Absolution Gap

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Absolution Gap Page 31

by Alastair Reynolds


  The two boats had come within fifty metres of the outer edge of the island’s fringe. The water had been calm for much of their journey, but here in the immediate vicinity of the iceberg it moved with the languor of some huge sedated animal, as if every ripple cost the sea great effort. Closer to the edge of the fringe, the sea was already beginning to freeze. It had the slick blue-grey texture of animal hide. Vasko touched his fingers just beneath the surface of the water by the boat and then pulled them back out immediately. Even here, this far from the fringe, the water was much colder than it had been when they had left the shuttle.

  “Look at this,” Scorpio said. He had one of the smart maps rolled out before him. Khouri was studying it, too, obviously agreeing with something Scorpio was saying to her as he pointed out features with the blunt-trottered stub of one hand.

  Clavain opened his own map. “What is it, Scorp?”

  “An update just came through from Blood. Take a look at the iceberg: it’s larger.”

  Clavain made his map display the same coordinates/The iceberg leapt into view. Vasko peered over the old man’s shoulder, searching for the pair of boats. There was no sign of them. He assumed that the-Tipdate had taken place before sunset the previous evening.

  “You’re right,” Clavain said. “What would you say… thirty, forty per cent larger, by volume?”

  “Easily,” Scorpio said. “And this isn’t real-time. If it’s growing this rapidly, it could be ten or twenty per cent larger again by now.”

  Clavain folded his map: he had seen enough. “It certainly seems to be refrigerating the surrounding water. Before very long, where we’re sitting will be frozen as well. We’re lucky we arrived when we did. If we’d left it a few more days, we’d never have stood a chance. We’d be looking at a mountain.”

  “Sir,” Vasko said, “I don’t understand how it can be getting larger. Surely it should be shrinking. Icebergs don’t last at these latitudes.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know much about them,” Clavain replied.

  “I said we don’t see many in the bay, sir.”

  Clavain looked at him shrewdly. “It’s not an iceberg. It never was. It’s a shell of ice around Skade’s ship. And it’s growing because the ship is making it grow by cooling the sea around it. Remember what Khouri said? They have ways of making their hulls as cold as the cosmic microwave background.”

  “But you also said you didn’t think Skade had any control over this.”

  “I’m not sure she has.”

  “Sir…”

  Clavain cut him off. “I think something may have gone wrong with the cryo-arithmetic engines that keep the hull cold. What, I don’t know. Perhaps Skade will tell us, when we find her.”

  Until a day ago Vasko had never heard of cryo-arithmetic engines. But the phrase had cropped up in Khouri’s testimony—it was one of the technologies that Aura had helped Remontoire and his allies to perfect as they raced away from the ruins of the Delta Pavonis system.

  In the hours that followed, Vasko had done his best to ask as many questions as possible, trying to fill in the most embarrassing voids in his knowledge. Not all of his questions had met with ready answers, even from Khouri. But Clavain had told him that the cryo-arithmetic engines were not completely new, that the basic technology had already been developed by the Conjoiners towards the end of their war against the Demarchists. At that time, a single cryo-arithmetic engine had been a clumsy thing the size of a mansion, too large to be carried on anything but a major spacecraft. All efforts to produce a miniaturised version had ended in disaster. Aura, however, had shown them how to make engines as small as apples.

  But they were still dangerous.

  The cryo-arithmetic principle was based on a controlled violation of thermodynamic law. It was an outgrowth from quantum computation, exploiting a class of algorithms discovered by a Conjoiner theorist named Qafzeh in the early years of the Demarchist war. Qafzeh’s algorithms—if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer—led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran. The trick—the really difficult part—was to prevent the computer from running even faster as it chilled, spiralling into a runaway process. The smaller the engine, the more susceptible it was to that kind of instability.

  Perhaps that was what had happened to Skade’s ship. In space, the engines had worked to suck heat away from the corvette’s hull, making the ship vanish into the near-zero background of cosmic radiation. But the ship had sustained damage, perhaps severing the delicate web of control systems monitoring the cryo-arithmetic engines. By the time it hit Ararat’s ocean it had become a howling mouth of interstellar cold. The water had begun to freeze around it, the odd patterns and structures betraying the obscene violation of physical law taking place.

  Could anyone still be alive inside it?

  Vasko noticed something then. It was possible that he was the first. It was a keening sound at the very limit of his hearing, a sensation so close to ultrasound that he barely registered it as noise at all. It was more like a kind of data arriving by a sensory channel he had never known he possessed.

  It was like singing. It was like a million fingers circling the wet rims of a million wine glasses.

  He could barely hear it, and yet it threatened to split his skull open.

  “Sir,” Vasko said, “I can hear something. The iceberg, sir, or whatever it is—it’s making a noise.”

  “It’s the sun,” Clavain said, after a moment. “It must be warming the ice, stressing it in different ways, making it creak and shiver.”

  “Can you hear it, sir?”

  Clavain looked at him with an odd expression on his face. “No, son, I can’t. These days, there are a lot of things I can’t hear. But I’m taking your word for it.”

  “Closer,” Scorpio said.

  THROUGH DARK, DANK corridors of the great drowned ship, Antoinette Bax walked alone. She held a torch in one hand and the old silver helmet in the other, her fingers tucked through the neck ring. Lolloping ahead of her with the eagerness of a hunting dog, the wandering golden circle of torchlight defined the unsettling sculptural formations that lined the walls: here an archway that appeared to be made from spinal vertebrae, there a mass of curled and knotted intestinal tubes. The crawling shadows made the tubes writhe and contort like copulating snakes.

  A steady damp breeze blew up from the lower decks, and from some unguessable distance Antoinette heard the clanging report of a hesitant, struggling mechanism—a bilge pump, maybe, or perhaps the ship itself remaking a part of its own fabric. Sounds propagated unpredictably through the ship, and the noise could just as easily have originated mere corridors away as from some location kilometres up or down the spire.

  Antoinette hitched high the collar of her coat. She would have preferred company—any company—but she knew that this was the way it had to be. On each of the very few occasions in the past when she had elicited anything from the Captain that might be construed as a meaningful response, it had always been when she was alone. She took this as evidence that the Captain was prepared to reveal himself to her, and that there was an element of trust—however small—in their rela-tionship. True or not, Antoinette had always believed that she stood a better chance of communicating with the Captain than her peers did. It was all about history. She had owned a ship herself once, and although that ship had been much smaller than the Nostalgia for Infinity, in some sense it, too, had been haunted.

  “Talk to me, John,” she had said on previous occasions. “Talk to me as someone you can trust, as someone who appreciates a little of what you are.”

  There had never been an unequivocal answer, but if she looked at all the instances when she had drawn some response, however devoid of content, it appeared to her that the Captain was more likely to do something in her presence than not. Taken together,
none of these apparitions amounted to any kind of coherent message. But what if the recent spate of manifestations pointed to him emerging from some dormant state?

  “Captain,” she said now, holding aloft the helmet, “you left a calling card, didn’t you? I’ve come to give it back. Now you have to keep your side of the bargain.”

  There was no response.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” she said. “I really don’t like it down here. Matter of fact, it scares the hell out of me. I like my ships small and cosy, with decor I chose myself.” She cast the torch beam around, picking out an overhanging globular mass filling half the corridor. She stooped under the shock-frozen black bubbles, brushing her fingers against their surprising warmth and softness. “No, this isn’t me at all. But I guess this is your empire, not mine. All I’m saying is that I hope you realise what it takes to bring me down here. And I hope you’re going to make it worthwhile for me.”

  Nothing happened. But she had never expected success at first bite.

  “John,” she said, deciding to risk familiarity, “we think something may be happening in the wider system. My guess is you may have some suspicions about this as well. I’ll tell you what we think, anyway—then you can decide for yourself.”

  The character of the breeze changed. It was warmer now, with an irregularity about it that made her think of ragged breathing.

  Antoinette said, “Khouri came back. She dropped out of the sky a couple of days back. You remember Khouri, don’t you? She spent a lot of time aboard, so I’d be surprised if you didn’t. Well, Khouri says there’s a battle going on around Ararat, something that makes the Demarchist-Conjoiner war look like a snowball fight. If she isn’t lying, we’ve got two squabbling human factions up there, plus a really frightening number of wolf machines. You remember the wolves, don’t you, Captain? You saw Ilia throw the cache weapons at them, and you saw what good it did.”

  There it was again. The breeze had become a faint suction.

  In Antoinette’s estimation that already made it a class-one apparition. “You’re here with me, aren’t you?”

  Another shift in the wind. The breeze returned, sharpened to a howl. The howl ripped her hair loose, whipping it in her eyes.

  She heard a word whispered in the wind: Ilia.

  “Yes, Captain. Ilia. You remember her well, don’t you? You remember the Triumvir. I do, too. I didn’t know her for long, but it was long enough to see that she isn’t the kind of woman you’d forget in a hurry.”

  The wind had died down. All that remained was a nagging suction.

  A small, sane voice warned Antoinette to stop now. She had achieved a clear result: a class one by anyone’s definition, and almost certainly (if she had not imagined the voice) a class two. That was enough for one day, wasn’t it? The Captain was nothing if not temperamental. According to the records she had left behind, Ilia Volyova had pushed him into a catatonic sulk many times by trying to coax just one more response from him. Often it had taken the Captain weeks to emerge from one of those withdrawals.

  But the Triumvir had had months or years to build up her working relationship with the Captain. Antoinette did not think she had anywhere near as much time.

  “Captain,” she said, “I’ll lay the cards on the table. The seniors are worried. Scorpio’s so worried he’s pulled Clavain back from his island. They’re taking Khouri seriously. They’ve already gone to see if they can get her baby back for her. If she’s right, there’s a Conjoiner ship already in our ocean, and it was damaged by the wolves. They’re here, Captain. It’s crunch time. Either we sit here and let events happen around us, or we think about the next move. I’m sure you know what I mean by that.”

  Abruptly, as if a door or valve had slammed shut somewhere, the suction stopped. No breeze, no noise, only Antoinette standing alone in the corridor with the small puddle of light from her torch.

  “Holy shit,” Antoinette said.

  But then, ahead of her, a cleft of light appeared. There was a squeal of metal and part of the corridor wall hinged aside. A new sort of breeze hit her face, a new concoction of biomechanical smells.

  Through the cleft she saw a new corridor, curving sharply down towards underlying decks. Golden-green light, firefly pale, oozed up from the depths.

  “I guess I was right about the calling card,” she said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ararat, 2675

  THE BOATS RAMMED through the thickening water on the periphery of the fringe, and then into the fringe itself. A blizzard of ice shards sprayed away on either side of the hulls. The boats surged forwards for ten or twelve metres and then scraped to a grinding halt, electric motors howling.

  The rectangular hulls had cut neat channels into the fringe, but the oily grey water had no sooner stopped sloshing than it began to turn suspiciously immobile and pearly. Scorpio thought of coagulating blood, the way it turned sticky and viscid. In a few minutes, he estimated, the channels would be frozen solid again.

  The two Security Arm people were the first out of the craft, establishing that the ice was firm enough to take the weight of the party. The others followed a minute later, carrying what weapons and equipment they could manage but leaving much else—including the incubator—in the boats. The firm part of the fringe formed a belt of land, five or six metres wide in most places, around the main peak of the iceberg. The huge crystalline structure rose up, steep-sided, above them. Scorpio, stiff-necked, found it awkward to look at the top for more than a few moments.

  He waited for Clavain to disembark, then moved over to him. They stood shivering, stomping their feet up and down. The ice beneath them had a braided texture, thick tuberous strands woven together into a kind of matting. It was treacherous, both slippery and uneven. Every footfall had to be taken with caution.

  “I was expecting a welcome by now,” Scorpio said. “The fact that we haven’t had one is starting to worry me.”

  “Me, too.” Clavain kept his voice very low. “We haven’t discussed the possibility, but Skade could well be dead. I just don’t think…” He trailed off, eyeing Khouri. She was sitting on her haunches, assembling the remaining parts of the Breit-enbach cannon. “I just don’t think she is quite ready to deal with that yet.”

  “You believe everything she’s said, don’t you?”

  “I’m sure we’ll find a ship in here. But she had no reason to believe that Skade survived the crash.”

  “Skade’s a survivor type,” Scorpio said.

  “There is that, but I never thought I’d find myself wishing it were the case.”

  “Sirs?”

  They followed the voice. It was Vasko. He had made his way some distance around the fringe, until he was almost about to vanish around the corner.

  “Sirs,” he said again, eyeing Scorpio and Clavain in turn, “there’s an opening here. I saw it from the sea. I think it’s the largest one all the way around.”

  “How deep does it go?” Scorpio asked.

  “Don’t know. More than a few metres, at least. I could easily squeeze through, I think.”

  “Wait,” Scorpio said. “Let’s take this one step at a time, shall we?”

  They followed Vasko to the gap in the ice. As they neared the wall, it was necessary to duck under and between the jutting horizontal spikes, shielding their eyes and faces with the backs of their arms. Some instinct made Scorpio loath to harm any part of the structure. It was next to impossible not to, for even as he stepped cautiously around one spike, protecting himself against the rapierlike tip of another, he shattered half a dozen smaller ones. They tinkled as they broke into pieces, and set off a cascade of secondary fractures metres away.

  “Is it still singing to you?” he asked Vasko.

  “No, sir,” he said, “not the way it was just now. I think that was only when the sun was coming up.”

  “But you can still hear something?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It’s lower, much lower. It comes in waves. I might be imagining
it.”

  Scorpio could not hear a thing. He had not been able to hear the iceberg singing, either. Nor had Clavain. Clavain was an old man, with an old man’s ailing faculties. Scorpio was a pig, with faculties about as good as they had ever been.

  “I’m ready to squeeze inside, sir”

  The opening that Vasko had found was merely a larger-than-usual pocket between the ragged weave of interthreading ice branches and needle-pointed spurs. It began at chest height: a vaguely oval widening, with the hint of a larger clearing beyond it. It was impossible to tell how far in they could reach.

  “Let me see,” Khouri said. She carried the cannon on a shoulder strap, slung down her back, its weight shifted on to one hip.

  ‘There are other ways in,“ Vasko said, ”but I think this is the easiest.“

  “We’ll take it,” Khouri said. “Stand aside. I’m going first.”

  “Wait,” Clavain said.

  Her lip curled. “My daughter’s in there. Someone go fetch the incubator.”

  “I know how you feel.” Clavain said.

  “Do you?”

  His voice was marvellously calm. “Yes, I do. Skade took Felka once. I went in after her, just the way you’re doing. I thought it was the right way to proceed. I see now that it was foolish and that I came very close to losing her. That’s why you shouldn’t be the first one in. Not if you want to see Aura again.”

  “He’s right,” Scorpio said. “We don’t know what we’ll find in that thing, or how Skade will react when she knows we’re here. We might lose someone. The one person we can’t afford to lose is you.”

  “You can still fetch the incubator.”

  “No,” Scorpio said. “It stays out here, out of harm’s way. I don’t want it getting smashed in a firefight. And if turns out that we can negotiate our way through this, there’ll be time to come back and get it.”

 

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