Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Yes, a bold stroke of luck,” Quaiche said. He was nearly immobile, only his lips moving. The air in the garret was colder than usual, and with each word she saw a jet of exhalation issue from his mouth. “Almost too lucky, one might say.”

  “I beg your pardon, Dean?”

  “Look at the table,” he said. “The malachite box next to the tea service.”

  Rashmika had not noticed the box until men, but she was certain it had not been there during any of her earlier visits to the garret. It sat on little feet, like the paws of a dog. She picked it up, finding it lighter than she had expected, and fiddled with the gold-coloured metal clasps until the lid popped open. Inside was a great quantity of paper: sheets and envelopes of all colours and bonds, neatly gathered together with an elastic band.

  “Open them,” the dean said. “Have a gander.”

  She took out the bundle, slipped the elastic band free. The paperwork spilled on to the table. At random, she selected a sheet and unfolded it. The lilac paper was so thin, so translucent that only one side had been written on. The neatly inked letters, seen in reverse, were already familiar to her before she turned it over. The dark-scarlet script was hers: childish but immediately recognisable.

  “This is my correspondence,” she said. “My letters to the church-sponsored archaeological study group.”

  “Does it surprise you to see them gathered here?”

  “It surprises me that they were collected and brought to your attention,” Rashmika said, “but I’m not surprised that it could have happened. They were addressed to a body within the ministry of the Adventist church, after all.”

  “Are you angered?”

  “That would depend.” She was, but it was only one emotion amongst several. “Were the letters ever seen by anyone in the study group?”

  “The first few,” Quaiche replied, “but almost all the others were intercepted before they reached any of the researchers. Don’t take it personally: it’s just that they receive enough crank literature as it is; if they had to answer it all they’d never get anything else done.”

  “I’m not a crank,” Rashmika said.

  “No, but—judging by the content of these letters—you are coming from a slightly unorthodox position on the matter of the scuttlers, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “If you consider the truth to be an unorthodox position,” Rashmika countered.

  “You aren’t the only one. The study teams receive a lot of letters from well-meaning amateurs. The majority are really quite worthless. Everyone has their own cherished little theory on the scuttlers. Unfortunately, none of them has the slightest grasp of scientific method.”

  “That’s more or less what I’d have said about the study teams,” Rashmika said.

  He laughed at her temerity. “Not greatly troubled by self-doubt, are you, Miss Els?”

  She gathered the papers into an untidy bundle, stuffed them back in the box. “I’ve broken no rules with this,” she said. “I didn’t tell you about my correspondence because I wasn’t asked to tell you about it.”

  “I never said you had broken any rules. It just intrigued me, that’s all. I’ve read the letters, seen your arguments mature with time. Frankly, I think some of the points you raise are worthy of further consideration.”

  “I’m very pleased to hear it,” Rashmika said.

  “Don’t sound so snide. I’m sincere.”

  “You don’t care, Dean. No one in the church cares. Why should they? The doctrine disallows any other explanation except the one we read about in the brochures.”

  He asked, playfully, “Which is?”

  “That the scuttlers are an incidental detail, their extinction unrelated to the vanishings. If they serve any theological function it’s only as a reminder against hubris, and to emphasise the urgent need for salvation.”

  “An extinct alien culture isn’t much of a mystery these days, is it?”

  “Something different happened here,” Rashmika said. “What happened to the scuttlers wasn’t what happened to the Amarantin or any of the other dead cultures.”

  “That’s the gist of your objection, is it?”

  “I think it might help if we knew what happened,” she said. She tapped her fingernails against the lid of the box. “They were wiped out, but it doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the Inhibitors. Whoever did this left too much behind.”

  “Perhaps the Inhibitors were in a hurry. Perhaps it was enough that they’d wiped out the scuttlers, without worrying about their cultural artefacts.”

  “That’s not how they work. I know what they did to the Amarantin. Nothing survived on Resurgam unless it was under metres of bedrock, deliberately entombed. I know what it was like, Dean: I was there.”

  The light flared off his eye-opener as he turned towards her. “You were there?”

  “I meant,” she said hastily, “that I’ve read so much about it, spent so much time thinking about it, it’s as if I was there.” She shivered: it was easy to gloss over the statement in retrospect, but when she had said it she had felt a burning conviction that it was completely true.

  “The problem is,” Quaiche said, “that if you remove the Inhibitors as possible agents in the destruction of Hela, you have to invoke another agency. From a philosophical standpoint, that’s not the way we like to do things.”

  “It may not be elegant,” she said, “but if the truth demands another agency—or indeed a third—we should have the courage to accept the evidence.”

  “And you have some idea of what this other agency might have been, I take it?”

  She could not help but glance towards the welded-up space suit. It was an involuntary shift in her attention, unlikely to have been noticed by the dean, but it still annoyed her. If only she could control her own reactions as well as she read those of others.

  “I don’t,” she said. “But I do have some suspicions.”

  The dean’s couch shifted, sending a wave of accommodating movement through the mirrors. “The first time Grelier told me about you—when it seemed likely that you might prove of use to me—he said that you were on something of a personal crusade.”

  “Did he?”

  “In Grelier’s view, it had something to do with your brother. Is that true?”

  “My brother came to the cathedrals,” she said.

  “And you feared for him, anxious because you had heard nothing from him for a while, and decided to come after him. That’s the story, isn’t it?”

  There was something about the way he said “story” that she did not care for. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “Because I wonder how much you really care about your brother. Was he really the reason you came all this way, Rashmika, or did he just legitimise your quest by making it seem less intellectually vain?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you gave up on your brother years ago,” the dean said. “I think you knew, in your heart, that he was gone. What you really cared about was the scuttlers, and your ideas about them.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “That bundle of letters says otherwise. It speaks of a deep-rooted obsession, quite unseemly in a child.”

  “I came here for Harbin.”

  He spoke with the calm insistence of a Latin tutor emphasising some subtlety of tense and grammar. “You came here for me, Rashmika. You came to the Way with the intention of climbing to the top of the cathedral administration, convinced that only I had the answers you wanted, the answers you craved, like an addict.”

  “I didn’t invite myself here,” she said, with something of the same insistence. “You brought me here, from the Catherine of Iron.”

  “You’d have found your way here sooner or later, like a mole burrowing its way to the surface. You’d have made yourself useful in one of the study groups, and from there you’d have found a connection to me. It might have taken months; it might have taken years. But Grelier—bless his sordid little heart—expedited somethi
ng that was already running its course.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said, her hands trembling. “I didn’t want to see you. I didn’t want to come here. Why would that have meant so much to me?”

  “Because you’ve got it into your head that I know things,” the dean said. “Things that might make a difference.”

  Her hands fumbled for the box. “I’ll take this,” she said. “It’s mine, after all.”

  “The letters are yours. But you may keep the box.”

  “Is it over, now?”

  He seemed surprised. “Over, Miss Els?”

  “The agreement. My period of employment.”

  “I don’t see why it should be,” he said. “As you pointed out, you were never obliged to mention your interest in the scuttlers. No crimes have been committed; no trust betrayed.”

  Her hands left sweaty imprints on the box. She had not expected him to let her keep it. All that lost correspondence: sad, earnest little messages from her past self to her present. “I thought you’d be displeased,” she said.

  “You still have your uses. I’m expecting more Ultras very shortly, as a matter of fact. I’ll want your opinions on them, your peculiar insights and observations, Miss Els. You can still do that for me, can’t you?”

  She stood up, clutching the box. From the tone of his voice it was clear that her audience with the dean was at an end. “Might I ask one thing?” she enquired, nearly stammering over her words.

  “I’ve asked you enough questions. I don’t see why not.”

  She hesitated. Even as she made her request, she had meant to ask him about Harbin. The dean must have known what had happened to him: it wouldn’t have cost him anything to uncover the truth from cathedral records, even if he’d never set eyes on her brother. But now that the moment was here, now that it had arrived and the dean had granted her permission to ask her question, she knew that she did not have the strength of mind to go through with it. It was not simply that she was frightened of hearing the truth. She already suspected the truth. What frightened her was finding out how she would react when that truth was revealed. What if she turned out not to care about Harbin as much as she claimed? What if everything the dean had said was true, about Harbin just being the excuse she gave for her quest?

  Could she take that?

  Rashmika swallowed. She felt very young, very alone. “I wanted to ask if you had ever heard of the shadows,” she said.

  But the dean said nothing. He had never, she realised, promised her an answer.

  Interstellar space, 2675

  THREE DAYS LATER, the Inhibitor aggregate had moved within range of the weapon. The technicians still felt they had more calibration to do, more parameter space to explore. Every now and then the weapon did something weird and frightening, taking a nibble out of something local when it was supposed to be tuned for a target several AU distant. Sometimes, most frighteningly of all, its effects seemed only loosely coupled to any input. It was weakly acausal, after all: a weapon that undercut both time and space, and did so according to rules of Byzantine and shifting complexity. It was no wonder that the wolves had nothing analogous to it in their own arsenal. Perhaps they had decided that, all told, it was more trouble than it was worth. The same logic probably applied to Skade’s faster-than-light drive. A great many things were possible in the universe, far more than appeared so at first glance. But many of them were unhealthy, on both the individual and the species/galactic culture level.

  But the lights kept dimming, and the weapon kept operating, and Scorpio’s private sense of self continued, unperturbed. The weapon might be doing grotesque things to the very foundations of reality, but all he cared about was what it did to the wolves. Slowly, it was taking chunks out of the pursuing swarm.

  He wasn’t winning. He was surviving. That was good enough, for now.

  AURA WAS WRAPPED in her customary quilted silver blanket, supported on her mother’s lap. Scorpio still found her frighten-ingly small, like a doll designed to sit inside a cabinet rather than be subjected to the damaging rough-and-tumble of the outside world. But there was something else, too: a quiet sense of invulnerability that made the back of his neck tingle. He only felt it now that her eyes were fully open. Focused and bright, like the eyes of some hunting bird, she absorbed everything that took place around her. Her eyes were golden-brown, flecked with glints of gold and bronze and some colour closer to electric blue. They didn’t simply look around. They probed and extracted. They surveilled.

  Scorpio and the other seniors had gathered in the usual meeting room, facing each other around the dark mirror of the table. He studied his companions, mentally listing his allies and adversaries and those who had probably still to make up their minds. He could have counted on Antoinette, but she was back on Ararat now. He was sure that Blood would also have seen things his way, not because Blood would necessarily have thought things through, but because it took imagination to think of disloyalty, and imagination had never been Blood’s strong point. Scorpio missed him already. He had to keep reminding himself that his old deputy was not in fact dead, just out of reach.

  It was two weeks since they had left Ararat. The Nostalgia for Infinity had pushed its way out of Ararat’s system at a steady one-gee acceleration, slipping between the meshing gear-teeth of the battle. In the first week, the Infinity had put twelve AU between itself and Ararat, reaching a fiftieth of the speed of light. By the end of the second week it had reached a twenty-fifth of light speed and was now nearly fifty AU from Ararat. Scorpio felt that distance now: looking back, Ararat’s Bright Sun, p Eridani A—the one that had warmed them for the last twenty-three years—was now only a very bright star, one hundred thousand times fainter than when seen from the the planet’s surface. It looked no brighter now than its binary companion, Faint Sun or p Eridani B; they were two amber eyes falling behind the lighthugger, pulling together as the ship headed further and further out into interstellar space. He couldn’t see the wolves—only the sensors could even begin to pick them out of the background, and then with only limited confidence—but they were there. The hypometric weapons—there were three of them online now—had been chewing holes in the pursuing elements, but not all of the wolves had been destroyed.

  There was no going back. But until this moment their course had been dictated solely by Remontoire’s plan, his trajectory designed merely to get them away from the wolves with the lowest probability of interception. It was only now, after two weeks, that they had the option to steer on a new heading. The pursuing wolves had no bearing on that decision: Scorpio had to assume that they would eventually be destroyed, long before the ship reached its final destination.

  He stood up and waited for everyone to fall silent. Saying nothing himself, he pulled Clavain’s knife from its sheath. Without turning it on, he leant across the table and made two marks, one on either side of the centre line, each requiring only three scratches of the blade. One was a “Y,” the other an “H.” In the dark lacquer of the wood the scratches were the colour of pigskin.

  They all watched him, expecting him to say something. Instead he returned the knife to its sheath and sat back down in his seat. Then he meshed his hands behind his neck and nodded at Orca Cruz.

  Cruz was his only remaining ally from his Chasm City days. She looked at them all in turn, fixing everyone with her one good eye, black fingernails rasping against the table as she made her points.

  “The last few weeks haven’t been easy,” she began. “We’ve all made sacrifices, all seen plans upturned. Some of us have lost loved ones or seen our families ripped apart. Every certainty that we had a month ago has been pulverised. We are deep into unfamiliar territory, and we don’t have a map. Worse, the man we had come to trust, the man who would have seen the right way forward, isn’t with us any more.” She fixed her gaze on Scorpio, waiting until everyone else was looking at him as well. “But we still have a leader,” she continued. “We still have a damned good leader, someone Clavain trusted to
run things on Ararat when he wasn’t around. Someone we should trust to lead us, more now than ever. Clavain had faith in his judgement. I think it’s about time we took a leaf from the old man’s book.”

  Urton, the Security Arm woman, shook her head. “This is all well and good, Orca. None of us has a problem with Scprpio’s leadership.” She gave the last word a heavy emphasis, leaving everyone to draw their own conclusions about just what problems they might have with the pig. “But what we want to hear now is where you think we should go.”

  “It’s very simple,” Orca Cruz replied. “We have to go to Hela.”

  Urton tried unsuccessfully to hide her surprise. “Then we’re in agreement.”

  “But only after we’ve been to Yellowstone,” Cruz said. “Hela is… speculative, at best. We don’t really know what we’ll find there, if anything. But we know that we can do some good around Yellowstone. We have the capacity to take tens of thousands more sleepers. Another hundred and fifty thousand, easily. Those are human lives, Urton. They’re people we can save. Fate gave us this ship. We have to do something with it.”

  “We’ve already evacuated the Resurgam system,” Urton said. “Not to mention seventeen thousand people from this one. I’d say that wipes the slate clean.”

  “This slate is never wiped clean,” Cruz said.

  Urton waved her hand across the table. “You’re forgetting something. The core systems are crawling with Ultras. There are dozens, hundreds of ships with the sleeper capacity of Infinity, in any system you care to name.”

  “You’d trust lives to Ultras? You’re dumber than you look,” Orca said.

  “Of course I’d trust them,” Urton said.

  Aura laughed.

  “Why did she do that?” Urton asked.

  “Because you lied,” Khouri told her. “She can tell. She can always tell.”

  One of the refugee representatives—a man named Rintzen—coughed tactically. He smiled, doing his best to seem conciliatory. “What Urton means is that it simply isn’t our job. The motives and methods of the Ultras may be questionable—we all know that—but it is a simple fact that they have ships and a desire for customers. If the situation in the core systems does indeed reach a crisis point, then—might I venture to suggest—all we’d have is a classic case of demand being met by supply.”