Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Bloodwork, Grelier?”

  “I’ll come to that. Just tell me what that business with the Ultra was all about. Why did you want him to bring his ship closer to Hela?”

  Visibly, Quaiche’s pupils dilated. “Why do you think that’s what I wanted of him?”

  “Isn’t it? Why else would he have said that it was too dangerous?”

  “You presume a great deal, Grelier.”

  The surgeon-general finished cleaning up, then slotted the top pair of glasses back into place. “Why do you want the Ultras closer, all of a sudden? For years you’ve worked hard to keep the bastards at arm’s-reach. Now you want one of their ships on your doorstep?”

  The figure in the couch sighed. He had more substance in the darkness. Grelier opened the slats again, observing that the yellow-green shuttle had departed from the landing pad.

  “It was just an idea,” Quaiche said.

  “What kind of idea?”

  “You’ve seen how nervous the Ultras are lately. I trust them less and less. Basquiat seemed like a man I could do business with. I was hoping we might come to an arrangement.”

  “What sort of arrangement?” Grelier returned the swabs to the cabinet.

  “Protection,” Quaiche said. “Bring one group of Ultras here to keep the rest of them away.”

  “Madness,” Grelier said.

  “Insurance,” his master corrected. “Well, what does it matter? They weren’t interested. Too worried about bringing their ship near to Hela. This place scares them as much as it tantalises them, Grelier.‘’

  “There’ll always be others.”

  “Perhaps…” Quaiche sounded as if the whole business was already boring him, a mid-morning fancy he now regretted.

  “You asked about Bloodwork,” Grelier said. He knelt down and picked up the case. “It didn’t go swimmingly, but I collected from Vaustad.”

  “The choirmaster? Weren’t you supposed to be administering?”

  “Wee change of plan.”

  Bloodwork: the Office of the Clocktower dedicated to the preservation, enrichment and dissemination of the countless viral strains spun off from Quaiche’s original infection. Almost everyone who worked in the cathedral carried some of Quaiche in their blood now. It had reached across generations, mutating and mingling with other types of virus brought to Hela. The result was a chaotic profusion of possible effects. Many of the other churches were based on, or had in some sense even been caused by, subtle doctrinal variants of the original strain. Bloodwork operated to tame the chaos, isolating effective and doctrinally pure strains and damping out others. Individuals like Vaustad were often used as test cases for newly isolated viruses. If they showed psychotic or otherwise undesirable side-effects, the strains would be eliminated. Vaustad had earned his role as guinea pig after a series of regrettable indiscretions, but had grown increasingly fearful of the results of each new test jab.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Quaiche said. “I need Bloodwork, Grelier, more so now than ever. I’m losing my religion.”

  Quaiche’s own faith was subject to horrible lapses. He had developed immunity to the pure strain of the virus, the one that had infected him before his time aboard the Gnostic Ascension. One of the principle tasks of Bloodwork was to isolate the new mutant strains that were still able to have an effect on Quaiche. Grelier didn’t advertise the fact, but it was getting harder and harder to find them.

  Quaiche was in a lapse now. Out of them, he never spoke of losing his religion. It was just there, solidly apart of him. It was only during the lapses that he found it possible to think of his faith as a chemically engineered thing. These interludes always worried Grelier. It was when Quaiche was at his most conflicted that he was at his least predictable. Grelier thought again of the enigmatic stained-glass window he had seen below, wondering if there might be a connection.

  “We’ll soon have you right as rain,” he said.

  “Good. I’ll need to be. There’s trouble ahead, Grelier. Major icefalls reported in the Gullveig Range, blocking the Way. It will fall to us to clear them, as it always does. But even with God’s Fire I’m still worried that we’ll lose time on Haldora.”

  “We’ll make it up. We always do.”

  “Drastic measures may be called for if the delay becomes unacceptably large. I want Motive Power to be ready for whatever I ask of them—even the unthinkable.” The couch tilted again, its reflection breaking up and reforming in the slowly moving mirrors. They were set up to guide light from Haldora into Quaiche’s field of view: wherever he sat, he saw the world with his own eyes. “The unthinkable, Grelier,” he added. “You know what I mean by that, don’t you?”

  “I think so,” Grelier said. And then thought of blood, and also of bridges. He also thought of the girl he was bringing to the cathedral and wondered if perhaps—just perhaps—he had set in motion something it would no longer be possible to stop.

  But he won’t do it, he thought. He’s insane, no one doubts that, but he isn’t that insane. Not so insane that he’d take the Lady Morwenna across the bridge, over Absolution Gap.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ararat, 2675

  THE INTERNAL MAP of the Nostalgia for Infinity was a long scroll of scuffed, yellowing paper, anchored at one end by Blood’s knife and at the other by the heavy silver helmet Palfrey had found in the junk. The scroll was covered with a dense crawl of pencil and ink lines. In places it had been erased and redrawn so many times that the paper had the thin translucence of animal skin.

  “Is this the best we’ve got?” Blood asked.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Antoinette said. “We’re doing our best with very limited resources.”

  “All right.” The pig had heard that a hundred times in the last week. “So what does it tell us?”

  “It tells us that we have a problem. Did you interview Palfrey?”

  “No. Scorp took care of that.”

  Antoinette fingered the mass of jewellery packed into her earlobes. “I had a little chat with him as well. I wanted to see how the land was lying. Turns out practically everyone in bilge management is convinced that the Captain is changing his haunt patterns.”

  “And?”

  “Now that we’ve got the last dozen or so apparitions plotted, I’m beginning to think they’re right.”

  The pig squinted at the map, his eyes poorly equipped for discerning the smoke-grey pencil marks in the low light of the conference room. Maps had never really been his thing, even during his days under Scorpio in Chasm City. There, it had hardly mattered. Blood’s motto had always been that if you needed a map to find your way around a neighbourhood, you were already in trouble.

  But this map was important. It depicted the Nostalgia for Infinity, the very sea-spire in which they were sitting. The ship was a tapering cone of intricate vertical and horizontal lines, an obelisk engraved with crawling, interlocked hieroglyphics. The lines showed floor levels, interconnecting shafts and major interior partitions. The ship’s huge internal storage bays were unmarked cavities in the diagram.

  The ship was four kilometres tall, so there was no space on the map for detail at the human scale. Individual rooms were usually not marked at all unless they had some strategic importance. Mostly, mapping it was a pointless exercise. The ship’s slow processes of interior reorganisation—utterly outside the control of its human occupants—had rendered all such efforts nearly useless within a handful of years.

  There were other complications. The high levels of the ship were well charted. Crews were always moving around in these areas, and the constant presence of human activity seemed to have dissuaded the ship from changing itself too much. But the deep levels, and especially those that lay below sea level, were nowhere near as well visited. Teams only went down there when they had to, and when they did they usually found that the interior failed utterly to conform to their expectations. And the transformed parts of the ship—warped according to queasy, biological archetypes�
��were by their very nature difficult to map with any accuracy. Blood had been down into some of the most severely distorted zones of the deep ship levels. The experience had been akin to the exploration of some nightmarish cave system.

  It was not only the interior of the ship that remained uncertain. Before descending from orbit, the lighthugger had prepared itself for landing by flattening its stern. In the chaos of that descent, very few detailed observations of the changes had been possible. And since the lower kilometre of the ship—including the twin nacelles of the Conjoiner drives—was now almost permanently submerged, there had been little opportunity to improve matters in the meantime. Divers had explored only the upper hundred metres of the submerged parts, but even their reports had revealed little that was not already known. Sensors could probe deeper, but the cloudy shapes that they returned showed only that the basic form of the ship was more or less intact. The crucial question of whether or not the drives would ever work again could not be answered. Through his own nervous system of data connections the Captain presumably knew the degree of spaceworthiness of ship. But the Captain wasn’t talking.

  Until, perhaps, now.

  Antoinette had marked with annotated red stars all recent and reliable apparitions of John Brannigan. Blood peered at the dates and comments, the handwritten remarks which gave details of the type of apparition and the associated witness or witnesses. He dabbed at the map with his knife, scraping the blade gently against it, scything arcs and feints against the pencil marks.

  “He’s moving up,” Blood observed.

  Antoinette nodded. A lock of hair had come loose, hanging across her face. “That’s what I thought, too. Judging by this, I’d say Palfrey and his friends have a point.”

  “What about the dates? See any patterns there?”

  “Only that things looked pretty normal until a month or so ago.”

  “And now?”

  “Draw your own conclusions,” she said. “Me, I think the map speaks for itself. The hauntings have changed. The Captain’s suddenly become restless. He’s increased the range and boldness of his haunts, showing up in parts of the ship where we’ve never seen him before. If I included the reports I didn’t think were entirely trustworthy, you’d see red marks all the way up to the administration levels.”

  “But you don’t believe those, do you?”

  Antoinette pushed back the stray strands of hair. “No, right now I don’t. But a week ago I wouldn’t have believed half of the others, either. Now all it’d take is one good witness above level six hundred.”

  “And then what?”

  “All bets would be off. We’d have to accept that the Captain’s woken up.”

  In Blood’s view this was already a given. “It can’t be down to Khouri, can it? If the Captain had started behaving differ-ently today, then I could believe it. But if this is real, it started weeks ago. She wasn’t here then.”

  “But they’d arrived in-system by then,” Antoinette pointed out. “The battle was already here. How do we know the Captain wasn’t sensitive to that? He’s a ship. His senses reach out for light-hours in all directions. Being anchored to a planet doesn’t change that.”

  “We don’t know that Khouri was telling the truth,” Blood said.

  Antoinette used her red marker to add another star, one that corresponded to Palfrey’s report. “I’d say we do now,” she said.

  “All right. One other thing. If the Cap’s woken up…”

  She looked at him, waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Yes?”

  “Do you think it means he wants something?”

  Antoinette picked up the helmet, causing the map to roll back on itself with a snapping sound. “Guess one of us is going to have to ask him,” she replied.

  TWO HOURS BEFORE dawn something twinkled on the horizon.

  “I see it, sir,” Vasko said. “It’s the iceberg, like we saw on the map.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Urton said, after peering into the distance for half a minute.

  “I do,” Jaccottet said, from the other boat. “Malinin’s right, I think. There’s something there.” He reached for binoculars and held them to his eyes. The wide cowl of the lenses stayed rigidly fixed on target even as the rest of the binoculars wavered in Jaccottet’s hands.

  “What do you see?” Clavain asked.

  “A mound of ice. At this range, that’s about all I can make out. Still no sign of a ship, though.”

  “Good work,” Clavain said to Vasko. “We’ll call you Hawk-eye, shall we?”

  On Scorpio’s order the boats slowed to half their previous speed, then veered gradually to port. They commenced a long encirclement of the object, viewing it from all sides in the slowly changing dawn light.

  Within an hour, as the boats spiralled nearer, the iceberg had become a small round-backed hummock. There was, in Vasko’s opinion, something deeply odd about it. It sat on the sea and yet seemed a part of it as well, surrounded as it was by a fringe of white that extended in every direction for perhaps twice the diameter of the central core. It made Vasko think of an island, the kind that consisted of a single volcanic mountain, with gently sloping beaches reaching the sea on all sides. He had seen a few icebergs, when they drifted down to the latitude of First Camp, and this was unlike any iceberg in his experience.

  The boats circled closer. Now and then, Vasko heard Scorpio speaking to Blood via his wrist radio. The western sky was a bruised purple, with only a scattering of bright stars showing. In the east it was a bleak shade of rose. Against either backdrop the pale mound of the iceberg threw back subtly distorted variations of the same hues.

  “We’ve circled it twice,” Urton reported.

  “Keep it up,” Clavain instructed. “Reduce our distance by half, but slow to half our present” speed. She may not be alert, and I don’t want to startle her.“

  “Something’s not right about that iceberg, sir,” Vasko said.

  “We’ll see.” Clavain turned to Khouri. “Can you sense her yet?”

  “Skade?” she asked.

  “I was thinking more of your daughter. I wondered if there might be some remote cross-talk between your mutual sets of implants.”

  “We’re still a long way out.”

  “Agreed, but let me know the instant you feel anything. My own implants may not pick up Aura’s emissions at all, or not until we’re much nearer. And in any case you are her mother. I am certain you’ll recognise her first, even if there is nothing unusual about the protocols.”

  “I don’t need reminding that I’m her mother,” Khouri said.

  “Of course. I just meant…”

  “I’m listening for her, Clavain. I’ve been listening for her from the moment you pulled me out of that capsule. You’ll be the first to hear if I pick up Aura.”

  Half an hour later they were close enough to make out more detail. It was clear to all of them now that this was no ordinary iceberg, even if one discounted the way it infiltrated the water around it. Indeed, it appeared increasingly unlikely that the thing was any kind of iceberg at all.

  Yet it was made of ice.

  The sides of the floating mass were weird and crystalline. Rather than facets or sheets, they consisted of a thickening tangle of white spars, a briar formed from interleaved spikes of ice. Stalagmites and stalactites daggered up and down like icy incisors. Vertical spikes bristled like rapiers. At the root of each spike was a flourish of smaller growths thrusting out in all directions, intersecting and threading through their neighbours. In all directions, the spikes varied in size. Some—the major trunks and branches of the structure—were as wide across as the boat. Others were so thin, so fine, that they formed only an iridescent haze in the air, as if the merest breeze would shatter them into a billion twinkling parts. From a distance, the berg had appeared to be a solid block. Now the mound seemed to be formed from a huge haphazardly tossed pile of glass needles. Unthinkable numbers of glass needles. It was a glistening cavity-filled thicket, as mu
ch hollow space as ice.

  It was easily the most unsettling thing Vasko had ever seen in his life.

  They circled closer.

  Of all of them, only Clavain seemed unimpressed by the utter strangeness of what lay before them. “The smart maps were accurate,” he said. “The size of this thing… by my reckoning, you could easily hide a moray-class corvette inside it.”

  Vasko raised his voice. “You still think there might be a ship inside that thing, sir?”

  “Ask yourself a question, son. Do you really think Mother Nature had anything to do with this?”

  “But why would Skade surround her ship with all this strange ice?” Vasko persisted. “I wouldn’t have thought it was much use as armour, and all it’s done so far is make her ship more visible on the maps.”

  “What makes you so sure she had any choice, son?”

  “I don’t follow, sir.”

  Scorpio said, “He’s suggesting that all this might mean there’s something wrong with Skade’s ship. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s my working hypothesis,” Clavain said.

  “But what…” Vasko abandoned his question before he got himself into even deeper water.

  “Whatever’s inside,” Clavain said, “we still have to reach it. We don’t have tunnelling equipment or anything that can blast through thick ice. But if we’re careful, we won’t have,to. We just have to locate a route through to the middle.”

  “What if Skade spots-us, sir?” Vasko asked.

  “I’m hoping she does. The last thing I want is to have to knock on her front door. Now take us closer. Nice and slowly does it.”

  BRIGHT SUN ROSE. In the early minutes of dawn, the iceberg took on an entirely different character. Against the soft violet of the sky the whole structure seemed magical, as delicate as some aristocrat’s confection. The briar spikes and icy spars were shot through with gold and azure, the colours refracted with the untainted dazzle of cut diamond. There were glorious ha-los, shards and jangles of chromatic purity, colours Vasko had never seen in his life. Instead of shadows, the interior shone turquoise and opal with a radiance that groped and fingered its way to the surface through twisting corridors and canyons of ice. And yet within that shining interior there was a shadowy kernel, a hint of something cocooned.