Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I won’t let them down,” he said. “When you were away on your island, I always tried to do things the way you would have done them. That doesn’t mean I ever thought I was your equal. I know that won’t ever be true. I have trouble planning beyond the end of my nose. Like I always say, I’m a hands-on type.” ‘

  His eyes stung. He thought about what he had just said, the bitter irony of it.

  “I suppose that was the way it was, right to the end. I’m sorry, Nevil. You deserved better than this. You were a brave man and you always did the right thing, no matter what it cost you.”

  Scorpio paused, catching his breath, quashing the vague feeling of absurdity he felt in talking to the bag. Speeches had never been his thing. Clavain would have made a much better job of it, had their roles been reversed. But he was here and Clavain was the dead man in the bag. He just had to do the best he could, fumbling through, the way he had done most things in his life.

  Clavain would forgive him, he thought.

  “I’m going to let you go now,” Scorpio said. “I hope this is what you wanted, pal. I hope you find what you were looking for.”

  He gave the bag one last heave over the side. It vanished instantly into the green raft that surrounded the boat. In the moments after the bag had gone there was a quickening in the activity of the Juggler forms. The constant procession of alien shapes became more frenzied, shuffling towards some excited climax.

  In the sky, the questing black trunk had curved nearly horizontal, groping towards the iceberg. The tip of the thing was no longer a blunt nub: it had begun to open, dividing into multiple black fingers that were themselves growing and splitting, writhing their way through the air.

  There was nothing he could about that now. He looked back at the play of Juggler shapes, thinking for an instant that he had even seen a pair of female human faces appear in the storm of images. The faces had been strikingly alike, but one possessed a maturity that the other lacked, a serene and weary resignation. It was as if entirely too much had been witnessed, entirely too much imagined, for one human life. Eyeless as statues, they stared at him for one frozen moment, before dissolving back into the flicker of masks.

  Around him, the raft began to break up. The changing wall of shapes slumped, collapsing back into the sea. Even the smell and the stinging miasma had begun to lose something of their astringency. He supposed that meant he had done his duty. But above the sea, the black thing continued to push its branching extremities towards the iceberg.

  He still had work to do.

  SCORPIO TURNED THE boat around. By the time he reached the iceberg the other craft was already afloat: Vasko, Khouri, the incubator and the two Security Arm people were visible within it, the adults crouching down against the spray, the hull sinking low in the water. The Jugglers had redoubled their activity after the lull when the ocean received Clavain. Scorpio was certain now that it had something to do with the thing reaching down from the sky. The Jugglers didn’t like it: it was making them agitated, like a colony of small animals sensing the approach of a snake.

  Scorpio didn’t blame them: it was no kind of weather phenomenon he had ever experienced. Not a tornado, not a sea-spout. Now that the swaying multi-armed thing was directly overhead, its artificial nature was sickeningly obvious. The entire thing—from the thick trunk descending down through the cloud layer to the thinnest of the branching extremities—was composed of the same cubic black elements they had seen in Skade’s ship. It was Inhibitor machinery, wolf machinery—whatever you wanted to call it. There was no guessing how much of it hovered above them, hidden behind the cloud deck. The trunk might even have reached all the way down through Ararat’s atmosphere.

  It made him feel ill just to look at it. It simply wasn’t right.

  He steered towards the other boat. Now that he had dealt with Clavain he felt a clarity of mind he’d lacked a few minutes before. It had probably been wrong to leavethem on the iceberg with just that one boat for escape, but he had not wanted anyone else with him when he buried his friend. Selfish, perhaps, but it hadn’t been any of them doing the cutting.

  “Hold tight,” he told them via the communicator. “We’ll even out the load as soon as I’m close enough.”

  “Then what?” Vasko asked, looking fearfully up at the thing stretched across the sky.

  “Then we run like hell.”

  The thing’s attention lingered over the iceberg. With slow, pythonlike movements it pushed a cluster of tentacles into the roof of the frozen structure, the needles and jags of ice shattering as the machinery forced its way through. Perhaps, Scorpio thought, it sensed the presence of other pieces of Inhibitor machinery, dormant or dead within the wreckage of the corvette. It needed to be reunited with them. Or perhaps it was after something else entirely.

  The iceberg quivered. The sea responded to the movement, slow, shallow waves oozing away from the fringe. From somewhere within the structure came crunching sounds, like the shattering of bone. Flaws opened wide in the outer layer of the ice, exposing a lacy marrow of fabulously differentiated colour: pinks and blues and ochres.

  Black machinery forced its way through the cracks. A dozen tentacles emerged from the iceberg, coiling and writhing, sniffing the air, splitting into ever-smaller components as they pushed outwards.

  Scorpio’s boat kissed the hull of the other craft. “Give me the incubator,” he shouted, above the screaming of the engine.

  Vasko stood up, leaning between the boats, steadying himself with one hand on Scorpio’s shoulder. The young man looked pale, his hair plastered to his scalp. “You came back,” he said.

  “Things changed,” Scorpio said.

  Scorpio took the incubator, feeling the weight of the child within it, and jammed it safely between his feet. “Now Khouri,” he said, offering a hand to the woman.

  She crossed over to his boat; he felt it sink lower in the water as she boarded. She met his gaze for a moment, seemed about to say something. He turned back to Vasko before she had a chance.

  “Follow me. I don’t want to hang around here a moment longer than necessary.”

  The cracks in the iceberg had widened to plunging abysses, rifts that cut deep into its heart. The black machinery forced more of itself into the ice, insinuating itself in eager surges. More extremities emerged from the perimeter, waving and extending. The iceberg began to break up into distinct chunks, each as large as a house. Scorpio gunned his boat’s engine harder, slamming across the waves, but could not tear his attention from what was happening behind him. Chunks of the iceberg calved away, jagged pieces tipping into the sea with a powdery roar of displaced water. Now he could see a writhing tangle of black tentacles flexing and coiling around the ruined corvette. Not much remained of the iceberg now, just the ship that had grown it.

  The machinery pulled the ship into the air. The black shapes forced themselves through the gaps in the hull, their movements delicate and thoughtful and vaguely apprehensive, like someone removing the last layer of wrapping from a present.

  The other boat was lagging: it was slower in the water, with three adults aboard.

  The corvette broke into sharp black pieces, all but the smallest of them still suspended in the sky. Coils and bows of perfect blackness wheeled around the parts.

  It’s looking for something, Scorpio thought.

  The coils loosened their grip. Tentacles and sub-tentacles withdrew in a flurry of contracting motion. Layers of black cubes flowed across each other, swelling and shrinking in queasy unison. Scorpio only saw the details in the edges, where the machinery met the grey backdrop of the sky.

  The pieces of the corvette—all of them, now—splashed into the sea.

  But it still held something: a tiny, white, star-shaped form hung limply in the air. It was Skade, Scorpio realised. The machinery had found her in the wreckage, wrapped part of itself around her waist and plunged another, more delicate part of itself into her head. It was interrogating her, retrieving neural structures fr
om her corpse.

  It might, for a moment, feel like being alive again.

  The black machinery pushed a new trunk of itself towards the fleeing boats. With that, something tightened in Scorpio’s stomach: some instinctive visceral response to the approach of a slithering predator. Get away from it. He tried to push the boat harder. But the boat was already giving him all it had.

  He saw motion in the other boat: the glint as a muzzle was trained towards the sky. An instant later, the blinding electric-pink discharge of a Breitenbach cannon lit the grey sky. The beam lanced up towards the looming mass of alien machinery. It should have speared right through it, etching a searing line into the cloud deck. Instead, the beam veered around the machinery like a firehose.

  Vasko kept firing, but the beam squirmed away from any point where it might have done damage.

  The black machinery followed the thick trunk. The whole mass still hung from the sky, multi-armed, like some obscene chandelier.

  It was taking a particular interest in the second boat.

  The cannon sputtered out. Scorpio heard the crackle of small-arms fire.

  None of it was going to make any difference.

  Suddenly he felt a lancing pain in his ears. All around him, in the same instant, the sea bellied up three or four metres, as if a tremendous suction effect had pulled it into the sky. There was a thunderclap louder than anything he had ever heard. He looked up, his ears still roaring, and saw… something—a hint, for a fraction of a second, of a circular absence in the sky, a faint demarcation between the air and something within it. The circle was gone almost immediately, and as it ceased to exist he felt the same pain in his ears, the same sense of suction.

  A few seconds later, it happened again.

  This time, the circle intersected the main black mass of the hovering Inhibitor machinery. A huge misshapen clot of it fell towards the waves, severed from the rest. Even more of the mass had simply ceased to exist: it was as if everything within the spherical region above him had winked out of existence—not just air, but the Inhibitor machinery occupying the same volume. The limbs attached to the falling chunk thrashed wildly even as it fell. Scorpio sensed it slowing as it neared the surface of the water, but the rate of arrest was not sufficient to bring it to a halt. It hit, Submerged, rebounded to the surface. The limbs continued to whip around the main core, threshing the sea.

  Khouri leaned towards him. Her lips moved, but her voice was lost under the blood-tide roaring in his ears. He knew what she was saying, though: the three syllables were unmistakable. “Remontoire.”

  He nodded. He didn’t need to know the details: it was enough that he had intervened. “Thank you, Rem,” he said, hearing his own voice as if underwater.

  The grey-green mass of the Juggler material was coalescing around the floating, thrashing mass of black machinery. Above, the intruder had begun to pull itself back into the cloud deck, the curved surfaces of its wounds still obvious. Scorpio was beginning to wonder about the other part—whether it would repair itself, shrug off the Juggler biomass and continue to cause them trouble—when it and the Jugglers and an entire hundred-metre-wide hemispherical scoop of sea vanished. He watched as the sloping, seamless wall of water around the absence seemed to freeze there, as if unwilling to reclaim the volume taken away from it. Then it crashed in, a tower of dirty green surging into the air above the epicentre, and an ominous ramp of water sped towards them.

  Scorpio tightened his grip on both the boat and the incubator. “Hold on,” he shouted to Khouri.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ararat, 2675

  THAT NIGHT, STRANGE lights appeared in the skies over Ararat. They were vast and schematic, like the blueprints of forbidden constellations. They were unlike any aurorae that the settlers had ever seen.

  They began to appear in the twilight hour that followed sundown, in the western sky. There were no clouds to hide the stars, and the moons remained almost as low as they had during the long crossing to the iceberg. The solitary spire of the great ship was a wedge of deeper blackness against the purple twilight, like a glimpse into the true stellar night beyond the veil of Ararat’s atmosphere.

  No one had any real idea what was causing the lights. Conventional explanations, involving beam weapons interacting with Ararat’s upper atmosphere, had proven utterly inadequate. Observations captured by camera from different locations on Ararat established parallactic distances for the shapes of whole fractions of a light-second, well beyond Ararat’s ionosphere. Now and then there was something more explicable: the flash of a conventional explosion, or a shower of exotic particles from the grazing lash of some stray beam weapon; occasionally the hard flicker of a drive exhaust or missile plume, or an encrypted burst of comms traffic. But for the most part the war above Ararat was being waged with weapons and methods incomprehensible in their function.

  One thing was clear, however: with each passing hour, the lights increased in brightness and complexity. And in the water around the bay, more and more dark shapes crested the waves. They shifted and merged, changing form too rapidly to be fixed by the eye. No sense of purpose was apparent, merely an impression of mindless congregation. The Juggler contact swimmer corps specialists watched nervously, unwilling to step into the sea. And as the lights above became more intense, the changes more frequent, so the shapes in the sea responded with their own quickening tempo.

  Ararat’s natives, too, were aware that they had visitors.

  Hela, 2727

  GRELIER TOOK HIS position in the great hall of the Lady Mor-wenna, in one of the many seats arranged before the black window. The hall was dim, external metal shutters having been pulled down over all the other stained-glass windows. There were a few electric lights to guide the spectators to their seats, but the only other source of illumination came from candles, vast arrays of them flickering in sconces. They threw a solemn, painterly cast on the proceedings, rendering every face noble, from the highest Clocktower dignitary to the lowliest Motive Power technician. There was, naturally, nothing to be seen of the black window itself, save for a faint suggestion of surrounding masonry.

  Grelier surveyed the congregation. Apart from a skeleton staff taking care of essential duties, the entire population of the cathedral must now be present. He knew many of the five thousand people here by name—more than many of them would ever have suspected. Of the others, there were only a few hundred faces that he was not passingly familiar with. It thrilled him to see so many in attendance, especially when he thought of the threads of blood that bound them all. He could almost see it: a rich, red tapestry of connections hanging above the congregation, drapes and banners of scarlet and maroon, simultaneously complex and wondrous.

  The thought of blood reminded him of Harbin Els. The young man, as Grelier had told Quaiche, was dead, killed in clearance duties. Their paths had never crossed again after that initial interview on the caravan, even though Grelier had been awake during part of Harbin’s period of work in the Lady Mor-wenna. The Bloodwork processing that Harbin had indeed gone through had been handled by Grelier’s assistants rather than the surgeon-general himself. But like all the blood that was collected by the cathedral, his sample had been catalogued and stored in the Lady Morwenna’s blood vaults. Now that the girl had re-entered his life, Grelier had taken the expedient step of recalling Harbin’s sample from the library and running a detailed assay on it.

  It was a long shot, but worth his trouble. A question had occurred to Grelier: was the girl’s gift a learned thing, or innate? And if it was innate, was there something in her DNA that had activated it? He knew that only one in a thousand people had the gift for recognising and interpreting micro expressions; that fewer still had it to the same degree as Rashmika Els. It could be learned, certainly, but people like Rashmika didn’t need any training: they just knew the rules, with absolute conviction. They had the observational equivalent of perfect pitch. To them, the strange thing was that everyone else failed to pick up on the sam
e signs. But that didn’t mean the gift was some mysterious superhuman endowment. The gift was socially debilitating. The afflicted could never be told a consoling lie. If they were ugly and someone told them they were beautiful, the gap between intention and effect was all the more hurtful because it was so obvious, so stingingly sarcastic.

  He had searched the cathedral’s records, scanning centuries-old medical literature for anything on genetic predisposition to the girl’s condition. But the records were frustratingly incomplete. There was much on cloning and life-extension, but very little on the genetic markers for hypersensitivity to facial microexpression.

  Nonetheless, he had still gone to the trouble of analysing Harbin’s blood sample, looking for anything unusual or anomalous, preferably in the genes that were associated with the brain’s perceptual centres. Harbin could not have had the gift to anything like the same degree as his sister, but that in itself would be interesting. If there were no significant differences in their genes beyond the normal variations seen between non-identical siblings, then Rashmika’s gift would begin to look like something acquired rather than inherited. A fluke of development, perhaps, something in her early environment that nurtured the gift. If something did show up, on the other hand, then he might be able to map the mismatched genes to specific areas of brain function. The literature suggested that people with brain damage could acquire the skill as a compensatory mechanism when they lost the ability to process speech. If that was the case, and if the important brain regions could be identified, then it might even be possible to introduce the condition by surgical intervention. Grelier’s imagination was freewheeling: he was thinking of installing neural blockades in Quaiche’s skull, little valves and dams that could be opened and closed remotely. Isolate the right brain regions—make them light up or dim, depending on function—and it might even be possible to turn the skill on and off. The thought thrilled him. What a gift for a negotiator, to be able to choose when you wished to see through the lies of those around you.