Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “All right,” Grelier said, raising his voice above the din of the traction machinery. “You’ve made your point. We’ve all had a bit of a laugh. Now turn around and we’ll talk things over sensibly.”

  But Vaustad was beyond reason now. He had reached the supporting stay and was trying to wriggle past it, shifting much of his weight to one side of the pipe. Grelier watched, knowing with numbing inevitability that Vaustad was not going to make it. It would have been a difficult exercise for an agile young man, and Vaustad was neither. He was curled around the obstacle now, one leg hanging uselessly over the side, the other trying to act as a balance, one hand on the metal stay and the other fumbling for the nearest rib on the other side. He stretched, straining to reach the rib. Then he slipped, both legs coming off the pipe. He hung there, one hand taking his weight while the other thrashed around in midair.

  “Stay still!” Grelier called. “Stay still and you’ll be all right. You can hold yourself there until we get help if you stop moving!”

  Again, a fit young man could have held himself up there until rescue arrived, even hanging from one hand. But Vaustad was a large, soft individual who had never had to use his muscles before.

  Grelier watched as Vaustad’s remaining hand slipped from the metal stay. He watched Vaustad fall down to the floor of the traction hall, hitting it with a thump that was nearly muffled by the constant background noise. There had been no scream, no gasp of shock. Vaustad’s eyes were closed, but from the expression on his upturned face it was likely that the man had died instantly.

  Grelier collected his cane, stuffed it into the crook of his arm and made his way back down the series of ramps and ladders. At the foot of the reactor he retrieved his medical kit and unlocked the access door. By the time he reached Vaustad, half a dozen of Glaur’s workers had gathered around the body. He considered shooing them away, then decided against it. Let them watch. Let them see what Bloodwork entailed.

  He knelt down by Vaustad and opened the medical kit. It gasped cold. It was divided into two compartments. In the upper tray were the red-filled syringes of top-up doses, fresh from Bloodwork. They were labelled for serotype and viral strain. One of them had been intended for Vaustad and would now have to go to new home.

  He peeled back Vaustad’s sleeve. Was there still a faint pulse? That would make life easier. It was never a simple business, drawing blood from the dead. Even the recently deceased.

  He reached into the second compartment, the one that held the empty syringes. He held one up to the light, symbolically.

  “The Lord giveth,” Grelier said, slipping the syringe into one of Vaustad’s veins and starting to draw blood. “And sometimes, unfortunately, the Lord taketh away.”

  He filled three syringes before he was done.

  GRELIER LATCHED THE gate to the spiral staircase behind him. It was good, on reflection, to escape the aggressive stillness of the traction hall. Sometimes it seemed to him that the place was a cathedral within a cathedral, with its own unwritten rules. He could control people, but down there—amid machines—he was out of his element. He had tried to make the most of the business with Vaustad, but everyone knew that he had not come to take blood, but to give it.

  Before ascending further he stopped at one of the speaking points, calling a team down from Bloodwork to deal with the body. There would be questions to answer, later, but nothing that would cost him any sleep.

  Grelier moved through the main hall, on his way to the Clocktower. He was taking the long way around, in no particular hurry to see Quaiche after the Vaustad debacle. Besides, it was his usual custom to make at least one circumnavigation of the hall before going up or down. It was the largest open space in the cathedral, and the only one—save for the traction hall—where he could free himself from the mild claustrophobia that he felt in every other part of the moving structure.

  The hall had been remade and expanded many times, as the cathedral itself grew to its present size. Little of that history was evident to the casual eye now, but having lived through most of the changes, Grelier saw what others might have missed. He observed the faint scars where interior walls had been removed and relocated. He saw the tidemark where the original, much lower ceiling had been. Thirty or forty years had passed since the new one had been put in—it had been a mammoth exercise in the airless environment of Hela, especially since the old space had remained occupied throughout the whole process and the cathedral had, of course, kept moving the entire time. Yet the choir had not missed a note during the entire remodelling, and the number of deaths amongst the construction workers had remained tolerably low.

  Grelier paused awhile at one of the stained-glass windows on the right-hand side of the cathedral. The coloured edifice towered dozens of metres above him. It was framed by a series of divided stone arches, with a rose window at the very top. The cathedral’s architectural skeleton, traction mechanisms and external cladding were necessarily composed largely of metal, but much of the interior was faced with a thin layer of cosmetic masonry. Some of it had been processed from indigenous Hela minerals, but the rest of it—the subtle biscuit-hued stones and the luscious white-and-rose marbles—had been imported by the Ultras. Some of the stones, it was said, had even come from cathedrals on Earth. Grelier took that with a large pinch of salt: more than likely they’d come from the nearest suitable asteroid. It was the same with the holy relics he encountered during his tour, tucked away in candlelit niches. It was anyone’s guess how old they really were, whether they’d been hand-crafted by medieval artisans or knocked together in manufactory nano-forges.

  But regardless of the provenance of the stonework that framed it, the stained-glass window was a thing of beauty. When the light was right, it not only shone with a glory of its own but transmitted that glory to everything and everyone within the hall. The details of the window hardly mattered—it would still have been beautiful if the chips of coloured, vacuum-tight glass had been arranged in random kaleidoscopic patterns—but Grelier took particular note of the imagery. It changed from time to time, following dictates from Quaiche himself. When Grelier sometimes had difficulty reading the man directly (and that was increasingly the case) the windows offered a parallel insight into Quaiche’s state of mind.

  Take now, for instance: when he had last paid attention to this window, it had focused on Haldora, showing a stylised view of the gas giant rendered in swirling chips of ochre and fawn. The planet had been set within a blue backdrop speckled with the yellow chips of surrounding stars. In the foreground there had been a rocky landscape evoked in contrasting shards of white and black, with the gold form of Quaiche’s crashed ship parked amid boulders. Quaiche himself was depicted outside the ship, robed and bearded, kneeling on the ground and raising an imploring hand to the heavens. Before that, Grelier recalled, the window had shown the cathedral itself, pictured descending the zigzagging ramp of the Devil’s Staircase, looking for all the world like a tiny storm-tossed sailing ship, all the other cathedrals lagging behind, and with a slightly smaller rendition of Haldora in the sky.

  Before that, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought it might have been a more modest variation on the theme of the crashed ship.

  The images that the window showed now were clear enough, but their significance to Quaiche was much more difficult to judge. At the top, worked into the rose window itself, was the familiar banded face of Haldora. Below that were a couple of metres of starlit sky, shaded from deep blue to gold by some artifice of glass tinting. Then, taking up most of the height of the window, was a toweringly impressive cathedral, a teetering assemblage of pennanted spires and buttresses, lines of converging perspective making it clear that the cathedral sat immediately below Haldora. So far so good: the whole point of a cathedral was for it to remain precisely below the gas giant, just as depicted. But the cathedral in the window was obviously larger than any to be found on the Permanent Way; it was practically a citadel in its own right. And—unless Grelier was mistaken—it was
clearly portrayed as being an outgrowth of the rocky foreground landscape, as if it had foundations rather than traction mechanisms. There was no sign of the Permanent Way at all.

  The window puzzled him. Quaiche chose the content of the windows, and he was usually very literal-minded in his selections. The scenes might be exaggerated, might even have the taint of unreality (Quaiche outside his ship without a vacuum suit, for instance) but they usually bore at least some glancing relationship to actual events. But the present content of the window appeared to be worryingly metaphorical. That was all Grelier needed, Quaiche going all metaphorical on him. But what else was he to make of the vast, grounded cathedral? Perhaps it symbolised the fixed, immobile nature of Quaiche’s faith. Fine, Grelier told himself: you think you can read him now, but what if the messages start getting even foggier?

  He shook his head and continued his journey. He traversed the entire left-hand wall of the cathedral, not seeing any further oddities amongst the windows. That was a relief, at least. Perhaps the new design would turn out to be a temporary aberration, and life would continue as normal.

  He moved around to the front of the cathedral, into the shadow of the black window. The chips of glass were invisible; all he could see were the ghostly arcs and pillars of the supporting masonry. The design in that window had undoubtedly changed since the last time he had seen it.

  He moved back across to the right-hand side and proceeded along half the length of the cathedral until he arrived at the base of the Clocktower.

  “Can’t put it off any longer,” Grelier said to himself.

  BACK IN HER quarters on the caravan, Rashmika opened the letter, breaking the already weakened seal. The paper sprung wide. It was good-quality stuff: creamy and thick, better than anything she had handled in the badlands. Printed inside, in neat but naive handwriting, was a short message.

  She recognised the handwriting.

  Dear Rashmika,

  I am very sorry not to have been in touch for so long. I heard your name on the broadcasts from the Vigrid region, saying you had run away from home. I had a feeling that you would be coming after me, trying to find out what had happened to me since my last letter. When I found out that there was a caravan coming towards the Way, one that you might have been able to reach with help, I felt certain you would be on it. I made an enquiry and found out the names of the passengers and now I am writing this letter to you.

  I know you will think it strange that I have not written to you or any of the family for so long. But things are different now, and it would not have been right. Everything that you said was true. They did not tell the truth to start with, and they gave me the dean’s blood as soon as I arrived at the Way. I am sure you could tell this from the letters I sent to begin with. I was angry at first, but now I know that it was all for the best. What’s done is done, and if they had been honest it wouldn’t have happened this way. They had to tell a lie for the greater good. I am happy now, happier than I have ever been. I have found a duty in life, something bigger than myself I feel the dean’s love and the love of the Creator beyond the dean. I don’t expect you to understand or like any of this, Rashmika. That’s why I stopped writing home. I didn’t want to lie, and yet I also didn’t want to hurt anyone. It was better to say nothing.

  It is kind and brave of you to come after me. It means more than you can imagine. But you must go home now, before I bring you any more hurt. Do this for me: go home, back to the badlands, and tell everyone that I am happy and that I love them all. I miss them terribly, but I do not regret what I have done. Please. Do that for me, will you? And take my love as well. Remember me as I was, as your brother, not as what I have become. Then it will all be for the best.

  With love,

  Your brother,

  Harbin Els.

  Rashmika read it one more time, scrutinising it for hidden meaning, and then put it down. She closed it, but the seal would no longer hold the edges tight.

  GRELIER LIKED THE view, if little else. Two hundred metres above the surface of Hela, Quaiche’s room was a windowed garret at the very top of the Clocktower. From this vantage point one could see nearly twenty kilometres of the Way in either direction, with the cathedrals strung along it like artfully placed ornaments. There were only a few of them ahead, but to the rear they stretched back far over the horizon. The tops of distant spires sparkled with the unnatural clarity of things in vacuum, tricking the eye into the illusion that they were much nearer than they actually were. Grelier reminded himself that some of those spires were nearly forty kilometres behind. It would take them thirty hours or more to reach the spot now immediately beneath the Lady Morwenna, the better part of a Hela day. There were some cathedrals so far behind that even their spires were not visible.

  The garret was hexagonal in plan, with high armoured windows on all six sides. The slats of metal jalousies were ready to tilt into position at a command from Quaiche, blocking light in any direction. For now the room was fully illuminated, with stripes of light and shade falling on every object and person within it. There were many mirrors in the room, arranged on pedestals, sight-lines and angles of reflection carefully chosen. When Grelier entered, he saw his own shattered reflection arriving from a thousand directions.

  He placed the cane into a wooden rack by the door.

  Aside from Grelier, the room contained two people. Quaiche, as usual, reclined in the baroque enclosure of his medical support couch. He was a shrivelled, spectral thing, seemingly less substantial in the full glare of daylight than in the half-shuttered darkness that prevailed in the garret. He wore oversized black sunglasses that accentuated the morbid pallor and thinness of his face. The couch ruminated to itself with thoughtful hums and clicks and gurgles, occasionally delivering a dose of medicine into its client. Most of the distasteful medical business was tucked away under the scarlet blanket that covered his recumbent form to the ribcage, but now and then something pulsed along one of the feedlines running into his forearms or the base of his skull: something chemical-green or electric-blue, something that could never be mistaken for blood. He did not look a well man. Appearances, in this case, were not deceptive.

  But, Grelier reminded himself, this was how Quaiche had looked for decades. He was a very old man, pushing the envelope of available life-prolongation therapies, testing them to their limit. But the limit was always slightly out of reach. Dying seemed to be a threshold that he lacked the energy to cross.

  They had both, Grelier reflected, been more or less the same physiological age when they had served under Jasmina aboard the Gnostic Ascension. Now Quaiche was by far the older man, having lived through all of the last hundred and twelve years of planetary time. Grelier, by contrast, had experienced only thirty of those years. The arrangement had been simple enough, with generous benefits where Grelier was concerned.

  “I don’t really like you,” Quaiche had told him, back aboard the Gnostic Ascension. “If that wasn’t already obvious.”

  “I think I got the message,” Grelier said.

  “But I need you. You’re useful to me. I don’t want to die here. Not just now.”

  “What about Jasmina?”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something. She relies on you for her clones, after all.”

  It had been shortly after Quaiche’s rescue from the bridge on Hela. As soon as she received data on the structure, Jasmina had turned the Gnostic Ascension around and brought it into the 107 Piscium system, swinging into orbit around Hela. There had been no more booby traps on the surface: later investigation showed that Quaiche had triggered the only three sentries on the entire moon, and that they had been placed there and forgotten at least a century before by an earlier and now unremembered discoverer of the bridge.

  Except that was almost but not quite true. There was another sentry, but only Quaiche knew about it.

  Fixated by what he had seen, and stunned by what had happened to him—the miraculous nature of his rescue combined inseparably and punishingl
y with the horror of losing Morwenna—Quaiche had gone mad. That was Grelier’s view, at least, and nothing in the last hundred and twelve years had done anything to reverse his opinion. Given what had happened, and given the perception-altering presence of the virus in Quaiche’s blood, he thought Quaiche had got off lightly with only a mild kind of insanity. He still had some kind of grip on reality, still understood—with a manipulative brilliance—all that was going on around him. It was just that he saw the world through a gauze of piety. He had sanctified himself.

  Rationally, Quaiche knew that his faith had something to do with the virus in his blood. But he also knew that he had been rescued because of a genuinely miraculous event. Telemetry records from the Dominatrix were clear on this: his distress signal had only been intercepted because, for a fraction of a second, Haldora had ceased to exist. Responding to that signal, the Dominatrix had raced to Hela, desperate to save him before his air ran out.

  The ship had only been doing its duty by racing at maximum thrust to reach Hela as quickly as possible. The acceleration limits that would have applied had Quaiche been aboard were ignored. But the dull intelligence of the ship’s mind had neglected to take Morwenna into consideration.

  When Quaiche found his way back aboard, the scrimshaw suit was silent. Later, in desperation—part of him already knowing that Morwenna was dead—he had cut through the thick metal of the suit. He had reached his hands inside, caressing the pulped red atrocity within, weeping even as she flowed through his fingers.

  Even the metal parts of her had been mangled.

  Quaiche had lived, therefore, but at a terrible cost. His options, at that point, had seemed simple enough. He could find a way to discard his faith, some flushing therapy that would blast all traces of the virus from his blood. He would then have to find a rational, secular explanation for what had happened to him. And he would have to accept that although he had been saved by what appeared to be a miracle, Morwenna—the only woman he had truly loved—was gone for ever, and that she had died so that he might live.