texture of leather. At a command from Blood, topographic features popped into exaggerated relief, then shaded themselves according to the current pattern of daylight and darkness on that part of Ararat. Latitude and longitude appeared as thin glowing lines, labelled with
tiny numerals.

  Khouri leant across, studying the map for a moment. She turned it slightly, then pointed to one small chain of islands. “Near here,” she said, “about thirty kilometres west of that strait, eight hundred kilometres north of here.”

  “Is this thing updated in real-time?” Clavain asked.

  “Refresh time is about every two days on average,” Scorpio said. “It can take a bit longer. Depends on the vagaries of satellite positions, high-altitude balloons and cloud cover. Why?”

  “Because it looks as if there’s something more or less where she said there would be.”

  “He’s right,” Khouri said. “It has to be Skade’s ship, doesn’t it?”

  Scorpio leant in to inspect the tiny white dot. “That’s no ship,” he said. “It’s just a speck of ice, like a small iceberg.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Clavain asked.

  Blood jabbed his trotter at the point Khouri had indicated. “Let’s be certain. Map: magnify, tenfold.”

  The surface features of the map crawled away to the edges. The speck of ice swelled until it was the size of a fingernail. Blood told the map to apply an enhancement filter, but there was no obvious increase in detail save for a vague suggestion that the iceberg was bleeding into the surrounding sea, extending fine tendrils of whiteness in all directions.

  “No ship,” Scorpio said.

  Clavain sounded less certain. “Ana, the craft Skade came down in—you said in your report that it was a heavy corvette, correct?”

  “I’m no expert on ships, but that’s what I was told.”

  “You said it was fifty metres long. That would be about right for a moray-class corvette. The funny thing is, that iceberg looks about the same size. The proportions are consistent—maybe a bit larger, but not much.”

  “Could be coincidence,” Blood said. “You know there are always bits of iceberg drifting down into those latitudes. Sometimes they even make it as far south as here.”