Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “But there are no other icebergs in the surrounding area,” Clavain pointed out.

  “All the same,” Scorpio said, “there can’t be a ship in that thing, can there? Why would it have ended up covered in ice? If anything, ships come in hot, not cold. And why wouldn’t the ice have melted by now?”

  “We’ll find out when we get there,” Clavain said slowly. “In the meantime, let’s stick to practicalities. We won’t want to alarm Skade into doing something rash, so we’ll make sure our approach is slow and obvious.” He indicated a spot on the map, to the south of the iceberg. “I suggest we take a shuttle out to about here; Antoinette can fly us. Then we’ll drop two or three boats and make the rest of the crossing by sea. We’ll carry surgical equipment and close-quarters arms, but nothing excessive. If we need to destroy the ship we can always call in an air-strike from the mainland.” He looked up, his finger still pressing down on the map. “If we leave this afternoon, we can time our arrival at the iceberg for dawn, which will give us a whole day in which to complete negotiations with Skade.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Dr. Valensin, smiling slightly. “Before we get too carried away—are you telling me that you’re actually taking any of this seriously?”

  “You mean you’re not?” Clavain asked.

  “She’s my patient,” Valensin said, looking sympathetically at Khouri. “I’ll vouch for the fact that she’s isn’t obviously insane. She has Conjoiner implants, and if her child had them as well they could have communicated with each other while the child was still in her womb. It would have been unorthodox, but Remontoire could have put those implants in her unborn child using microsurgical remotes. Given Conjoiner medicine, too, it’s not inconceivable that Skade could have removed Khouri’s child without evidence of surgery. But the rest of it? This whole business about a space war taking place on our doorstep? It’s a bit of a stretch, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’m not so sure,” Clavain said.

  “Please explain,” Valensin said, looking to his colleagues for support.

  Clavain tapped the side of his skull. “Remember, I’m a Conjoiner as well. The last time I was able to check, all the machinery in my head was still working properly.”

  “I could have told you as much,” Valensin said.

  “What you forget is how sensitive it is. It’s designed to detect and amplify ambient fields, signals produced by machines or other Conjoiners. Two Conjoiners can share thoughts across tens of metres of open space even if there aren’t any amplifying systems in the environment. The hardware translates those fields into patterns that the organic part of the brain can interpret, harnessing the basic visual grammar of the perceptual centre.”

  “This isn’t news to me,” Valensin said.

  “So consider the implications. What if there really was a war going on out there—a major circumsolar engagement, with all sorts of weapons and countermeasures being deployed? There’d be a great deal of stray electromagnetic noise, much more powerful than normal Conjoiner signals. My implants might be picking up signals they can’t interpret properly. They’re feeding semi-intelligible patterns into my meat brain. The meat does its best to sort out the mess and ends up throwing shapes and faces into the sky.”

  “He told me he’d been seeing things,” Scorpio said.

  “Figures, signs and portents,” Clavain said. “It only began in the last two or three months. Khouri said the fleet arrived nine weeks ago. That’s too much of a coincidence for me. I thought that perhaps I was going mad, but it looks as if I was just picking up rumours of war.”

  “Like the good old soldier you always were,” Scorpio said.

  “It just means I’m inclined to take Khouri seriously,” Clavain said, “no matter how strange her story.”

  “Even the part about Skade?” Valensin asked.

  Clavain scratched his beard. His eyes were slit-lidded, almost closed, as if viewing a vast mental landscape of possibilities. “Especially the part about Skade,” he replied.

  Hela, 2727

  RASHMIKA LOOKED STRAIGHT ahead. She had nearly reached the other machine. In the distance she could see suited figures moving about on errands, clambering from one catwalk to another. Cranes swung out, burdened by pallets of heavy equipment. Servitors moved with the eerie, lubricated glide of clockwork automata. The vast single machine, the sum of many parts that was the caravan, needed constant care. It was, Rashmika suspected, a little like a cathedral in microcosm.

  She stood again on the relatively firm ground of another vehicle. The motion of this one depended on legs rather than wheels, so instead of rumbling steadily, the metal surface beneath her feet drummed a slow rhythm, a series of timed thuds as each piston-driven mechanical foot hit ice. The gap she had crossed looked trivial now, a matter of metres, but she did not doubt that it would be just as unnerving on the way back.

  Now she looked around. There was something very different about the layout of this roof: it was more ordered, lacking any of the obvious mechanical clutter of the last one. The few equipment boxes had been neatly stowed around the edges of the roof, with the conduits and power lines routed likewise.

  Occupying much of the central area was a tilted surface, angled up from the roof on a set of pistons; she’d seen it during the approach in Crozet’s icejammer, and she’d also seen something like it in her village: an array of solar collectors forming part of the reserve power supply in case the main generators failed. The array had been a precise mosaic of small, square photovoltaic cells that spangled emerald and blue as they caught the light. But here there were no cells; instead the surface was covered by ranks of dark cruciform objects. Rash-mika counted them: there were thirty-six cruciform shapes, arranged six across and six high, and every one of the objects was about the same size as a human being.

  She walked closer, but with trepidation. There really were people shackled to the tilted surface, held in place by clasps around their wrists, their heels supported by small platforms. As near as she could tell they were dressed identically. Each one wore a hooded, foot-length gown of chocolate-brown material, cinched around the waist by a braided white rope. The cowl of each hood framed the curved mirror of a vacuum suit visor. She saw no faces, just the warped reflection of the slowly crawling landscape, herself an insignificant part of it.

  They were looking at Haldora. It was obvious now: the tilt of the platform was just right for observation of the rising planet. As the caravan approached the Way and the cathedrals that ran on it, the platform would approach the horizontal, until the thirty-six watchers were all flat on their backs, staring at the zenith.

  They were pilgrims, she realised. They had been picked up by the caravan during its deviation away from the equatorial settlements. She had been stupid not to realise that there were bound to be some along for the ride. There was an excellent chance that some of them had even come down from the badlands, perhaps even from her village.

  She looked up at them, wondering if they were somehow aware of her presence. She hoped that their attentions were too thoroughly fixed on Haldora for them to take any notice of her. That was the point of them being up there, after all: half-crucified, lashed to an iron raft, forced to stare into the face of the world they considered miraculous.

  The thing that she found most disturbing was the speed with which these pilgrims had taken their faith to this limit. It was likely that they had only left their homes in the last few weeks. Until then, they would have had very little choice but to act like normal members of a secular community. They were welcome to their beliefs, but the necessary duties of functioning in the badlands precluded taking religious observations as seriously as this. They would have had to fit into families and work units, and to smile at the jokes of their colleagues. But here, now, they were free. Very likely there was already Quaicheist blood in their veins.

  Rashmika looked back along the winding line of the caravan. There were other tilted surfaces. Assuming that they each held about the same number o
f pilgrims, there could easily have been two hundred just on this one caravan. And at any one time there were many other caravans on Hela. It amounted to thousands of pilgrims being transported to the shining Way, with thousands more making the journey on foot, step by agonising step.

  The futility of it, the sheer miserable waste of finite human life, made her indignant and filled with self-righteous anger. She wanted to climb on to the rack herself to wrench one of the pilgrims away from the sight that transfixed then, to rip back the cowl from their helmet, to press her own face against that blank mirror and try to make contact—before it was too late—with whatever fading glimmer of human individuality remained. She wanted to drive a rock into the faceplate, shattering faith in an instant of annihilating decompression.

  And yet she knew that her anger was horribly misdirected. She knew that she only loathed and despised these pilgrims because of what she feared had happened to Harbin. She could not smash the churches, so she desired instead to smash the gentle innocents who were drawn towards them. At this realisation she felt a secondary sort of revulsion directed towards herself. She could not recall ever feeling a hatred of this intensity. It was like a compass needle turning inside her, looking for a direction in which to settle. It both awed and frightened her that she had the capacity for such animus.

  Rashmika forced a kind of calm upon herself. In all the time that she had been watching them, the figures had never stirred. Their dark-brown cloaks hung about their suited figures in reverential stillness, as if the various folds and twists in the fabric had been chiselled from the hardest granite by expert masons. Their mirrored faces continued to reflect the slow ooze of the landscape. Perhaps it was a kindness that she could not see the individuals behind the glass.

  Rashmika turned from them, and then began to make her way back towards the bridge.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ararat, 2675

  THE SHUTTLE CAME to a halt, hovering a few metres above the water. The rescue team assembled in the rear bay, waiting as the first boat—still tethered to the shuttle—was lowered gently on to the surface of the water. The sea was vast and dark in all directions, but also calm, apart from the area immediately within the thermal footprint of the shuttle. There was no wind, nor any indication of unusual Juggler activity, and the sea currents in this region were at their usual seasonal ebb. The iceberg would barely have moved between updates from the mapping network.

  Once the boat had stabilised, the first three members of the team were lowered individually on to its decking. Scorpio went down first, followed by a male Security Arm officer called Jac-cottet, with Khouri completing the trio. Rations, weapons and equipment were lowered down in scuffed metal boxes, then quickly stowed in waterproof hatches along the sides of the boat. The last thing to go in was the portable incubator, a transparent box with an opaque base and carrying handle. This was secured with particular care, almost as if it already held a child.

  The first boat was then unhitched, allowing Scorpio to steer it clear of the shuttle. The whine of its battery-driven motor cut across the loud simmer of the hovering shuttle. The second boat was then lowered down and allowed to settle. Vasko watched as another Security Arm officer—a woman named Urton—was lowered down into it, followed by Clavain. The old man teetered at first, but quickly found his sea legs. Then it was Vasko’s turn to be lowered down, helped by Blood. Vasko had expected that the other pig would be joining them on the operation, but Scorpio had ordered him to return to First Camp, to take care of things there. Scorpio’s only concession had been to let Blood come this far, to help with the loading of the boats.

  The final boxes of equipment were lowered down, causing the boat to sink even more worryingly low in the water. The instant it was unhitched, the Security Arm woman had it speeding over to join Scorpio’s craft. The hulls chafed and squealed together. Minutes of whispered activity followed while items were transferred from craft to craft, until they were evenly trimmed.

  “You ready for this?” Urton asked Vasko. “It’s not too late to back out, you know.”

  She had been on his case from the moment they had met, during mission-planning sessions back on the Nostalgia for Infinity. Before that, their paths had barely crossed: like Jaccottet, she had only ever been another Arm operative to Vasko, with a few years of seniority on him.

  “You seem to have a particular problem with me being on this mission,” he said, as calmly as he could. “Is it something personal?”

  “Some of us have earned the right to be here,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “And you think I haven’t?”

  “You did a small favour for the pig,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Because of that you ended up embroiled in something bigger than you. That doesn’t mean you automatically earn my undying respect.”

  “I’m not really interested in your respect,” Vasko said. “What I’m interested in is your professional co-operation.”

  “You needn’t worry about that,” she said.

  He started to say something, but she had already turned away, levering a heavy Breitenbach cannon into locking stanchions set along one side of the boat.

  Vasko did not know what he had done to earn her hostility. Was it simply the fact that he was younger and less experienced? Sighing, he busied himself by helping to check and stow the equipment. It was not pleasant work: all the delicate tackle—the weapons, navigation and communication devices—had been lathered in a revolting opaque grey mucous layer of protective unguent. It kept getting all over his hands, breaking free in sticky ropes.

  Swearing under his breath, wiping the muck off on to his knees, he barely noticed as the shuttle yawed away, leaving them alone at sea.

  THEY SLID ACROSS kilometres of mirror-flat water. The cloud layer had broken up in patches, opening ragged windows in the deep black sky. There were stars visible now, but it was one of those comparatively rare nights when none of Ararat’s moons were above the horizon. Lamps provided their only illumination. The boats kept within metres of each other, scudding side by side, the whine of their motors not quite loud enough to hinder conversation. Vasko had decided early in the expedition that his best course of action—having apparently won the grudging approval, of Clavain—would be to say as little as possible. Besides, he had plenty to think about. He sat near the back of the second boat, squatting on the gunwale, loading and unloading a weapon in a kind of mindless loop, burning the action into the muscle memory of his hands so that it would happen without thought when he needed it to. For the hundredth time since they had set out, he wondered if it would actually come to violence. Perhaps the whole thing would be revealed to be a colossal misunderstanding, nothing more.

  In Vasko’s opinion, however, that was rather unlikely.

  They had all read Khouri’s testimony; had all sat in on the session while she was cross-examined. Much of what had been discussed had meant little to Vasko, but as the argument and interrogation had continued, a picture had begun to form in his mind.

  What was clear was this: Ana Khouri had returned from the computational matrix of the Hades neutron star with Thorn dead and his unborn child in her belly. Even then, she had known what Aura signified: that the unborn girl was not merely her child, but an agent of the ancient minds—human and alien—trapped within the sanctuary of the Hades matrix. Aura was a gift to humanity, her mind loaded with information capable of making a difference in the war against the Inhibitors. In Sylveste’s case—and it seemed likely that she carried some of his memories in addition to the reserves of knowledge—she was an act of atonement.

  Khouri knew also that Aura’s information had to be accessed as quickly as possible if it was going to mean anything. They did not have time to wait for her to be born, let alone for her to grow up and begin talking.

  With Khouri’s permission, therefore, Remontoire had sent droves of surgical remotes into the heads of mother and child while Aura was still inside Khouri’s womb. The drones had established Conjoiner-
type implants in both Aura and Khouri, enabling them to share thoughts and experiences. Khouri had become Aura’s mouthpiece and eyes: she had found herself dreaming Aura’s dreams, unwilling or unable to define precisely where Aura ended and she began. Her child’s thoughts were leaking into her own, permeating them to the point where no concrete division existed.

  But the thoughts and experiences had remained difficult to interpret. Khouri’s daughter was still an unborn child; the structures of her mind were tentative and half-formed, her mental model of the external universe necessarily vague. Khouri had done her best to interpret the signals, but despite her efforts only a fraction of the things she was picking up were intelligible. But even that fraction had turned out to be of vital importance. Following clues from Aura—sifting jewellike nuggets from a slurry of confusing signals—Remontoire had made drastic improvements to his arsenal of weapons and instruments. If nothing else, Aura’s potential significance was becoming obvious.

  But that was when Skade had entered the affair,

  She had arrived in the Delta Pavonis system long after the Inhibitors had completed their torching of Resurgam and the other planets. Quickly she had established lines of negotiation with the human elements still present after the departure of the Nostalgia for Infinity. Her ultimate objective remained the recovery of as many of the old Conjoiner-built cache weapons as possible. But with her own fleet damaged, and with the Inhibitors themselves gathering en masse, Skade was in no position to take what she wanted by brute force.

  By then, the Zodiacal Light had completed its self-repairs and the human exploration of the Hades object had reached its logical conclusion. As Remontoire and his allies moved out of the system, therefore, Skade had shadowed them. Tentative communications ensued, and Skade had deployed her existing assets to protect die evacuees from the pursuing Inhibitor elements. The gesture was calculated and risky, but nothing else would convince Remontoire that she was to be trusted.