Absolution Gap

by Alastair Reynolds

  “What is it?” Grelier asked.

  “The bridge,” Quaiche answered. “It doesn’t seem to be there any more.”

  Grelier leant closer to the couch. “There must be some mistake.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be one, Surgeon-General. The inductance cable—the line we use for emergency navigation—is quite clearly severed.”

  “So someone cut the cable.”

  “I’ll have surface imagery in a moment. Then we’ll know.”

  They all turned to the screen that had been showing the descent of the Nostalgia for Infinity. The image flickered with ghostly colours, then stabilised around a familiar view captured by a static camera that must have been mounted on the wall of Ginnungagap Rift itself.

  The dean was right: there was no longer any bridge. All that remained were the extremities of the span: those curlicued fancies of scrolled sugar and icing flung out from either cliff as if to suggest the rest of the bridge by a process of elegant mathematical extrapolation. But most of the span was simply not there. Nor was there any hint of wreckage down on the floor. In her mind’s eye, Rashmika had thought of the bridge collapsing time and again, ever since she had known she would have to cross it. But always she had seen it coming down in an avalanche of splintering shards, forming a jewelled, glinting scree that was in itself a thing of wonder: an enchanted glass forest you could lose yourself in.

  “What happened?” the dean asked.

  Rashmika turned to him. “Does it matter? It’s gone: you can see for yourself. Crossing it isn’t an issue now. There’s no reason not to stop the cathedral.”

  “Weren’t you listening, girl?” he asked. “The cathedral doesn’t stop. The cathedral cannot stop.”

  Khouri stood up, followed by Vasko. “We can’t stay aboard any longer. You’ll come with us, Aura.”

  Rashmika shook her head. She was still not used to being called by that name. “I’m not leaving without the thing I came for.”

  “She is right,” said a new voice, thin and metallic.

  No one said anything. It was not the intrusion of a new voice that alarmed them, but its obvious point of origin. As one, they all turned to look at the scrimshaw suit. Outwardly, nothing about it had changed: it was exactly the same brooding silver-grey form, crawling with manic detail and the blistered seams of crude welding.

  “She is right,” the suit continued. “We must leave now, Quaiche. You have your ship, the thing you wanted so badly. You have your means of stopping Hela. Now let us go. We are of no consequence to any of your plans.”

  “You never spoke except when I was alone before,” Quaiche said.

  “We spoke to the girl, when you wouldn’t listen. She was easier: we could see straight into her head. Couldn’t we, Rashmika?”

  Bravely, she said, “I’d rather you called me Aura now.”

  “Aura it is, then. It changes nothing, does it? You came all this way to find us. Now you have. And there’s nothing to prevent the dean from giving us to you.”

  Grelier shook his head, as if he alone were the victim of an extended joke. “The suit is talking. The suit is talking and you’re all just standing around as if this happens every day.”

  “For some of us,” Quaiche said, “it does.”

  “These are the shadows?” Grelier asked.

  “An envoy of the shadows,” the suit said. “The distinction need not detain us. Now, please, we must be removed from the Lady Morwenna immediately.”

  “You’ll stay here,” Quaiche said.

  “No,” Rashmika said. “Dean—give us the suit. It doesn’t matter to you, but it means everything to us. The shadows are going to help us survive the Inhibitors. But that suit is our only direct line of communication with them.”

  “If they mean that much to you, send another probe into Haldora.”

  “We don’t know that it will work twice. Whatever happened to you may have been a fluke. We can’t gamble everything on the off chance that it might happen again.”

  “Listen to her,” the suit said urgently. “She is right: we are your only guaranteed contact with the shadows. You must safeguard us, if you wish our assistance.”

  “And the price of this assistance?” Quaiche asked.

  “Nothing compared to the price of extinction. We wish only to be allowed to cross over from our side of the bulk. Is that so much to ask? Is that so great a cost to pay?”

  Rashmika faced the others, feeling as if she had been appointed as witness for the shadows. “They can cross over provided that the matter-synthesiser is allowed to function. It’s a machine at the heart of the Haldora receiver. It will make them bodies, and their minds will slip across the bulk and inhabit them.”

  “Machines, again,” Vasko said. “We run from one group, and now we negotiate with another.”

  “If that’s what it takes,” Rashmika said. “And they’re only machines because they had no choice, after everything they’d lived through.” She remembered, in hypnagogic flashes, the vision she had been granted of life in the shadow universe: of entire galaxies stained green with the marauding blight; suns like emerald lanterns. “They were a lot like us once,” she added. “Closer than we realise.”

  “They’re demons,” Quaiche said. “Not people at all. Not even machines.”

  “Demons?” Grelier asked tolerantly.

  “Sent to test my faith, of course. To undermine my belief in the miracle. To pollute my mind with fantasies of other universes. To make me doubt that the vanishings are the word of God. To cause me to stumble, in the hour of my greatest testing. It’s no coincidence, you know: as my plans for Hela grew towards culmination, so the demons increased their taunting of me.”

  “They were scared you’d destroy them,” Rashmika said. “The mistake they made was to deal with you as a rational individual. If only they had pretended to be demons or angels they might have got somewhere.” She leant over him, until she could smell his breath: old and vinegary, like a disused wine cellar. “They may be demons to you, Dean, I won’t deny it. But don’t deny them to us.”

  ‘They are demons,“ he said. ”And that’s why I can’t let you have them. I should have had the courage to destroy them years ago.“

  “Please,” Rashmika said.

  Something else chimed on his couch. Quaiche pursed his lips, closed his eyes in ecstasy or dread.

  “It’s done,” he said. “The ship’s in the holdfast. I have what I wanted.”

  THE VIEWSCREEN SHOWED them everything. The Nostalgia for Infinity lay lengthwise in the pen Quaiche had prepared for it, like some captured sea creature of monstrous, mythic proportions. The clasps and supports of the cradle clutched the hull in a hundred places, expertly conforming to its irregularities and architectural flourishes. The damage that the ship had wrought upon itself during its descent—the shedding of the hull around the midsection and the disgorging of so many internal parts—was obvious now, and for a moment Quaiche wondered if his prize would be too weakened to serve his needs. But the doubt vanished immediately: the ship had withstood the stresses of the approach to the holdfast and the final, brutal mating procedure as it came to a crunching stop in the cradle. The harness machinery had been engineered to dampen the impact of that moving mass, but the instant of collision had still sent all the stress indicators into the red. Yet the harness had held—enough of it, anyway—and so had the ship. The lighthugger had not broken her back, her engines had not been ripped away from their outriggers. It had survived the hardest part of its journey, and nothing else that he asked of it would put quite the same load on it as the capture. It was everything that he had anticipated.

  Quaiche signalled his audience closer. “Look at it. See how the rear of the ship is being elevated to align the exhaust away from Hela’s surface. A slight angle, but critical nonetheless.”

  “As soon as the engines are fired,” Vasko said, “she’ll rip her way out of your holdfast.”

  Quaiche shook his head. “No, she won’t. I didn�
��t just pick the first place on the map, you know. This is a region of extreme geological stability. The holdfast itself is anchored deep into Hela’s crust. It won’t budge. Trust me: after all the effort I went to getting my hands on that ship, do you think I’d forget geology?” Another chime. Quaiche bent a speaking stalk towards his lips and whispered something to his contact in the holdfast. “She’s elevated now,” he said. “No reason not to begin firing. Mr. Malinin?”

  Vasko spoke into his communicator. He asked for Scorpio, but it was another senior who answered.

  “Request that the ship fire its engines,” Vasko said.

  But even before he had finished his sentence they saw the engines light. Twin spikes of purple-edged white lanced from the Conjoiner drives, their brilliance overloading the camera. The ship crept forwards in the harness, like a last, weakened effort at escape by a captured sea creature. But the holding machines flexed, absorbing the shock of drive activation, and the ship gradually returned to its earlier position. The engines burned clean and steady.

  “Look,” Grelier said, pointing to one of the garret’s windows. “We can see it.”

  The exhaust beams were two scratches of fading white, probing over the horizon like searchlights.

  A moment later, they felt a tremble run through the Lady Morwenna.

  Quaiche summoned Grelier, gestured at his eyes. “Take this monstrosity off my face. I don’t need it any more.”

  “The eye-opener?”

  “Remove it. Gently.”

  Grelier did as he was told, carefully levering the metal frame away from its subject.

  “Your eyelids will take a while to settle back,” Grelier told him. “In the meantime, I’d keep the glasses on.”

  Quaiche held the shades to his face, like a child playing with an adult’s spectacles. Without the eye7opener, they were much too large to stay in place.

  “Now we can leave,” he said.

  SCORPIO LOPED BACK to the squat pebble of his ship, climbed in through the open doorframe and took the little craft away from the remains of the bridge. The gashed landscape wheeled below him, myriad sharp black shadows stretching across it like individual ink-spills. One wall of the Rift was now as dark as night, while the other was illuminated only near its top. Some part of him wanted the bridge to still be there; wanted his last act to have been revoked so that he could have more time to consider its consequences. He had always felt that way after he hurt someone or something. He always regretted his impulsiveness, but the one thing about the regret was that it never lasted.

  The experts had been wrong about the bridge, he now knew. It was a human artefact, not something made by the scuttlers at all. It had certainly been here for more than a century, but it might not have been very much older than that. But until it was shattered, broken open, its origin—its very nature—had remained unknown. It was a thing of advanced science, but it was the advanced science of the Demarchist era rather than the vanished aliens.“ He thought of the man who had appeared on the ice, his sense of anguish that his beautiful, pointless creation had been destroyed. But it was a recording, not a live transmission. It must have been made when the bridge was made, designed to activate when the structure was damaged or destroyed. It meant that the man had always considered this possibility; had even perhaps anticipated it. To Scorpio he had sounded very much like someone being vindicated.

  The ship pulled away from the side of the Rift. He was over solid ground now, with the roughly defined track of the Way visible below him. There, no more than three or four kilometres away, was the Lady Morwenna, throwing its own shadow far back along the route it had travelled, dragging it like a great black wedding train. He pushed the bridge and its maker from his mind. Everything he wanted, everything that mattered now, was in that cathedral. And he had to find a way to get inside it.

  He took his ship closer, until he could make out the slow, inching crawl of the great walking machine. There was something hypnotic and calming about the sequenced movements of the flying buttresses. It was not his imagination, then: the Lady Morwenna was still moving, seemingly oblivious to the nonexistence of any safe crossing ahead of it.

  He hadn’t expected that.

  Perhaps it would start slowing any moment now, as forward sensors detected the interruption in its route. Or perhaps it was simply going to keep walking towards the edge, exactly as if the bridge still existed. A thought occurred to him for the first time: what if stopping really wasn’t an option, and not just bluster on Quaiche’s part?

  He slid the ship to within five hundred metres of the cathedral, approximately level with the top of its main tower. All he needed was a landing stage, or something he could improvise as one, and some means of accessing the interior of the cathedral from there. The main landing pad was too crowded; he couldn’t put his ship down on it without risking a collision with one of the other two craft already occupying it. One of them was an unfamiliar red cockleshell; the other was the shuttle Vasko and Khouri had brought from the Nostalgia for Infinity. The shuttle was the only ship capable of getting all of them—including Aura and the suit—back into orbit, so he was anxious not to damage it or push it from the landing stage.

  But there were other possibilities, and a landing on the designated pad would have lacked the element of surprise. He circled the cathedral, tapping the thruster stud to hold his altitude steady, watching the stuttering glare flicker against the Lady Morwenna like midsummer lightning. The shadows and highlights moved with him, making the architectural features appear to slide and ooze against each other, as if the cathedral were yawning, waking from some tremendous sleep of stone and metal. Even the gargoyles joined in the illusion of movement, their gape-jawed heads seeming to track him with the smooth, oiled malevolence of weapons turrets.

  It wasn’t an illusion.

  He saw a flash of fire from one of the gargoyles, and then felt his ship shudder and lurch. In his helmet, alarms rang. The console lit up with emergency icons. He saw the cathedral and the landscape tilt alarmingly and felt the ship begin a sharp, barely controlled descent. The thrusters fired urgently, doing their best to stabilise the falling craft, but there was no hope of getting away from the Lady Morwenna, let alone of reaching orbit. Scorpio pulled hard on the controls, trying to steer the damaged ship away from the gargoyle defence systems. His chest hurt as he applied maximum pressure to the steering stick, making him groan and bite his bottom lip. He tasted his own blood. Another head vomited red fire towards him. The ship lurched and fell even more swiftly. He braced for the impact; it came an instant later. He stayed conscious as the ship slammed into the ice, but cried out with the pain—a pure meaningless roar of rage and indignation. The ship rolled, finally coming to rest on its side. The open door was above him, neatly framing the revealed heart of Haldora.

  He waited for at least a minute before moving.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  THE DETACHMENT OF Cathedral Guard kept watch over their prisoners while Grelier left the garret with whispered orders from Quaiche buzzing in his ear. When he returned he brought with him a suit of approximately the right size for Rashmika: a blood-red Adventist model rather than the One she had worn during her journey aboard the caravan.

  Grelier dropped the pieces of the suit into her lap. “Put it on,” he said. “And don’t take an eternity doing it. I want to get off this thing as much as you do.”

  “I’m not leaving without the scrimshaw suit,” she said, before glancing at her mother. “Or my friends. They’re coming with me, both of them.”

  “No,” Quaiche said. “They’re staying here, at least until you and I reach the safety of the ship.”

  “Which ship?” Vasko asked.

  “Your ship, of course,” Quaiche said, as if this should have been obvious. “The Nostalgia for Infinity. There’s still rather a lot I don’t know about it. The ship even appears to have something of a mind of its own. Mysteries, mysteries: doubtless we’ll get to the bottom of them all in good time.
What I do know is this: I don’t trust that ship not to do something stupid like making itself blow up.”

  “There are people aboard it,” Vasko said.

  “A fully armed squad of Cathedral Guard will be attempting occupation from the holdfast even as I speak. They will have the weapons and armour denied to the earlier infiltration units, and they won’t need to wait for back-up from spaceborne elements. I assure you: they’ll have that ship flushed clean in a matter of hours, no matter what tricks it tries to play on them. In the meantime, it seems to me that the one thing guaranteed to stop that ship from doing anything foolish would be the presence of Rashmika—apologies, Aura—herself. After all, it practically threw itself into my holdfast as soon as I declared my position.”

  “I won’t save you,” Rashmika said. “With me or without me, Dean, you’re a dead man unless you give me the shadows.”

  “The shadows stay here, with your friends.”

  “That’s murder.”

  “No, merely prudence.” He beckoned one of the Cathedral Guard officers closer to his couch. “Haken, keep them here until you have news of my safe arrival in the holdfast. I should be there within thirty minutes, but you are not to act without my word. Understood?”

  The guard acknowledged him with a nod. “And if we don’t hear from you, Dean?

  “The cathedral won’t reach the western limit of the bridge for another four hours. In three hours and thirty minutes, you may release your prisoners and make your own escape. Regroup at the holdfast at your earliest convenience.”

  “And the suit, sir?” Haken asked.

  “It goes down with the Lady Mor. The cathedral will take its demons with it when it dies.” Quaiche directed his attention towards Grelier, who was helping Rashmika with the final details of the Adventist suit. “Surgeon-General? Would you happen to have your medical kit, by any chance?”

  Grelier looked affronted. “I never leave home without it.”

  “Then open it. Find a syringe containing something potent, like DEUS-X. That should be sufficient encouragement, don’t you agree?”