Absolution Gap rs-4

by Alastair Reynolds

  “But someone must have been here before,” Morwenna said, “or there wouldn’t be a bridge.”

  Quaiche smiled. This was the part he had been looking forward to. “That’s just the point. I don’t think anyone did build this bridge.” He wriggled free into the cramped volume of the excursion bay, lights coming on as the chamber sensed his body heat. “No one human, at any rate.”

  Morwenna, to her credit, took this last revelation in her stride. Perhaps he was easier to read than he imagined.

  “You think you’ve stumbled on an alien artefact, is that it?”

  “No,” Quaiche said. “I don’t think I’ve stumbled on an alien artefact. I think I’ve stumbled on the fucking alien artefact to end them all. I think I’ve found the most amazing, beautiful object in the known universe.”

  “What if it’s something natural?”

  “If I could show you the images, rest assured that you would immediately dismiss such trifling concerns.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be so hasty, all the same. I’ve seen what nature can do, given time and space. Things you wouldn’t believe could be anything other than the work of intelligent minds.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “But this is something different. Trust me, all right?”

  “Of course I’ll trust you. It’s not as if I have a lot of choice in the matter.”

  “Not quite the answer I was hoping for,” Quaiche said, “but I suppose it’ll have to do for now.”

  He turned around in the tight confines of the bay. The entire space was about the size of a small washroom, with something of the same antiseptic lustre. A tight squeeze at the best of times, but even more so now that the bay was occupied by Quaiche’s tiny personal spacecraft, clamped on to its berthing cradle, poised above the elongated trap door that allowed access to space.

  With his usual furtive admiration, Quaiche stroked the smooth armour of the Scavenger’s Daughter. The ship purred at his touch, shivering in her harness.

  “Easy, girl,” Quaiche whispered.

  The little craft looked more like a luxury toy than the robust exploration vessel it actually was. Barely larger than Quaiche himself, the sleek vessel was the product of the last wave of high Demarchist science. Her faintly translucent aerodynamic hull resembled something that had been carved and polished with great artistry from a single hunk of amber. Mechanical viscera of bronze and silver glimmered beneath the surface. Flexible wings curled tightly against her flanks, various sensors and probes tucked back into sealed recesses within the hull.

  “Open,” Quaiche whispered.

  The ship did something that always made his head hurt. With a flourish, various parts of the hull hitherto apparently seamlessly joined to their neighbours slid or contracted, curled or twisted aside, revealing in an eyeblink the tight cavity inside. The space—lined with padding, life-support apparatus, controls and read-outs—was just large enough for a prone human being. There was something both obscene and faintly seductive about the way the machine seemed to invite him into herself.

  By rights, he ought to have been filled with claustrophobic anxiety at the thought of climbing into her. But instead he looked forward to it, prickling with eagerness. Rather than feeling trapped within the amber translucence of the hull, he felt connected through it to the rich immensity of the universe. The tiny jewel-like ship had enabled him to skim deep into the atmospheres of worlds, even beneath the surfaces of oceans. The ship’s transducers relayed ambient data to him through all his senses, including touch. He had felt the chill of alien seas, the radiance of alien sunsets. In his five previous survey operations for the queen he had seen miracles and wonders, drunk in the giddy ecstasy of it all. It was merely unfortunate that none of those miracles and wonders had been the kind you could take away and sell at a profit.

  Quaiche lowered himself into the Daughter. The ship oozed and shifted around him, adjusting to match his shape.

  “Horris?”

  “Yes, love?”

  “Horris, where are you?”

  “I’m in the excursion bay, inside the Daughter.”

  “No, Horris.”

  “I have to. I have to go down to see what that thing really is.”

  “I don’t want you to leave me.”

  “I know. I don’t want to leave either. But I’ll still be in contact. The timelag won’t be bad; it’ll be just as if I’m right next to you.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  He sighed. He had always known this would be the difficult part. More than once it had crossed his mind that perhaps the kindest thing would be to leave without telling her, and just hope that the relayed communications gave nothing away. Knowing Morwenna, however, she would have seen through this gambit very quickly. -

  “I’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be in and out in a few hours.” A day, more likely, but that was still a “few” hours, wasn’t it? Morwenna would understand.

  “Why can’t you just take the Dominatrix closer?”

  “Because I can’t risk it,” Quaiche said. “You know how I like to work. The Dominatrix is big and heavy. It has armour and range, but it lacks agility and intelligence. If we—I—run into anything nasty, the Daughter can get me out of harm’s way a lot faster. This little ship is cleverer than me. And we can’t risk damaging or losing the Dominatrix. The Daughter doesn’t have the range to catch up with the Gnostic Ascension. Face it, love, the Dominatrix is our ticket out of here. We can’t place it in harm’s way.” Hastily he added, “Or you, for that matter.”

  “I don’t care about getting back to the Ascension. I’ve burned my bridges with that power-crazed slut and her toadying crew.”

  “It’s not as if I’m in a big hurry to get back there myself, but the fact is we need Grelier to get you out of that suit.”

  “If we stay here, there’ll be other Ultras along eventually.”

  “Yeah,” Quaiche said, “and they’re all such nice people, aren’t they? Sorry, love, but this is definitely a case of working with the devil you know. Look, I’ll be quick. I’ll stay in constant voice contact. I’ll give you a guided tour of that bridge so good you’ll be seeing it in your mind’s eye, just as if you were there. I’ll sing to you. I’ll tell you jokes. How does that sound?”

  “I’m scared. I know you have to do this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m still scared.”

  “I’m scared as well,” he told her. “I’d be mad not be scared. And I really don’t want to leave you. But I have no choice.”

  She was quiet for a moment. Quaiche busied himself checking the systems of the little ship; as each element came on line, he felt a growing anticipatory thrill.

  Morwenna spoke again. “If it is a bridge, what are you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, how big is it?”

  “Big. Thirty, forty kilometres across.”

  “In which case you can’t very well bring it back with you.”

  “Mm. You’re right. Got me there. What was I thinking?”

  “What I mean, Horris, is that you’ll have to find a way to make it valuable to Jasmina, even though it has to stay on the planet.”

  “I’ll think of something,” Quaiche said, with a brio he did not feel. “At the very least Jasmina can cordon off the planet and sell tickets to anyone who wants to take a closer look. Anyway, if they built a bridge, they might have built something else. Whoever they were.”

  “When you’re out there,” Morwenna said, “you promise me you’ll take care?”

  “Caution’s my middle name,” Quaiche said.

  The tiny ship fell away from the Dominatrix, orientating herself with a quick, excited shiver of thrust. To Quaiche it always felt as if the craft enjoyed her sudden liberation from the docking harness.

  He lay with his arms stretched ahead of his face, each hand gripping an elaborate control handle bristling with buttons and levers. Between the control handles was a head-up display screen showing an overview of the Scavenge
r’s Daughter’s systems and a schematic of her position in relation to the nearest major celestial body. The diagrams had the sketchy, cross-hatched look of early Renaissance astronomy or medical illustrations: quilled black ink against sepia parchment, annotated in crabby Latin script. His dim reflection hovered in the glass of the head-up display.

  Through the translucent hull he watched the docking bay seal itself. The

  Dominatrix grew rapidly smaller, dwindling until it was only a dark, vaguely cruciform scratch against the face of Haldora. He thought of Morwenna, still inside the Dominatrix and encased within the scrimshaw suit, with a renewed sense of urgency. The bridge on Hela was without doubt the strangest thing he had seen in all his travels. If this was not precisely the kind of exotic item Jasmina was interested in, then he had no idea what was. All he had to do was sell it to her, and make her forgive him his earlier failures. If a huge alien artefact didn’t do the trick, what would?

  When it became difficult to pick out the other ship without an overlay, Quaiche felt a palpable easing in his mood. Aboard the Dominatrix he never entirely lost the feeling that he was under the constant vigilance of Queen Jasmina. It was entirely possible that the queen’s agents had installed listening devices in addition to those he was meant to know about. Aboard the much smaller Scavenger’s Daughter, though, he seldom felt Jasmina’s eye on him. The little ship actually belonged to him: she answered only to Quaiche and was the single most valuable asset he had ever owned in his life. She had been a not-insignificant incentive when he had first offered his services to the queen.

  The Ultras were undoubtedly clever, but he did not think they were quite clever enough to bypass the many systems the Daughter carried aboard her to prevent surveillance taps or other forms of unwarranted intrusion. It was not much of an empire, Quaiche supposed, but the little ship was his and that was all that mattered. In her he could revel in solitude, every sense splayed open to the absolute.

  To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust.

  Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales.

  For a long time this realisation had formed an important element of Quaiche’s personal creed, and he supposed he had always lived by it, to one degree or another. But it had taken space travel—and the loneliness that his new profession brought—to give him some external validation of his philosophy.

  But now there was something in his universe that really mattered to him, something that could be hurt by his own actions. How had it come to this? he wondered. How had he allowed himself to make such a fatal mistake as to fall in love? And especially with a creature as exotic and complicated as Morwenna?

  “Where had it all begun to go wrong?

  Gloved within the Daughter’s hull, he barely felt the surge of acceleration as the ship powered up to her maximum sustainable thrust. The sliver of the Dominatrix was utterly lost now; it may as well not have existed.

  Quaiche’s ship aimed for Hela, Haldora’s largest moon.

  He opened a communications channel back to the Gnostic Ascension to record a message.

  “This is Quaiche. I trust all is well, ma’am. Thank you for the little incentive you saw fit to pop aboard. Very thoughtful of you. Or was that all Grelier’s work? A droll gesture, one that—I’m sure you can imagine—was also appreciated by Morwenna.” He waited a moment. “Well, to business. You may be interested to hear that I have detected… something: a large horizontal structure on the moon that we’re calling Hela. It looks rather like a bridge. Beyond that, I can’t say for sure. The Dominatrix doesn’t have the sensor range, and I don’t want to risk taking it closer. But I think it is very likely to be an artificial structure. I am therefore investigating the object using the Scavenger’s Daughter—she’s faster, smarter and she has better armour. I do not expect my excursion to last more than twenty-six hours. I will of course keep you informed of any developments.“

  Quaiche replayed the message and decided that it would be unwise to transmit it. Even if he did find something, even if that something turned out to be more valuable than anything he had turned up in the five previous systems, the queen would still accuse him of making it sound more promising than it actually was. She did not like to be disappointed. The way to play the queen, Quaiche now knew, was with studied understatement. Give her hints, not promises.

  He wiped the message and started again.

  “Quaiche here. Have an anomaly that requires further investigation. Commencing EVA excursion in the Daughter. Estimate return to the Dominatrix within… one day.”

  He listened to that and decided it was an improvement, but not quite there yet.

  He scrubbed the buffer again and drew a deep breath.

  “Quaiche. Popping outside for a bit. May be some time. Call you back.”

  There. That did it.

  He transmitted the buffer, aiming the message laser in the computed direction of the Gnostic Ascension and applying the usual encryption filters and relativistic corrections. The queen would receive his announcement in seven hours. He hoped she would be suitably mystified, without in any way being able to claim that he was exaggerating the likely value of a find.

  Keep the bitch guessing.

  Hela, 2727

  What Culver had told Rashmika Els was not quite the truth. The icejammer was moving as quickly as it could in ambulatory mode, but once it cleared the slush and obstacles of the village and hit a well-maintained trail, it locked its two rear legs in a fixed configuration and began to move by itself, as if pushed along by an invisible hand. Rashmika had heard enough about icejammers to know that the trick was down to a layer of material on the soles of the skis that was programmed with a rapid microscopic ripple. It was the same way slugs moved, scaled up a few thousand times in both size and speed. The ride became smoother and quieter then; there was still the occasional lurch or veer, but for the most part it was tolerable.

  “That’s better,” Rashmika said, now sitting up front with just Crozet and his wife Linxe. “I thought I was going to…”

  “Throw up, dear?” Linxe asked. “There’s no shame in that. We’ve all thrown up around here.”

  “She can’t do this on anything other than smooth ground,” Crozet said. “Trouble is, she doesn’t walk properly either. Servo’s fucked on one of the legs. That’s why it was so rough back there. It’s also the reason we’re making this trip. The caravans carry the kind of high-tech shit we can’t make or repair back in the badlands.”

  “Language,” Linxe said, smacking her husband sharply on the wrist. “We’ve a young lady present, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Don’t mind me,” Rashmika said. She was beginning to relax: they were safely beyond the village now, and there was no sign that anyone had tried to stop or pursue them.

  “He’s not talking sense in any case,” Linxe said. “The caravans might have the kinds of things we need, but they won’t be giving any of it away for free.” She turned to Crozet. “Will they, love?”

  Linxe was a well-fed woman with red hair that she wore swept across one side of her face, hiding a birthmark. She had known Rashmika since Rashmika was much smaller, when Linxe had helped out at the communal nursery in the next village along.

  She had always been kind and attentive to Rashmika, but there had been some kind of minor scandal a few years later and Linxe had been dismissed from the nursery. She had married Crozet not long afterwards. The village gossips said it was just desserts,
that the two deserved each other, but in Rashmika’s view Crozet was all right. A bit of an oddball, kept him-self to himself, that was all. When Linxe had been ostracised he would have been one of the few villagers prepared to give her the time of day. Regardless, Rashmika still liked Linxe, and consequently found it difficult to hold any great animosity towards her husband.

  Crozet steered the icejammer with two joysticks set one on either side of his seat. He had permanent blue stubble and oily black hair. Just looking at him always made Rashmika want to have a wash.

  “I’m not expecting sod all for free,” Crozet said. “We may not make the same profit we did last year, but show me the bastard who will.”

  “Would you think about relocating closer to the Way?” Rashmika asked.

  Crozet wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’d rather chew my own leg off.”

  “Crozet’s not exactly a church-going man,” Linxe explained.

  “I’m not the most spiritual person in the badlands, either,” Rashmika said, “but if it was a choice between that and starving, I’m not sure how long my convictions would last.”

  “How old are you again?” Linxe asked.