Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  The planet returned. But it wasn’t the same planet. In a blink, Haldora became another gas giant, then another—the colouring and banding different each time. Rings appeared in the sky. A garland of moons, orbiting in impossible procession. Two sets of rings, intersecting at an angle, passing through each other. A dozen perfectly square moons.

  A planet with a neat chunk taken out of it, like a half-eaten wedding cake.

  A planet that was a reflected mirror of stars.

  A dodecahedral planet.

  Nothing.

  For a few seconds there was only a black sphere up there. Then the sphere began to wobble, like a balloon full of water.

  At last the great concealment mechanism was breaking down.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  QUAICHE CLAWED AT his eyes, making a faint screaming sound, the words I’m blind, I’m blind his pitiful refrain.

  Grelier put down the pneumatic speaking tube. He leant over the dean, pulling some gleaming ivory-handled optical device from his tunic pocket and peering into the trembling horror of Quaiche’s exposed eyes. With the other hand he cast shadows over them, watching the reactions of the twitching irises.

  “You’re not blind,” he said. “At least, not in both eyes.”

  “The flash—”

  “The flash damaged your right eye. I’m not surprised: you were staring straight at the face of Haldora when it happened, and you have no blink reflex, of course. But we happened to lurch at the same moment: whatever caused that flash also upset Glaur’s machines. It was enough to perturb the optical light path from the collecting apparatus above the garret. You were spared the full effect of it.”

  “I’m blind,” Quaiche said again, as if he had heard nothing that Grelier had told him.

  “You can still see me,” Grelier said, moving his finger, “so stop snivelling.”

  “Help me.”

  “I’ll help you if you tell me what just happened—-and also why the hell the Lady Mor is on automatic control.”

  Quaiche’s voice regained a semblance of calm. “I don’t know what happened. If I’d been expecting that, do you think I’d have been looking at it?”

  “I imagine it was your friends the Ultras. They professed an interest in Haldora, didn’t they?”

  “They said they were going to send in instrument packages.”

  “I think they fibbed,” Grelier replied.

  “I trusted them.”

  “You still haven’t told me about the automatic control. Glaur says we can’t stop.”

  “Twenty-six-hour lockout,” Quaiche said, as if reciting from a technical manual. “To be used in the event of a complete collapse of cathedral authority, ensuring that the Lady Mor continues to move along the Way until order is restored. All manual control of the reactor and propulsion systems is locked out on sealed, tamper-proof timing systems. Guidance cameras detect the Way; gyroscopes prevent drift even if there’s a loss of all visual cues; multiply redundant star-trackers come online for celestial navigation. There’s even a buried inductance cable we can follow, if all else fails.”

  “When was the lockout instigated?”

  “It was the last thing Seyfarth did before departing for the Infinity.”

  Many hours ago, Grelier thought, but fewer than twenty-six. “So she’s going over that bridge, and nothing can stop it, short of sabotage?”

  “Have you tried sabotaging a reactor lately, Grelier? Or a thousand tonnes of moving machinery?”

  “Just wondering what the chances were.”

  “The chances are, Surgeon-General, that she’s going over that bridge.”

  IT WAS A tiny surface-to-orbit ship, barely larger than the reentry capsule that had brought Khouri to Ararat, It slipped from the belly of the Nostalgia for Infinity, impelled by the merest whisper of thrust. Through the transparent patches in the cockpit armour, Scorpio watched the huge old ship fall slowly away, more like a receding landscape than another vessel. He gasped: at last he could see the changes for himself.

  Wonderful and frightening things were happening to the Nostalgia for Infinity. As she made her slow approach to the surface holdfast, vast acres of the hull were peeling away, sheets of biomechanical cladding and radiation shielding breaking loose like flakes of sloughed skin. As the ship approached Hela, the pieces stretched behind her, forming a dark, jostling tail, like a comet’s. It was the perfect camouflage for Scorpio, permitting him to make his departure undetected.

  None of it, Scorpio knew, was unintentional. The ship wasn’t breaking up because of the unbalanced stresses of its sidelong approach to Hela. It was breaking up because the Captain was choosing to fling away entire parts of himself. Where the skin cladding had gone, the ship’s innards were revealed in all their bewildering intricacy. And even there—in the solid depths of the Nostalgia for Infinity—great changes were afoot. The Captain’s ordinary transformative processes had been accelerated. The former maps of the ship were now utterly useless—no one had the slightest idea how to navigate through those deep districts. Not that it mattered: the living crew were crammed into a tiny, stable district near the nose, and if anyone was alive and warm down in the parts of the ship that were changing, they were only the last, wandering elements of the Cathedral Guard. In Scorpio’s opinion, it was unlikely that they’d be alive and warm for very much longer.

  No one had told the Captain to do this, just as no one had told him to lower himself towards Hela. Even if there had been a rebellion—even if some of the seniors had decided to abandon Aura—it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. Captain John Brannigan had made up his mind.

  When he was clear of the tumbling cloud of sloughed parts, Scorpio told the ship to accelerate harder. It had been a long time since he had sat behind the controls of a spacecraft, but that didn’t matter: the little machine knew exactly where it needed to go. Hela rolled below: he saw the diagonal scratch of the rift, and the even fainter scratch of the bridge spanning it. He turned up the magnification, steadied the image and tracked back from the bridge until he made out the tiny form of the Lady Mor-wenna, creeping towards the edge of the plain. He had no idea what was going on aboard it now: since the appearance of the Haldora machinery, all attempts to communicate with. Quaiche or his hostages had failed. Quaiche must have destroyed or disabled all the communication channels, no longer wishing to be distracted by outside parties now that he had finally seized effective control of the Nostalgia for Infinity. All Scorpio could do was assume that Aura and the others were still safe, and that there was still some measure of rationality in Quaiche’s mind. If he could not be contacted by conventional means, then he would have to be sent a very obvious and compelling signal to stop.

  Scorpio’s ship aimed itself for the bridge.

  The pressure of thrust, mild as it was, made Scorpio’s chest hurt. Valensin had told him he was a fool even to think about riding a ship down to Hela after what he had been through in the last few years.

  Scorpio had shrugged. A pig had to do what a pig had to do, he’d said.

  GRELIER ATTENDED TO Quaiche, dribbling solutions into the blinded eye. Quaiche flinched and moaned at each drop, but gradually his moans became intermittent whimpers, signifying irritation and disappointment more than pain.

  “You still haven’t told me what she’s doing here,” Quaiche said, finally.

  “That wasn’t my job,” Grelier replied. “I established that she wasn’t who she said she was, and I established that she had arrived on Hela nine years ago. The rest you’ll have to ask her yourself.”

  Rashmika stood up and walked over to the dean, brushing the surgeon-general aside. “You don’t have to ask,” she said. “I’ll tell you myself. I came here to find you. Not because I was particularly interested in you, but because you were the key to reaching the shadows.”

  “The shadows?” Grelier asked, screwing the lid on to a thumb-sized bottle of blue fluid.

  “He knows what I’m talking about,” Rashmika said. “Don�
�t you, Dean?”

  Even through the masklike rigidity of his face, Quaiche managed to convey his sense of awful realisation. “But it took you nine years to find me.”

  “It wasn’t just about finding you, Dean. I always knew where you were: no one ever made a secret of that. A lot of people thought you were dead, but it was always clear where you were meant to be.”

  “Then why wait all this time?”

  “I wasn’t ready,” she said. “I had to learn more about Hela and the scuttlers, otherwise I couldn’t be sure that the shadows were the right people to talk to. It was no good trusting the church authorities: I had to learn things for myself, make my own deductions. And, of course, I had to have a convincing background, so you’d trust me.”

  “But nine years,” Quaiche said again, marvelling. “And you’re still just a child.”

  “I’m seventeen. And it’s been a lot more than nine years, believe me.”

  “The shadows,” Grelier said. “Will one of you please do me the courtesy of explaining who or what they are?”

  “Tell him, Dean,” Rashmika said.

  “I don’t know what they are.”

  “But you know they exist. They talk to you, don’t they, just the way they talk to me. They asked you to save them, to make sure they weren’t destroyed when the Lady Morwenna goes over the bridge.”

  Quaiche raised a hand, dismissing her. “You’re quite deluded.”

  “Just like Saul Tempier was deluded, Dean? He knew about the missing vanishing, and he didn’t believe the official denials. He also knew that the vanishings were due to end, just like the Numericists did.”

  “I’ve never heard of Saul Tempier.”

  “Perhaps you haven’t,” Rashmika said, “but your church had him killed because he couldn’t be allowed to speak of the missing vanishing. Because you couldn’t face the fact that it had happened, could you?”

  Grelier’s fingers shattered the little blue vial. ‘Tell me what this is about,“ he demanded.

  Rashmika turned to him, cleared her throat. “If he won’t tell you, I will. The dean had a lapse of faith during one of those periods when he began to build up immunity to his own blood viruses. He began to question the entire edifice of the religion he’d built around himself, which was painful for him, because without this religion the death of his beloved Morwenna becomes just another meaningless cosmic event.”

  “Be careful what you say,” Quaiche said.

  She ignored him. “During this crisis, he felt compelled to test the nature of a vanishing, using the tools of scientific enquiry normally banned by the church. He arranged for a probe to be fired into the face of Haldora during a vanishing.”

  “Must have called for some careful preparations,” Grelier said. “A vanishing’s so brief—”

  “Not this one,” Rashmika said. ‘The probe had an effect: it prolonged the vanishing by more than a second. Haldora is an illusion, nothing more: a piece of camouflage to hide a signalling mechanism. The camouflage has been failing, lately—that’s why the vanishings have been happening in the first place. The dean’s probe added additional stress, prolonging the vanishing. It was enough, wasn’t it, Dean?“

  “I have no…”

  Grelier pulled out another vial—a smoky shade of green, this time—and held it over his master, pinched tight between thumb and forefinger. “Let’s stop mucking about, shall we? I’m convinced that she knows more than you’d like the rest of us to know, so will you please stop denying it?”

  “Tell him,” Rashmika said.

  Quaiche licked his lips: they were as pale and dry as bone. “She’s right,” he said. “Why deny it now? The shadows are just a distraction.” He tilted his head towards Vasko and Khouri. “I have your ship. Do you think I give a damn about anything else?”

  The skin of Grelier’s fingers whitened around the vial. “Tell us,” he hissed.

  “I sent a probe into Haldora,” Quaiche said. “It prolonged the vanishing. In that extended glimpse I saw… things—shining machinery, like the inside of a clock, normally hidden within Haldora. And the probe made contact with something. It was destroyed almost instantly, but not before that something—whatever it was—had managed to transmit itself into the Lady Morwenna.”

  Rashmika turned and pointed towards the suit. “He keeps it in that.”

  Grelier’s eyes narrowed. “The scrimshaw suit?”

  “Morwenna died in it,” Quaiche said, picking his way through his words like someone crossing a minefield. “She was crushed in it when our ship made an emergency sprint to Hela, to rescue me. The ship didn’t know that Morwenna couldn’t tolerate that kind of acceleration. It pulped her, turned her into red jelly, red jelly with bone and metal in it. / killed her, because if I hadn’t gone down to Hela…”

  “I’m sorry about what happened to her,” Rashmika said.

  “I wasn’t like this before it happened,” Quaiche said.

  “No one could have blamed you for her death.”

  Grelier sneered. “Don’t let him fool you. He wasn’t exactly an angel before that happened.”

  “I was just a man with something bad in his blood,” Quaiche said defensively, “just a man trying to make his way.”

  Quietly, Rashmika said, “I believe you.”

  “You can read my face?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I just believe you. I don’t think you were a bad man, Dean.”

  “And now, after all that I’ve made happen? After what happened to your brother?” There was, she heard, an audible crack of hope in his voice. This late in the day, this close to the crossing, he still craved absolution.

  “I said that I believed you, not that I was in a forgiving mood,” she said.

  “The shadows,” Grelier said. “You still haven’t told me what they are, or what they have to do with the suit.”

  “The suit is a holy relic,” Rashmika said, “his one tangible link with Morwenna. In testing Haldora, he was also validating the sacrifice she’d made for him. That was why he put the receiving apparatus inside the suit: so that when the answer came, when he discovered whether or not Haldora was a miracle, it would be Morwenna who told him.”

  “And the shadows?” Grelier asked.

  “Demons,” Quaiche said.

  “Entities,” Rashmika corrected. “Sentient beings trapped in a different universe, adjacent to this one.”

  Grelier smiled. “I think I’ve heard enough.”

  “Listen to the rest,” Vasko said. “She’s not lying. They’re real, and we need their help very badly.”

  “Their help?” Grelier repeated.

  “They’re more advanced than us,” Vasko said, “more advanced than any other culture in this galaxy. They’re the only things that are going to make a difference against the Inhibitors.”

  “And in return for this help, what do they want?” Grelier asked.

  “They want to be let out,” Rashmika said. “They want to be able to cross over into this universe. The thing in the suit—it’s not really the shadows, just a negotiating agent, like a piece of software—it knows what we have to do to let the rest of them through. It knows the commands we need to send to the Hal-dora machinery.”

  “The Haldora machinery?” the surgeon-general asked.

  “Take a look for yourself,” the dean said. The arrangement of mirrors had locked on to him again, beaming a shaft of focused light into his one good eye. “The vanishings have ended, Grelier. After all this time, I can see the holy machinery.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  GLAUR WAS ALONE, the only member of the technical staff left in the vaulted hall of Motive Power. The cathedral had recovered from the earlier disturbance; the klaxon had silenced, the emergency lights on the reactor had dimmed, and the motion of the rods and spars above his head had fallen back into their usual hypnotic rhythm. The floor swayed from side to side, but only Glaur had the hard-won acuity of balance to detect that. The motion was within normal limits, and t
o someone unfamiliar with the Lady Morwenna the floor would have felt rock steady, as if anchored to Hela.

  Breathing heavily, he made his way around one of the catwalks that encircled the central core of turbines and generators. He felt the breeze as the whisking spars moved just above his head, but years of familiarity with the place meant that he no longer ducked unnecessarily.

  He reached an anonymous, unremarkable-looking access panel. Glaur flipped the toggles that held the panel shut, then hinged it open above his head. Inside were the gleaming silver-blue controls of the lockout system: two enormous levers, with a single keyhole beneath each. The procedure had been simple enough: well rehearsed in many exercises using the dummy panel on the other side of the machine.

  Glaur had inserted a key into one lock. Seyfarth had inserted his key into the corresponding hole. The keys had been engaged simultaneously, and then the two of them had pulled the levers as far as they would travel, in one smooth, synchronised movement. Things had clunked and whirred. All around the chamber there had been the chatter of relays as the normal control inputs were disconnected. Behind this one panel, Glaur knew, was an armoured clock ticking down the seconds from the moment the levers had been pulled. The levers had now moved through half of their travel: there were another twelve or thirteen hours before the relays would chatter again, restoring manual control.

  Too long. In thirteen hours, there probably wouldn’t be a Lady Morwenna.

  Glaur braced himself against the catwalk handrail, then positioned both gloved hands on the left-side handle. He squeezed down, applying as much force as he could muster. The handle didn’t budge: it felt as solid as if it had been welded into place, at exactly that angle. He tried the other, and then tried to pull both of them down at the same time. It was absurd: his own knowledge of the lockout system told him that it was engineered to resist a lot more interference than this. It was built to withstand a rioting gang, let alone one man. But he had to try, no matter how unlikely the chances of success.