Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Superstition,” he said, “coupled with excessive caution.”

  “Excessive caution sounds entirely appropriate to me where this bridge is involved.”

  “Are you frightened, Miss Els? You shouldn’t be. This caravan weighs barely fifty thousand tonnes, all told. And by its very nature, the weight is distributed along a great length. It isn’t as if we’re taking a cathedral across the bridge. Now that would be folly.”

  “No one would do that.”

  “No one sane. And especially not after they saw what happened last time, But that needn’t concern us in the slightest. The bridge will hold the caravan. It has done so in the past. I would have no particular qualms about taking us across it during every expedition away from the Way, but the simple truth is that most of the time it wouldn’t help us. You’ve seen how laborious the approach is. More often than not, using the bridge would cost us more time than it would save. It was only a particular constellation of circumstances that made it otherwise on this occasion.” The quaestor clasped his hands decisively. “Now, to business. I believe I have secured you a position in a clearance gang attached to an Adventist cathedral.”

  “The Lady Morwenna?”

  “No. A somewhat smaller cathedral, the Catherine of Iron. Everyone has to start somewhere. And why are you in such a hurry to reach the Lady Morwenna? Dean Quaiche has his foibles. The Catherine’s dean is a good man. His safety record is very good, and those who serve under him are well looked after.”

  “Thank you, Quaestor,” she said, hoping her disappointment was not too obvious. She had still been hoping he might be able to find her a solid clerical job, something well away from clearance work. “You’re right. Something is better than nothing.”

  “The Catherine is amongst the main group of cathedrals, moving towards the Rift from the western side. We will join them when we have completed our crossing of the bridge, shortly before they begin their descent of the Devil’s Staircase. You are privileged, Miss Els: very few people get the chance to cross Absolution Gap twice in one year, let alone within a matter of days.”

  “I’ll count myself lucky.”

  “Nonetheless, I will repeat what I said before: the work is difficult, dangerous and poorly rewarded.”

  “I’ll take what’s available.”

  “In which case you will be transferred to the relevant gang as soon as we reach the Way. Keep your nose clean, and I am sure you will do very well.”

  “I will certainly bear that in mind.”

  He touched a finger to his lips and made to turn away, as if remembering some other errand, then halted. The eyes of his green pet—it had been on his shoulder the whole time-remained locked on to her, blank as gun barrels.

  “One other matter, Miss Els,” the quaestor said, looking back at her over his shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  “The gentleman you were speaking to earlier?” His eyes narrowed as he studied her expression. “Well, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

  “You wouldn’t what?”

  “Have anything to do with his sort.” The quaestor stared vaguely into the distance. “As a rule, it’s never wise to circu-late amongst Observers, or any other pilgrims of a similarly committed strain of faith. But in my general experience it is especially unwise to associate with those who are vacillating between faith and denial.”

  “Surely, Quaestor, it is up to me who I talk to.”

  “Of course, Miss Els, and please don’t take offence. I offer only advice, from the bottomless pit of goodness which is my heart.” He popped a morsel into the mouthpiece of his pet. “Don’t I, Peppermint?”

  “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” the creature observed.

  THE CARAVAN SURMOUNTED the eastern approach to the bridge. A kilometre from the eastern abutment, the road had veered back into the side of the cliff, ascending a steep defile that—via scraping hairpins, treacherous gradients and brief interludes of tunnel and ledge—brought it to the level of the bridge deck. Behind them, the landscape was an apparently impassable chaos of ice boulders. Ahead, the road deck stretched away like a textbook example of perspective, straight as a rifle barrel, un-fenced on either side, gently cambered towards the middle, gleaming with the soft diamond lustre of starlit ice.

  Gathering speed now that it was on a level surface with no immediate worry of obstructions, the caravan sped towards the point where the ground fell away on either side. The road beneath the procession became smoother and wider, no longer furrowed or interrupted by rock-falls or man-deep fissures. And here there were, finally, very few pilgrims to be avoided. Most of them did not take the bridge, and so there was minimal risk of any unfortunates being trundled to death beneath the machines.

  Rashmika’s grasp of the scale of the structure underwent several ratchetting revisions. She recalled that, from a distance, the deck of the bridge had formed a shallow arc. From this approach, however, it appeared flat and straight, as if aligned by laser, until the point where it vanished into convergence, far ahead. She was trying to resolve this paradox when she realised—dizzyingly—that at that moment she must only be seeing a small fraction of the distance along the deck. It was like climbing a dome-shaped hill: the summit was always tan-talisingly out of reach.

  She walked to another viewing point and looked back. The first half-dozen vehicles of this flank of the caravan were now on the bridge proper, and the sheer walls of the cliff were drop-ping back to the rear, offering her the first real opportunity to judge the depth of the Rift.

  It fell away with indecent swiftness. The cliff walls were etched and gouged with titanic geological clawmarks, here vertical, there horizontal, elsewhere diagonal or curled and folded into each other in a display of obscene liquidity. The walls sparkled and spangled with blue-grey ice and murkier seams of darker sediment. The ledge that the caravan had traversed, visible now to the left, appeared far too narrow and hesitant to be used as a road, let alone by something weighing fifty thousand tonnes. Beneath the ledge, Rashmika now saw, the cliff often curved in to a worrying degree. She had never exactly felt safe during the traverse, but she had convinced herself that the ground beneath them continued down for more than a few dozen metres.

  She did not see the quaestor again during the rest of the crossing. Within an hour she judged that the opposite wall of the Rift looked only slightly further away than the one that was receding behind them. They must be nearing the midpoint of the bridge. Quickly, therefore, but with the minimum of fuss, Rashmika put on her vacuum suit and stole up through the caravan to its roof.

  From the top of the vehicle things looked very different from the sanitised, faintly unreal scene she had observed from the pressurised compartment. She now had a panoramic view of the entire Rift, and it was much easier to see the floor, which was a good dozen kilometres below. From this perspective, the Rift floor almost appeared to be creeping forwards as the flat ribbon of the road bed streaked backwards beneath the caravan. This contradiction made her feel immediately dizzy, and she was gripped by an urgent desire to flatten herself on the roof of the machine, spread-eagled so that she could not possibly topple over the edge. But although she bent her knees, lowering her centre of gravity, Rashmika managed to screw up the courage to remain standing.

  The road bed appeared only slightly wider than the caravan. They were moving down the middle of it, only occasionally veering to one side or the other to avoid a patch of thickened ice or some other obstruction. There were rocks on the frozen surface of the road, deposited there from volcanic plumes else-where on Hela. Some of them were half as high as the caravan’s wheels. The fact that they had managed to smash on to the road without shattering the bridge gave her a tiny flicker of reassurance. And if the road bed was just wide enough to accommodate the two rows of vehicles that made up the caravan, then it was clearly absurd to think of a cathedral making the same journey.

  That was when she noticed something down in the floor of the Rift. It was a huge smear of rub
ble, kilometres across. It was dark and star-shaped, and as far as she could tell the epicentre of the smear lay almost directly beneath the bridge. Near the centre of the star were vague suggestions of ruined structures. Rashmika saw what she thought might be the uppermost part of a spire, leaning to one side. She made out sketchy hints of smashed machinery, smothered in dust and debris.

  So someone had tried to cross the bridge with a cathedral.

  She moved between the vehicles, focusing dead ahead as she made her own personal crossing. The Observers were still on their racks, tilted towards the swollen sphere of Haldora. Their mirrored faceplates made her think of dozens of neatly packed titanium eggs.

  Then she saw another suited figure waiting on the next vehicle along, resting against a railing on one side of the roof. It became aware of her presence at about the same time that she noticed it, for the figure turned to her and beckoned her onwards.

  She moved past the Observers, then crossed another swaying connection. The caravan swerved alarmingly to negotiate the chicane between two rockfalls, then bounced and crunched its way over a series of smaller obstructions.

  The other figure wore a vacuum suit of unremarkable design. She had no idea whether it was the same kind that the Observers wore, since she had never seen beneath their habits. The mirrored silver visor gave nothing away.

  “Pietr?” she asked, on the general channel.

  There was no response, but the figure still urged her on with increased urgency.

  What if this was a trap of some kind? The quaestor had known about her conversation with the young man. It was quite likely that he also knew about her earlier assignation on the roof. Rashmika had little doubt that she would be making enemies during the course of her investigations, but she did not think she had made any yet, unless one counted the quaestor. But since he had now arranged work for her in the clearance gang, she imagined that he had a vested interest in seeing her safely delivered to the Permanent Way.

  Rashmika approached the figure, weighing possibilities all the while. The figure’s suit was a hard-shelled model, closely fitting the anatomy of its wearer. The helmet and limb parts were olive green, the accordion joints gleaming silver. Unlike the suits she had seen being worn by the walking pilgrims, it was completely lacking in any ornamentation or religious frippery.

  The faceplate turned to her. She saw highlights glance off a face behind the glass, the hard shadow beneath well-defined cheekbones.

  Pietr extended an arm and with the other hand folded back a flap on the wrist of the outstretched arm. He unspooled a thin optical fibre and offered the other end to Rashmika.

  Of course. Secure communication. She took the fibre and plugged it into the corresponding socket on her own suit. Such fibres were designed to allow suit-to-suit communications in the event of a radio or general network failure. They were also ideal for privacy.

  “I’m glad you made it,” Pietr said.

  “I wish I understood the reason for all the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

  “Better safe than sorry. I shouldn’t really have talked to you about the vanishings at all, at least not down in the caravan. Do you think anyone overheard us?”

  “The quaestor came and had a quiet word with me when you had gone.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Pietr said. “He’s not really a religious man, but he knows which side his bread’s buttered on. The churches pay his salary, so he doesn’t want anyone rocking the boat with unorthodox rumours.”

  “You were hardly calling for the abolition of the churches,” Rashmika replied. “From what I remember, all we discussed was the vanishings.”

  “Well, that’s dangerous enough, in some people’s views. Talking of which—views, I mean—isn’t this something else?” Pietr pivoted around on his heels, illustrating his point with an expansive sweep of his free hand.

  Rashmika smiled at his enthusiasm. “I’m not sure. I’m not really one for heights.”

  “Oh, c’mon. Forget all that stuff about the vanishings, forget your enquiry—whatever it is—just for now. Admire the view. Millions of people will never, ever see what you’re seeing now.”

  “It feels as if we’re trespassing,” Rashmika said, “as if the scuttlers built this bridge to be admired, but never used.”

  “I don’t know much about them. I’d say we haven’t a clue what they thought, if they even built this thing. But the bridge is here, isn’t it? It seems an awful shame not to make some use of it, even if it’s only once in a while.”

  Rashmika looked down at the star-shaped smear. “Is it true what the quaestor told me? Did someone once try to take a cathedral across this thing?”

  “So they say. Not that you’ll find any evidence of it in any ecumenical records.”

  She grasped the railing tighter, still beguiled by the remoteness of the ground so far below. “But it did happen, all the same?”

  “It was a splinter sect,” Pietr said. “A one-off church, with a small cathedral. They called themselves the Numericists. They weren’t affiliated to any of the ecumenical organisations, and they had very limited trading agreements with the other churches. Their belief system was… odd. It wasn’t just a question of being in doctrinal conflict with any of the other churches. They were polytheists, for a start. Most of the churches are strictly monotheistic, with strong ties to the old Abrahamic religions. Hellfire and brimstone churches, I call them. One God, one Heaven, one Hell. But the ones who made that mess down there… they were a lot stranger. They weren’t the only polytheists, but their entire world view—their entire cosmology—was so hopelessly unorthodox that there was no possibility of interecumenical dialogue. The Numericists were devout mathematicians. They viewed the study of numbers as the highest possible calling, the only valid way to approach the numinous. They believed there was one God for every class of number: a God of integers, a God of real numbers, a God of zero. They had subsidiary gods: a lesser god of irrational numbers, a lesser god of the Diophantine primes. The other churches couldn’t stomach that kind of weirdness. So the Numericists were frozen out, and in due course they became insular and paranoid.”

  “Not surprising, under the circumstances.”

  “But there’s something else. They were interested in a statistical interpretation of the vanishings, using some pretty arcane probability theories. It was tricky. There hadn’t been so many vanishings at that time, so the data was sparser—but their methods, they said, were robust enough to be able to cope. And what they came up with was devastating.”

  “Go on,” Rashmika said. She finally understood why Pietr had wanted her to come up on to the roof midway through the crossing.

  “They were the first to claim that the vanishings were increasing in frequency, but it was statistically difficult to prove. There, was already anecdotal evidence that they occurred in closely spaced clusters, but now, or so the Numericists claimed, the spaces between the clusters were growing shorter. They also claimed that the vanishings themselves were growing longer in duration, although they admitted that the evidence for that was much less ‘significant,’ in the statistical sense.”

  “But they were right, weren’t they?”

  Pietr nodded, the reflected landscape tilting in his helmet. “At least for the first part. Now even crude statistical methods will show the same result. The vanishings are definitely becoming more frequent.”

  “And the second part?”

  “Not proven. But all the new data hasn’t disproved it, either.”

  Again Rashmika risked a glance down at the smear. “But what happened to them? Why did they end up down there?”

  “No one really knows. As I said, the churches don’t even admit that an attempt at a crossing ever took place. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find grudging acknowledgement that the Numericists once existed—paperwork relating to rare trade dealings, for instance—but you won’t find anything about them ever crossing Absolution Gap.”

  “It happened, though.
”

  “They tried it, yes. No one will ever know why, I think. Perhaps it was a last-ditch attempt to steal prestige from the churches that had frozen them out. Perhaps they’d worked out a short cut that would bring them ahead of the main procession without ever losing sight of Haldora. It doesn’t matter, really. They had a reason, they tried to make the crossing, and they failed. Why they failed, that’s something else.”

  “The bridge didn’t give way,” Rashmika said.

  “No—doesn’t look as if it did. Their cathedral was small, by the standards of the main ones. From the position of the impact point we can tell they made it a good way across the bridge before sliding off, so it wasn’t a question of the bridge buckling. My guess is it was always a delicate balancing act, with the cathedral extending either side of the road, and that midway over they lost navigational control just long enough to topple over. Who knows?”

  “But you think there’s another possibility.”

  “They hadn’t made themselves popular, what with all that statistical stuff about the vanishings. Remember what I said about the other churches not wanting to know about the increasing frequency?”

  “They don’t want the world to change.”

  “No, they don’t. They’ve got a nice arrangement as it stands. Keep circling Hela, keep monitoring Haldora, make a living exporting scuttler relics to the rest of human space. In the high church echelons, things are fine as they are, thank you very much. They don’t want any rumours of apocalypse upsetting their gravy train.”

  “So you think someone destroyed the Numericists’ cathedral.”

  “Like I said, don’t go trying to prove anything. Of course, it could have been an accident. No one has ever said that taking a cathedral across Absolution Gap was a wise course of action.”

  “Despite all that, Pietr, you still have faith?” She saw his fist close tighter on the rail.

  “I believe that the vanishings are a message in a time of crisis. Not just a mute statement of Godlike power, as the churches would have it—a miracle for a miracle’s sake—but something vastly more significant. I believe that they are a kind of clock, counting down, and that zero hour is much closer than anyone in authority will have us believe. The Numericists knew this. Do I believe that the churches are to be trusted? By and large, with one or two exceptions, no. I trust them about as far as I can piss in vacuum. But I still have my faith. That hasn’t changed.”