Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I don’t need this,” she said. She spoke aloud, hoping to break the spell. “Grelier, you bastard, there was something on that needle, wasn’t there?”

  [There was nothing on the needle. We are not a hallucination. We have nothing to do with Quaiche or his scripture.]

  “Then who the hell are you?” she said.

  [Who are we? You know who we are, Rashmika. We are the ones you came all this way to find. We are the shadows. You came to negotiate with us. Don’t you remember?]

  She swore, then pummelled her head against the pillow at the end of the bed.

  [That won’t do any good. Please stop, before you hurt yourself]

  She snarled, smashing her fists against the sides of her skull.

  [That won’t help either. Really, Rashmika, don’t you see it yet? You aren’t going mad. We’ve just found a way into your head. We speak to Quaiche as well, but he doesn’t have the benefit of all that machinery in his head. We have to be discreet, whispering aloud to him when he’s alone. But you’re different.]

  “There’s no machinery in my head. And I don’t know anything about any shadows.”

  The voice shifted its tone, adjusting its timbre and resonance until it sounded exactly as if there was a small, quiet friend whispering confidences into her ear.

  [But you do know, Rashmika. You just haven’t remembered yet. We can see all the barricades in your head. They’re beginning to come down, but it will take a little while yet. But that’s all right. We’ve waited a long time to find a friend. We can wait a little longer.]

  “I think I should call Grelier,” she said. Before he left, the surgeon-general had shown her how to access the cathedral’s pneumatic intercom system. She leant over the bed, towards the bedside table. There was a grilled panel above it.

  [No, Rashmika,] the voice warned. [Don’t call him. He’ll only look at you more closely, and you don’t want that, do you?]

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  [Because then he’ll find out that you aren’t who you say you are. And you wouldn’t want that.]

  Her hand hesitated above the intercom. Why not press it, and summon the surgeon-general? She didn’t like the bastard, but she liked voices in her head even less.

  But what the voice had said reminded her of her blood. She visualised him taking the sample, drawing the red core from her arm.

  [Yes, Rashmika, that’s part of it. You don’t see it yet, but when he analyses that sample he’ll be in for a shock. But he may leave it at that. What you don’t want is him crawling over your head with a scanner. Then he’d really find something interesting.]

  Her hand still hovered above the intercom, but she knew she was not going to press the connecting button. The voice was right: the one thing she did not want was Grelier taking an even deeper interest in her, beyond her blood. She did not know why, but it was enough to know it.

  “I’m scared,” she said, moving her hand away.

  [You don’t have to be. We’re here to help you, Rashmika.]

  “Me?” she said.

  [All of you,] the voice said. She sensed it pulling away, leaving her alone. [All we ask of you is a little favour in return.]

  Afterwards, she tried to sleep.

  Interstellar space, 2675

  SCORPIO LOOKED OVER the technician’s shoulder. Glued to one wall was a large flexible screen, newly grown by the manufactories. It showed a cross section through the ship, duplicated from the latest version of the hand-drawn map that had been used to track the Captain’s apparitions. Rather than the schematic of a spacecraft, it resembled a blow-up of some medieval anatomy illustration. The technician was marking a cross next to a confluence of tunnels, near to one of the acoustic listening posts.

  “Any joy?” Scorpio asked.

  The other pig made a noncommittal noise. “Probably not. False positives from this area all day. There’s a hot bilge pump near this sector. Keeps clanging, setting off our phones”.

  “Better check it out all the same, just to be on the safe side,” Scorpio advised.

  “There’s a team already on their way down there. They’ve never been far away.”

  Scorpio knew that the team would be going down in full vacuum-gear, warned that they might encounter a breach at any point, even deep within the ship. “Tell them to be careful,” he said.

  “I have, Scorp, but they could be even more careful if they knew what they needed to be careful about.”

  “They don’t need to know.”

  The pig technician shrugged and went back to his task, waiting for another acoustic or barometric signal to appear on his read-out.

  Scorpio’s thoughts drifted to the hypometric weapon mov-ing in its shaft, a corkscrewing, meshing, interweaving gyre of myriad silver blades. Even immobile, the weapon had felt subtly wrong, a discordant presence in the ship. It was like a picture of an impossible solid, one of those warped triangles or ever-rising staircases; a thing that looked plausible enough at first glance but which on closer inspection produced the effect of a knife twisting in a particular part of the brain—an area responsible for handling representations of the external universe, ah area that handled the mechanics of what did and didn’t work. Moving, it was worse. Scorpio could barely look at the threshing, squirming complexity of the operational weapon. Somewhere within that locus of shining motion, there was a point or region where something sordid was being done to the basic fabric of space-time. It was being abused.

  That the technology was alien had come as no surprise to Scorpio. The weapon—and the two others like it—had been assembled according to instructions passed to the Conjoiners by Aura, before Skade had stolen her from Khouri’s womb. The instructions had been precise and comprehensive, a series of unambiguous mathematical prescriptions, but utterly lacking any context—no hint of how the weapon actually functioned, or which particular model of reality had to apply for it to work. The instructions simply said: just build it, calibrate it in this fashion, and it will work. But do not ask how or why, because even if you were capable of understanding the answers, you would find them upsetting.

  The only other hint of context was this: the hypometric weapon represented a general class of weakly acausal technologies usually developed by pre-Inhibitor-phase Galactic cultures within the second or third million years of their star-faring history. There were layers of technology beyond this, Aura’s information had implied, but they could certainly not be assembled using human tools. The weapons in that theoretical arsenal bore the same abstract relationship to the hypometric device as a sophisticated computer virus did to a stone axe. Simply grasping how such weapons were in some way disadvantageous to something loosely analogous to an enemy would have required such a comprehensive remapping of the human mind that it would be pointless calling it human anymore.

  The message was: make the most of what you have.

  “Teams are there,” the other pig said, pressing a microphone into the little pastry like twist of his ear.

  “Found anything?”

  “Just that pump playing up again.”

  “Shut it down,” Scorpio said. “We can deal with the bilge later.”

  “Shut it down, sir? That’s a schedule-one pump.”

  “I know. You’re probably going to tell me it hasn’t been turned off in twenty-three years.”.

  “It’s been turned off, sir, but always with a replacement unit standing by to take over. We don’t have a replacement available now, and won’t be able to get one down there for days. All service teams are tied up following other acoustic leads.”

  “How bad would it be?”

  “About as bad as it gets. Unless we install a replacement unit, we’ll lose three or four decks within a few hours.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to lose them. Is your equipment sophisticated enough to filter out the sounds of those decks being flooded?”

  The technician hesitated for a moment, but Scorpio knew that professional pride would win out in the end. “That sho
uldn’t be a problem, no.”

  “Then look on the bright side. Those fluids have to come from somewhere. We’ll be taking the load off some other pumps, more than likely.”

  “Yes, sir,” the pig said, more resigned than convinced. He gave the order to his team, telling them to sacrifice those levels. He had to repeat the instruction several times before the message got through that he was serious and that he had Scorpio’s authorisation.

  Scorpio understood his reservations. Bilge management was a serious business aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, and the turning off of pumps was not something that was ever taken lightly. Once a deck had been flooded with the Captain’s chemical humours and exudations, it could be very difficult to reclaim it for human use. But what mattered more now was the calibration of the weapon. Turning off the pump made more sense than turning off the listening devices in that area. If losing three or four decks meant having a realistic hope of defeat-ing the pursuing wolves, it was a small price to pay.

  The lights dimmed; even the constant background churn of bilge pumps became muted. The weapon was being discharged.

  As the weapon rotated up to speed, it became a silent columnar blur of moving parts, a glittering whirlwind. In vacuum, it moved with frightening speed. Calculations had shown that it would only take the failure of one tiny part of the hypo-metric weapon to rip the Nostalgia for Infinity to pieces. Scorpio remembered the Conjoiners putting the thing together, taking such care, and now he understood why.

  They followed the calibration instructions to the letter. Because their effects depended critically on atomic-scale tolerances, Remontoire had said, no two versions of the weapon could ever be exactly alike. Like handmade rifles, each would have its own distinct pull, an unavoidable effect of manufacture that had to be gauged and then compensated for. With a hypometric weapon it was not just a case of aiming-off to compensate—it was more a case of finding an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect within a locus of expectations. Once this pattern was determined, the weapon could in theory produce its effect almost anywhere, like a rifle able to fire in any direction.

  Scorpio had already seen the weapon in action. He didn’t have to understand how it worked, only what it did. He had heard the sonic booms as spherical volumes of Ararat’s atmosphere were deleted from existence (or, conceivably, shifted or redistributed somewhere else). He had seen a hemispherical chunk of water removed from the sea, the memory of those in-rushing walls of water—even now—making him shiver at the sheer wrongness of what he had witnessed.

  The technology, Remontoire had told him, was spectacularly dangerous and unpredictable. Even when it was properly constructed and calibrated, a hypometric weapon could still turn against its maker. It was a little like grasping a cobra by the tail and using it to lash out against enemies while hoping that the snake didn’t coil around and bite the hand that held it.

  The trouble was, they needed that snake.

  Thankfully, not all aspects of the h-weapon’s function were totally unpredictable. The range was limited to within light-hours of the weapon itself, and there was a tolerably well-defined relationship between weapon spin-rate (as measured by some parameter Scorpio didn’t even want to think about) and radial reach in a given direction. What was more difficult to predict was the direction in which the extinction bubble would be launched, and the resulting physical size of the bubble’s effect.

  The testing procedure required the detection of an effect caused by the weapon’s discharge. On a planet, this would have presented no real difficulties: the weapon’s builders would simply tune the spin-rate to allow the effect to show itself at a safe distance, and then make some guess as to the size of the effect and the direction in which it would occur. After the weapon had been fired, they would examine the predicted zone of effect for any indication that a spherical bubble of space-time—including all the matter within it—had simply winked out of existence.

  But in space it was much more difficult to calibrate a hypometric weapon. No sensors in existence could detect the disappearance of a few atoms of interstellar gas from a few cubic metres of vacuum. The only practical solution, therefore, was to try to calibrate the weapon within the ship itself. Of course, this was scarily dangerous: had the bubble appeared within the core of one of the Conjoiner drives, the ship would have been destroyed instantly. But the mid-flight calibration procedure had been done before, Remontoire had said, and none of his ships had been destroyed in the process.

  The one thing they didn’t do was immediately select a target within the ship. They were aiming for an effect on the skin of the vessel, safely distant from any critical systems. The procedure, therefore, was to set the weapon’s initial coordinates to generate a small, unobserved extinction bubble beyond the hull. The weapon would then be fired repeatedly, with the spin-rate adjusted by a tiny amount each time, decreasing the radial distance and therefore drawing the bubble closer and closer to the hull. They couldn’t see it out there; they could only imagine it approaching, and could never be sure whether it was about to nibble the ship’s hull or was still hundreds of metres distant. It was like summoning a malevolent spirit to a seance: the mo-ment of arrival was a thing of both dread and anticipation.

  The test area around the weapon had been sealed off right out to the skin of the ship, save for automated control systems. Everyone not already frozen had been moved as far away from the weapon as possible. After each firing—each squirming, rebounding collapse of the threshing mechanisms—Scorpio’s technicians pored over their data to see if the weapon had generated an effect, scanning the network of microphones and barometers to see if there was any hint that a spherical chunk of the ship a metre in diameter had just ceased to exist. And so the calibration process continued, the technicians tuning the weapon time and again and listening for results.

  The lights dimmed again.

  “Getting something,” the technician said, after a moment. Scorpio saw a cluster of red indicators appear on his read-out. “Signals coming in from…”

  But the technician did not complete his sentence. His words were drowned out by a rising howl, a noise unlike anything Scorpio had ever heard aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. It was not the shriek of air escaping through a nearby breach, nor the groan of structural failure. It was much closer to a low, agonised vocalisation, to the sound of something huge and bestial being hurt.

  The moan began to subside, like the dying after-rumble of a thunderclap.

  “I think you have your effect,” Scorpio said.

  HE WENT DOWN to see it for himself. It was much worse than he had feared: not a one-metre-wide nibble taken out of the ship, but a gaping fifteen-metre-wide wound, the edges where bulkheads and floors had been sheared gleaming a bright, untarnished silver. Greenish fluids were raining down through the cavity from severed feedlines; an electrical cable was thrashing back and forth in the void, gushing sparks each time it contacted a metallic surface.

  It could have been worse, he told himself. The volume of the ship nipped out of the existence by the weapon had not coincided with any of the inhabited parts, nor had it intersected critical ship systems or the outer hull. There had been a slight local pressure loss as the air inside the volume ceased to exist, but, all told, the weapon had had a negligible effect on the ship. But it had unquestionably had an effect on the Captain. Some part of his vaguely mapped nervous system must have passed through this volume, and the weapon had evidently caused him pain. It was difficult to judge how severe that pain must have been, whether it had been transitory or Was even now continuing. Perhaps there was no exact analogue for it in human terms. If there was, Scorpio was not certain that he really wished to know, because for the first time a disturbing thought had occurred to him: if this was the pain the Captain felt when a tiny part, of the ship was harmed, what would it be like if something much worse happened?

  Yes, it could have been worse.

  He visited the technicians who were calibrating the weapon, taking in
their nervous expressions and gestures. They were expecting a reprimand, at the very least.

  “Looks like it was a bit larger than one metre,” he said.

  “It was always going to be uncertain,” their leader flustered. “All we could do was take a lucky guess and hope—”

  Scorpio cut her off. “I know. No one ever said this was going to be easy. But knowing what you know now, can you adjust the volume down to something more practical?”

  The technician looked relieved and doubtful at the same time, as if she could not really believe that Scorpio had no intention of punishing her.

  “I think so… given the effect we’ve just observed… of course, there’s still no guarantee…”

  “I’m not expecting one. I’m just expecting the best you can do.”

  She nodded quickly. “Of course. And the testing?”

  “Keep it up. We’re still going to need that weapon, no matter how much of a bastard it is to use.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Hela, 2727

  THE DEAN HAD called Rashmika to his garret. When she arrived, she was relieved to find him alone in the room, with no sign of the surgeon-general. She had no great affection for the dean’s company, but even less for the skulking attentions of his personal physician. She imagined him lurking somewhere else in the Lady Morwenna, busy with his Bloodwork or one of the unspeakable practices he was rumoured to favour.

  “Settling in nicely?” the dean asked her as she took her appointed seat in the middle of the forest of mirrors. “I do hope so. I’ve been very impressed with your acumen, Miss Els. It was an inspired suggestion of Grelier’s to have you brought here.”

  “I’m glad to have been of service,” Rashmika said. She prepared herself a small measure of tea, her hands shaking as she held the china. She had no appetite—the mere thought of being in the same room as the iron suit was enough to unsettle her nerves—but it was necessary to maintain the illusion of calm.