Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  Those who monitored such things considered Marl a marginal case. Her signs of takeover were by no means the worst anyone had ever seen. On statistical grounds, she ought to be safe for another dozen swims, at the very least. But there were always exceptions. Sometimes the sea consumed those who had only very slight indications of takeover. Rarely, it took complete newcomers the first time they swam.

  That was the point about the Pattern Jugglers. They were alien. It, the Juggler biomass, was alien. It would not succumb to human analysis, to neatly circumscribed cause and effect. It was as quixotic and unpredictable as a drunkard. You could guess how it might behave given certain parameters, but once in a while you might be terribly, terribly wrong.

  Marl knew this. She had never pretended otherwise. She knew that any swim brought risks.

  She had been lucky so far.

  She thought of Shizuko, waiting in the psychiatric section for one of Marl’s visits—except she wasn’t really waiting in the usual sense of the word. Shizuko might have been aware that Marl was due to arrive, and she might have varied her activities accordingly. But when Marl showed up, Shizuko merely looked at her with the distracted passing interest of someone who has seen a crack in a wall that they did not remember, or a fleeting suggestion of meaningful shape in a cloud. The flicker of interest was waning almost as soon as Marl had noticed it. Sometimes Shizuko would laugh, but it was an idiot’s laugh, like the chime of small, stupid bells.

  Shizuko would then return to her scratching, her fingers always bleeding under the nails, ignoring the crayons and chalks offered to her as substitutes. Marl had stopped visiting some months ago. Once she had acknowledged and accepted that she now meant nothing to Shizuko, there had been an easing. Counterpointing it, however, had also been a dispiriting sense of betrayal and weakness.

  She thought now of Vasko. She thought of his easy certainties, his conviction that the only thing that stood between the swimmers and the sea was fear.

  She hated him for that.

  Marl took a step into the water. A dozen or so metres out, a raft of green matter twirled in response, sensing that she had entered its realm. Marl took in a deep breath. She was impossibly scared. The itch across her face had become a burn. It made her want to swoon into the water.

  “I’m here,” she said. And she stepped towards the mass of Juggler organisms, submerging up to her thighs, up to her waist, then deeper. Ahead, the biomass formed shapes with quickening intensity, the breeze of its transformations blowing over her. Alien anatomies shuffled through endless permuta-tions. It was a pageant of monsters. The water too deep now to walk through, she kicked off from the bed of rocks and began to swim towards the show.

  VASKO LOOKED AT the others present. “Quaiche? That doesn’t mean anything more to me than the first word.”

  “They meant nothing to me either,” Scorpio said. “I wasn’t even sure of the spelling of the first word. But now I’m certain. The second word locks it. The meaning is unambiguous.”

  “So are you going to enlighten us?” Liu asked.

  Scorpio gestured to Orca Cruz.

  “Scorp’s right,” she said. “Hela means nothing significant in isolation. Query the databases we brought with us from Resurgam or Yellowstone and you’ll find thousands of possible explanations. Same if you try variant spellings. But put in Quaiche and Hela and it’s a different kettle of fish. There’s really only one explanation, bizarre as it seems.”

  “I’m dying to hear it,” Liu said. Next to him, Vasko nodded in agreement. Antoinette said nothing and conveyed no visible interest, but her curiosity was obviously just as strong.

  “Hela is a world,” Cruz said. “Not much of one, just a medium-sized moon orbiting a gas giant named Haldora. Still not ringing any bells?”

  No one said anything.

  “What about Quaiche?” Vasko asked. “Another moon?”

  Cruz shook her head. “No. Quaiche is actually a man, the individual who assigned the names to Hela and Haldora. There’s no entry for Quaiche or his worlds in the usual nomenclature database, but we shouldn’t be too surprised about that—it’s been more than sixty years since it was updated by direct contact with other ships. But ever since we’ve been on Ararat, we’ve been picking up the occasional stray signal from other Ultra elements. A lot, recently—they’re using long-range wide-beam transmissions far more than they ever did in the past, and occasionally one of those signals sweeps over us by accident.”

  “Why the change in tactics?” Vasko asked.

  “Something’s got them scared,” Cruz said. “They’re becoming nervous, unwilling to do face-to-face trade. Some Ultras must have met something they didn’t like, and now they’re spreading the word, switching to long-range trading of data rather than material commodities.”

  “No prizes for guessing what’s spooked them,” Vasko said.

  “It works to our advantage, though,” Cruz said. “They may not be authoritative transmissions, and half of those we do intercept are riddled with errors and viruses, but over the years we’ve been able to keep our databases more up to date than we could ever have hoped given our lack of contact with external elements.”

  “So what do we know about Quaiche’s system, then?” Vasko asked.

  “Not as much as we’d like,” Cruz said. “There were no conflicts with prior assignments, which means that the system Quaiche was investigating must have been very poorly explored prior to his arrival.”

  “So whatever Aura is referring to happened—what—fifty, sixty years ago?” Vasko asked.

  “Easily,” Cruz said.

  Vasko stroked his chin. It was clean-shaven, smooth as sandpapered wood. “Then it can’t mean much to us, can it?”

  “Something happened to Quaiche,” Scorpio said. “Accounts vary. Seems he was doing scutwork for Ultras, getting his hands dirty exploring planetary environments they weren’t happy around. He witnessed something, something to do with Haldora.” Scorpio looked at them all, one by one, daring anyone—especially Vasko—to interrupt or quibble. “He saw it vanish. He saw the planet just cease to exist for a fraction of a second. And because of that he started up a kind of religion on Hela, Haldora’s moon.”

  ‘That’s it?“ Antoinette asked. ”That’s the message Aura came all this way to give us? The address of a religious lunatic?“

  ‘There’s more,“ Scorpio said.

  “I sincerely hope there is,” she replied

  “He saw it happen more than once. So, apparently, did others.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” she said.

  “Wait,” Vasko said, holding up a hand. “I want to hear the rest. Go on, Scorp.”

  The pig looked at him with an utter absence of expression. “Like I need your permission?”

  “That’s not how I meant it to sound. I just…” Vasko looked around, perhaps wondering whom he might solicit for support. “I just think we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss anything we learn from Aura, no matter how little sense it seems to make.”

  “No one’s dismissing anything,” Scorpio said.

  “Please tell us what you learned,” Antoinette interrupted, sensing that things were about to get out of hand.

  “Not much happened for decades,” Scorpio continued. “Quaiche’s miracle drew a few people to Hela. Some of them signed up for the religion, some of them became disillusioned and set up shop as miners. There are alien artefacts on Hela—nearly useless junk, but they export enough to sustain a few settlements. Ultras buy the junk off them and sell it on to curio collectors. Someone probably makes a bit of money out of it, but you can guess that it isn’t the poor idiots who dig the stuff out of the ground.”

  “There are alien artefacts on a bunch of worlds,” Antoinette said. “I’m guessing this lot went the same way as the Amarantin and a dozen or so other civilisations, right?”

  “The databases didn’t have much on the indigenous culture,” Scorpio said. “The people who run Hela don’t exactly encourage free-think
ing scientific curiosity. But yes, reading between the lines, it looks as though they met the wolves.”

  “And they’re extinct now?” she asked.

  “So it would seem.”

  “Help me out here, Scorp,” Antoinette said. “What do you think all this might mean to Aura?”

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Perhaps she wants us to go there,” Vasko said.

  They all looked at him. His tone of voice had been reasonable, as if he was merely voicing something the rest of them were taking for granted. Perhaps that was even true, but hearing someone articulate it was like a small, quiet profanity in the most holy of audiences.

  “Go there?” Scorpio said, frowning, the skin between his snout and forehead crinkling into rolls of flesh. “You mean actually go there?”

  “If we conclude that she’s suggesting it would help us, then yes,” Vasko said.

  “We can’t just go to this place on the basis of a sick woman’s delirious ramblings,” said Hallatt, one of the colony seniors from Resurgam who had never trusted Khouri.

  “She isn’t sick,” said Dr. Valensin. “She has been tired, and she has been traumatised. That’s all.”

  “I hear she wanted the baby put back inside her,” Hallatt said, a revolted sneer on his face, as if this was the most debased thing anyone had ever imagined.

  “She did,” Scorpio said, “and I vetoed it. But it wasn’t an unreasonable request. She is the child’s mother, and the child was kidnapped before she could give birth to her. Under the circumstances, I thought it was an entirely understandable desire.”

  “But you still turned her down,” Hallatt said.

  “I couldn’t risk losing Aura, not after the price we paid for her.”

  “Then you were cheated,” Hallatt said. “The price was too high. We lost Clavain and all we got back was a brain-damaged child.”

  “You’re saying Clavain died in vain?” Scorpio asked him, his voice dangerously soft.

  The moment stalled, elongated, like a fault in a recording. Antoinette realised with appalling clarity that she was not the only one who did not know what had happened in the iceberg. Hallatt, too, must be ignorant of the actual events, but his ignorance was of an infinitely more reckless kind, trampling and transgressing its own boundaries.

  “I don’t know how he died. I don’t care and I don’t need to know. But if Aura was all it was about then no, it wasn’t worth it. He died in vain.” Hallatt locked his fingers together and pursed his lips in Scorpio’s direction. “You might not want to hear it, but that’s the way it is.”

  Scorpio glanced at Blood. Something passed between them: an interplay of minute gestures too subtle, too familiar to each participant, ever to be unravelled by an outsider. The exchange only lasted for an instant. Antoinette wondered if anyone else even noticed it, or whether she had simply imagined it.

  But another instant later, Hallatt was looking down at something parked in his chest.

  Languidly, as if standing up to adjust a picture hung at a lopsided angle, Blood eased to his feet. He strolled towards Hallatt, swaying from side to side with the slow, effortless rhythm of a metronome.

  Hallatt was making choking sounds. His fingers twitched impotently against the haft of Blood’s knife.

  “Get him out of here,” Scorpio ordered.

  Blood removed his knife from Hallatt, cleaned it against his thigh, sheathed it again. A surprisingly small amount of blood leaked from the wound.

  Valensin moved to stand up.

  “Stay where you are,” Scorpio said.

  Blood had already called for a pair of SA aides. They arrived within the minute, reacting to the situation with only a momentary jolt of surprise. Antoinette gave them top marks for that. Had she walked into the room and found someone bleeding to death from an obvious knife wound, she would have had a hard time staying conscious, let alone calm.

  “I’m going after him,” Valensin said, standing up again as the SA aides removed Hallett.

  “I said, stay put,” Scorpio repeated.

  The doctor hammered a fist on the table. “You just killed a man, you brutal little simpleton! Or at least you will have if he doesn’t get immediate medical attention. Is that something that you really want on your conscience, Scorpio?”

  “Stay where you are.”

  Valensin took a step towards the door. “Go ahead, then. Stop me, if it really means that much to you. You have the means.”

  Scorpio’s face twisted into a mask of fury and hatred that Antoinette had never seen before. It astonished her that pigs had the necessary facial dexterity to produce such an extreme expression.

  “I’ll stop you, trust me on that.” Scorpio reached into a pocket or sheath of his own—whatever it was lay hidden under the table—and removed his knife. It was not one Antoinette had seen before. The blade, at some command from the pig, grew blurred.

  “Scorpio,” she said, standing up herself, “let him do it. He’s a doctor.”

  “Hallatt dies.”

  “There’ve been enough deaths already,” Antoinette said. “One more isn’t going to make anything better.”

  The knife quivered in his grasp, as if not quite tamed. Antoinette expected it to leap from his hand at any moment.

  Something chimed. The unexpected noise seemed to catch the pig unawares. His fury slipped down a notch. He looked for the source of the sound. It had come from his communications bracelet.

  Scorpio quietened the knife. It grew solid again, and he returned it to the sheath or pocket where it had originated.

  He looked at Valensin and said one word. “Go.”

  The doctor nodded curtly—his own face still angry—and scurried after the aides who had carried the wounded man away.

  Scorpio lifted the bracelet to his ear and listened to some small, shrill, distant voice. After a minute he frowned and asked the voice to repeat what it had said. As the message was reiterated his frown lessened, but did not entirely vanish.

  “What is it?” Antoinette asked.

  “The ship,” he said. “Something’s happening.”

  WITHIN TEN MINUTES a shuttle had been commandeered and diverted from the ongoing evacuation effort. It came down within a block of the High Conch, descending between buildings, a Security Arm retinue clearing the area and providing safe access for the small party of colony seniors. Vasko was the last aboard, after Scorpio and Antoinette Bax, while Blood and the others remained on the ground as the plane hauled itself aloft once more. The shuttle threw hard white light against the sides of the buildings, the citizens below shielding their eyes but unwilling to look away. There was now no one in First Camp who did not urgently wish to be somewhere else. There was only room for the three who had just boarded because the shuttle’s bay was already loaded to near-capacity with evacuees.

  Vasko felt the machine accelerate. He hung on to a ceiling handhold, hoping that the flight would be brief. The evacuees looked at him with stunned faces, as if waiting for an explanation he was in no position to give.

  “Where are they supposed to be heading?” he asked the foreman in charge.

  “The outlands,” he said quietly, meaning the sheltered ground, “but now they’ll be taken to the ship instead. We can’t afford to waste valuable time.”

  The cold efficiency of this decision stunned Vasko. But he also found himself admiring it.

  “What if they don’t like it?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

  “They can always lodge a complaint.”

  The journey did not take very long. They had a pilot this time; some of the evacuation flights were being handled by autonomous craft, but this one had been deemed too unusual. They kept low, heading out to sea, and then executed a wide turn around the base of the ship. Vasko was lucky enough to be by the wall. He had made a window in it, peering into silvery mist. Around him, the evacuees crowded forwards for a better look.

  “Close the window,” Scorpio said.

  “What?”
>
  “You heard me.”

  “I’d do it if I were you,” Antoinette said.

  Vasko closed the window. If ever there was a day not to argue with the pig, he thought, then this was it. He had seen nothing in any case, just a hint of the ship’s looming presence.

  They climbed, presumably continuing the spiralling flight path around the spire, and then he felt the shuttle slow and touch solid ground. After a minute or so a crack of light signalled the opening of the escape door and the evacuees were ushered out. Vasko did not get a good look at what lay beyond, in the reception area. He had only a brief glimpse of Security Arm guards standing alertly, shepherding the newcomers with an efficiency that went way beyond polite urgency. He had expected the people to show some anger when they realised they had been taken to the ship instead of the safe haven on the surface, but all he saw was docile acceptance. Perhaps they did not yet realise that this was the ship, and not some ground-level processing area on the other side of the island. If so, he did not care to be around when they learned about the change of plan.

  Soon the shuttle was empty of evacuees. Vasko half-expected to be ushered off as well, but instead the three of them remained aboard with the pilot. The loading door closed again and the plane departed from the bay.

  “You can open the window now,” Scorpio said.

  Vasko made a generous window in the hull, large enough for the three of them to look out of, but for the moment there was nothing to see. He felt the shuttle lurch and yaw as it descended from the reception bay, but he could not tell if they were staying near the Nostalgia for Infinity or returning to First Camp.

  “You said something was happening with the ship,” Vasko said. “Is it the neutrino levels?”

  Scorpio turned to Antoinette Bax. “How are they looking?”

  “Higher than the last time I reported,” she said, “but according to our monitor stations they haven’t been climbing at quite the same rate as before. Still going up, but not as fast. Maybe my little chat with John did some good after all.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Vasko asked.