Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  It probably didn’t matter.

  What did matter—the only thing that mattered—was that there was a way to signal across the bulk. Gravity was not like the other elements of her universe: it was only imperfectly bound to a particular brane. It could take the long way around—oozing along an individual brane like a slowly-spreading wine stain—but it could also leak through, taking the short cut across the bulk.

  The people—the shadows, she now realised—had used gravity to send messages across the bulk, from brane to brane. And with their usual patience—for they were nothing if not patient—they had waited until someone answered.

  Finally, someone had. They were the scuttlers: a starfaring species in their own right. Their history was much shorter than that of the shadows; only a few million years had passed since they had emerged from their birth world, in some lost corner of the galaxy. They were a peculiar species, with their strange habit of swapping body parts and their utter abhorrence of similarity and duplication. Their culture was impenetrably weird: nothing about it made any sense to any other species that the scuttlers ever met. Because of this they had established few trading partners, made few allegiances, and accumulated very little knowledge from other societies. They lived on cold worlds, favouring the moons of gas giants. They kept themselves to themselves, and had no ambitions beyond the modest settlement of a few hundred systems in their local galactic sector. Because of their solitary habits, it took them a while to draw down the attentions of the Inhibitors.

  It made no difference. The Inhibitors didn’t distinguish between the meek and aggressive: the rules applied equally to all. By the time the scuttlers had made contact with the shadows, they had been pushed to the edge of extinction. They were, needless to say, ready to consider anything.

  The shadows learned of the scuttlers’ travails. They listened, amused, at the stories of entire species being wiped out by the swarming black machines.

  We can help, they said.

  At that time, all they could do was transmit messages across the bulk, but with the co-operation of the scuttlers, they could do much more than that: the vast gravitational signal receiver constructed by the scuttlers to collect the shadows’ messages had the potential to allow physical intervention. At its heart was a mass-synthesiser, a machine capable of constructing solid objects according to transmitted blueprints. Like the receiver itself, the mass-synthesiser was old galactic-level technology. It fed itself on the metal-rich remains of the gas-giant planet that had been stripped apart to make the receiver in the first place. But for all its simplicity, the mass-synthesiser was versatile. It could be programmed to build receptacles for the shadows: vacant, near-immortal machine bodies into which they could transmit their personalities. For the shadows, already embodied in machines on their side of the bulk, it was no great sacrifice.

  But the scuttlers—nothing if not a cautious species—had installed clever safeguards, mindful of the danger in permitting physical intervention from one brane to another. The mass-synthesiser couldn’t be activated remotely, from the shadows’ side of the bulk. Only the scuttlers could turn it on, and allow the shadows to start colonising this side of the bulk. The shadows weren’t interested in taking over the entire galaxy, or so they said, merely in establishing a small, independent community away from the dangers that were making their own braneworld uninhabitable.

  In return, they promised, they would supply the scuttlers with the means to defeat the Inhibitors.

  All the scuttlers had to do was turn on the mass-synthesiser and allow the shadows to reach across the bulk.

  RASHMIKA AWOKE. IT was bright daylight outside, and the stained-glass window threw tinted lozenges across the damp hummock of her pillow. For a moment she lay there, anointed in colours, lulled by the sway of the Lady Morwenna. She felt as if she had been deeply asleep, but at the same time she also felt drained, in desperate need of a few hours of dreamless oblivion. The voice was gone now, but she did not doubt that it would return. Nor was there any doubt in her mind that the voice had been real, and its story essentially true.

  Now, at least, she understood a little more. The scuttlers had been offered a chance to escape extinction, but the price of that deal had been opening the door to the shadows. They had come so very close to doing it, too, but at the final moment they had not been able to make that leap of faith. The shadows had remained on their side of the bulk; the scuttlers had been wiped out.

  With that realisation she felt a groaning sense of failure. She had been wrong to doubt that the scuttlers were destroyed by the Inhibitors. Everything she had worked for over the last nine years, every pious certainty she had allowed herself to indulge in, had been undermined by that one revelatory dream. The shadows had put her right. What did her opinions matter, when set against actual testimony from another alien intelligence?

  She had already considered the alternative: that the shadows had wiped out the scuttlers. But that made even less sense than the Inhibitor hypothesis. If the scuttlers had let the shadows through, and if the shadows had organised themselves enough to do that much damage, then where were they now? It was unthinkable that they would have pulverised Hela, wiping out the scuttlers, and then crawled quietly back into their own universe. Nor was it likely that they had crossed the gap, done that damage, and then vanished into some solitary corner of this one, because—or so the voice had told her—they still needed to make the crossing. That was why they were speaking to her.

  They wanted humanity to have the courage that the scuttlers had lacked.

  Haldora, she now understood, was the signalling mechanism: the great receiver that the scuttlers had built. They had taken the former gas giant, smashed it down to its essentials and woven the remains into a world-sized gravitational antenna with a mass-synthesiser at its heart.

  What the Observers saw when they looked into the sky—the illusion of Haldora—was just a form of projected camouflage. The scuttlers were gone, but their receiver remained. And now and then, for a fraction of a second, the camouflage failed. In the vanishings, what the Observers glimpsed was not some shining citadel of God but the mechanism of the receiver itself.

  A door in the sky, waiting to be unlocked.

  That only left one question. It was, perhaps, the hardest of all. If everything the shadows had told her was true, then she also had to accept what the shadows told her about herself.

  That she wasn’t who she thought she was.

  Interstellar space, 2675

  FIVE DAYS LATER, technicians plumbed Scorpio into the reefersleep casket. It was a surgical procedure: a ritual of incisions and catheters, anaesthetic swabs, sterilising balms.

  “You don’t have to watch,” he told Khouri, who was standing at the foot of the casket with Aura in her arms.

  “I want to see you go under safely,” she said.

  “You mean you want to see me safely out the picture.” He knew even as he said it that it was cruel and unnecessary.

  “We still need you, Scorp. We might not agree with you about Hela, but that doesn’t make you any less useful.”

  The child watched fascinatedly as the technicians fumbled a plastic shunt into Scorpio’s wrist. He could still see the scar where the last one had been removed, twenty-three years earlier.

  “It hurts,” Aura said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It hurts, kid. But I can handle it.”

  The reefersleep casket sat in a room of its own. It was the same one that had brought him to Ararat all those years ago. It was very old and very unsophisticated: a brutish black box with squared-off edges and the heavy, wrought-iron look of some artefact of medieval jurisprudence.

  But it also had a perfect operational record, a flawless history of preserving its human occupants in frozen stasis during the years of relativistic travel between stars. It had never killed anyone, never brought anyone back to life with anything other than the full spectrum of mental faculties. It incorporated the minimum of nanotechnology. The Melding Plague had
never touched it, nor had the Captain’s own transforming influences. A baseline human contemplating a spell in the casket could have been quietly confident of revival. The transitions to and from the cryogenic state were slow and uncomfortable compared to the sleeker, more modern units. There would be discomfort, both physical and mental. But there would be little doubt that the unit would work as intended, and that the occupant would wake again at the other end of the journey.

  The only problem was, none of this applied to pigs. The caskets were tuned to baseline human physiology on the unforgiving level of cell chemistry. Scorpio had made it through reefersleep before, but each time had been a gamble. He told himself that the odds didn’t get any worse each time he submitted himself to a casket, that he was no more likely to die in this unit than in the first one he had used. But that wasn’t strictly true. He was much older now. His body was intrinsically weaker than the last time he had been through the process. Everyone was being very coy about the hard numbers—whether it was a ten or twenty or even a thirty per cent chance of him not making out—but their very refusal to discuss the matter alarmed him more than a cold assessment of the risk would ever have done. At least then he could have compared the risks of taking the casket and staying awake for the entire trip. Five or six years of shiptime, making him fifty-five or fifty-six, against a thirty per cent chance of not making it there at all? It wouldn’t have been an easy decision—as a pig, he had no guarantee of making it to sixty under normal circumstances. But at least full disclosure of the facts would have enabled him to make a considered choice. Instead, what drove him to the casket was a simple desire to skip over the intervening time. Damn the odds; he had to get the waiting over with. He had to know if it was worth their while making it to Hela.

  And before that, of course, he had to know if he had made a terrible mistake by persuading the ship to travel to Yellowstone first.

  He thought of the dust leaking from his hand, spilling on to the table, the trail drifting towards the Y he had marked rather than the H. Within minutes it had been confirmed: the ship was executing a slow turn, steering for Epsilon Eridani rather than the dim, unfamiliar star of 107 Piscium.

  He had been pleased with the Captain’s decision, but it also frightened him. The Captain had followed the minority view rather than the democratic wish of the seniors. It had suited Scorpio, but he wondered how he would have felt if the Captain had sided with the others. It was one thing to know that he had an ally in John Brannigan. It would be quite another to feel himself the prisoner of the ship.

  “It’s not too late,” Khouri said. “You can stop now, spend the trip awake.”

  “Is that what you’re planning to do?”

  “At least until Aura is older,” she said.

  The girl laughed.

  “I can’t take the risk,” Scorpio said. “I may not last the journey if they don’t freeze me. Five or six years might not be much to you, but it’s a big chunk out of my life.”

  “It might not be that long if they can get the new machines to work. Our subjective time to Yellowstone might only be a couple of years.”

  “Still too long for my liking.”

  “It worries you that much? I thought you said you never thought much about the future.”

  “I don’t. Now you know why.”

  She came closer to the black cabinet, lowering down on one knee, presenting Aura to him. “She thinks this is the wrong thing to do,” Khouri said. “I feel it coming through. She really thinks we should be going straight to Hela.”

  “We’ll get there eventually,” he said. “John willing.” He directed his attention to Aura, looking into her golden-brown eyes. He expected her to flinch, but she held his gaze, barely blinking.

  “Shadows,” she said, in her liquid gurgle, a voice that always seemed on the edge of hilarity. “Negotiate with shadows.”

  “I don’t believe in negotiation,” Scorpio said. “All it gets you into is a world of pain.”

  “Maybe it’s time you changed your opinion,” Khouri said.

  Khouri and Aura left him alone with the technicians. He had been glad of the visit, but he was also glad to have a moment to marshal his thoughts, making sure that he did not forget the important things. One thing in particular assumed particular importance in his mind. He had still not told either of them about the private conversation he had had with Re-montoire just before the Conjoiner’s departure. The conversation had not been recorded, and Remontoire had given little more than his words: no data, no written evidence, just a shard of translucent white material small enough to fit in his pocket.

  Now that omission was beginning to weigh upon him. Was it right to keep Remontoire’s doubts from Aura and her mother? Remontoire had left the final decision to him, in the end: a measure of the extent to which he trusted Scorpio.

  Now, in the casket, Scorpio could have done with a bit less of that trust.

  He didn’t have the shard with him now. It was with his personal effects, awaiting his revival. It had no intrinsic worth in its own right, and had anyone else found it, it was more than likely that they would have left it undisturbed, assuming only that it was some personal trinket or totem of purely sentimental value. What mattered was where Remontoire had found it. And aboard the ship, to the best of his knowledge, Scorpio was the only one who knew.

  “I DON’T KNOW what to make of it,” Remontoire said, handing him the curved white shard. Scorpio examined it, immediately disappointed at what had he been given. He could see through it. The edges were sharp enough to be dangerous, and it was too hard to flex or break. The thing looked like a dinosaur’s toenail clipping.

  “I know what it is, Rem.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s a piece of conch material. We found it all the time on Ararat, washed up after storms or floating out at sea. Much bigger than this piece.”

  “How big?” Remontoire asked, steepling his fingers.

  “Large enough to use for dwellings, sometimes. Sometimes even for major administrative structures. We didn’t have enough metal or plastic to go around, so we were always trying to make the best use of local resources. We had to anchor the conch pieces down, because otherwise they blew away in the first storm.”

  “Difficult to work with?”

  “We couldn’t cut them with anything other than torches, but that’s not saying much. You should have seen the state of our tools.”

  “What did you make of the conch pieces, Scorp? Did you have a theory about them?”

  “We didn’t have much time for theories about anything.”

  “You must have had an inkling.”

  Scorpio shrugged and passed the fragment back to him. “We assumed they were the discarded shells of extinct marine creatures, bigger than anything now living on Ararat. The Jugglers weren’t the only organism in that ocean; there was always room for other kinds of life, maybe relics of the original inhabitants, before the Juggler colonisation.”

  Remontoire tapped a finger against the shard. “I don’t think we’re dealing with marine life, Scorp.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might do, especially given the fact that I found this in space, around Ararat.” He handed it back to the pig. “Interested now?”

  “I might be.”

  Remontoire told him the rest. During the last phase of the battle around Ararat, he had been contacted by a group of Conjoiners from Skade’s party. “They knew she was dead. Without a leader, they were devolving into a directionless squabble. They approached me, hoping to steal the hypometric technology. They’d learned much already, but that was the one thing they didn’t have. I resisted, fought them off, but I also let them go with a warning. I considered it rather late in the day to be making new enemies.”

  “And?”

  “They came back to help me when the wolf aggregate was about to finish me off. A suicidal move on their part. I think it convinced me and my associates to accept terms of cooperation from Skade’s people. But
there was something else.”

  “The shard?”

  “Not the shard itself, but data pertaining to the same mystery. I viewed it with suspicion, as I still do. I can’t rule out the possibility that it may have been a piece of disinformation sown by Skade when she knew her days were numbered. Just like her to throw a posthumous spanner into our works, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her for a second,” Scorpio replied. Now that he knew it had some deeper significance, the piece of conch material felt like some holy relic in his hands. He held it with reverential care, as if he might damage it. “What did the data tell you?”

  “Before they transmitted the data, they spoke of the situation around Ararat being more complicated than we had assumed. I didn’t admit it at the time, but what they said chimed with my own observations. There had, for some time, been hints of something else in the game. Not my people, nor Skade’s, not even the Inhibitors, but another party, lurking on the very edge of events, like spectators. Of course, in the confusion of battle it was easy to dismiss such speculation: ghost returns from mass sensors, vague phantom forms glimpsed during intense energy bursts. There was a great deal of deliberate confusion.“

  “And the data?”

  “It only confirmed those fears. Added to my own observations, the conclusion was inescapable: we were being watched. Something else—neither human nor Inhibitor—had followed us to Ararat. It may even have been there before us.”

  “How do you know they weren’t part of the Inhibitors? We know so little about them.”

  “Because their movements suggested they were as wary of the Inhibitors as we were. Not to the same degree, but cautious nonetheless.”

  “Then who are they?”

  “I don’t know, Scorp. I only have this shard. It was recovered after an engagement during which one of their vehicles may have been damaged by drifting too close to the battle. It is a piece of debris, Scorp. The same applies, I think, to every piece of conch material you have ever found on Ararat. They are the remains of ships, fallen into the sea.”