Absolution Gap rs-4

by Alastair Reynolds

  “We’re approaching the Ginnungagap Rift.” He paused. “You know about the rift, of course. Everything has to cross it at some point.”

  Rashmika visualised the laceration of the Rift, a deep sheer-sided ice canyon slicing diagonally across the equator. It was the largest geological feature on the planet, the first thing Quaiche had named on his approach.

  “I thought there was only one safe crossing,” she said.

  “For the cathedrals, yes,” he allowed. “The Way deviates a little to the north, where the walls of the Rift have been tiered in a zigzag fashion to allow the cathedrals to descend to the floor. It’s a laborious process, costs them days, and then they have to repeat the process climbing up the far side. They need a good head start on Haldora if they aren’t to slip behind. They call that route the Devil’s Staircase, and every cathedral master secretly dreads it. The descent is narrow and collapses aren’t uncommon. But we don’t have to take the Staircase: there’s another way across the Rift, you see. A cathedral can’t make it, but a caravan doesn’t weigh anywhere near as much as a cathedral.”

  “You’re talking about the bridge,” Rashmika said, with a shiver of fear and anticipation.

  “You’ve seen it, then.”

  “Only in photos.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I think it looks beautiful,” she said, “beautiful and delicate, like something blown from glass. Much too delicate for machines.”

  “We’ve crossed it before.”

  “But no one knows how much it can take.”

  “I think we can trust the scuttlers in that regard, wouldn’t you say? The experts say it’s been there for millions of years.”

  “They say a lot of things,” Rashmika replied, “but we don’t know for sure how old it is, or who built it. It doesn’t look much like anything else the scuttlers left behind, does it? And we certainly don’t know that it was ever meant to be crossed.”

  “You seem unnaturally worried about what is—in all honesty—a technically simple manoeuvre, one that will save us many precious days. Might I ask why?”

  “Because I know what they call that crossing,” she said. “Ginnungagap Rift is what Quaiche named the canyon, but they have another name for it, don’t they? Especially those who decide to cross the bridge. They call it Absolution Gap. They say you’d better be free from sin before you begin the crossing.”

  “But of course, you don’t believe in the existence of sin, do you?”

  “I believe in the existence of reckless stupidity,” Rashmika replied.

  “Well, you needn’t worry yourself about that. All you have to do is enjoy the view, just like the other pilgrims.”

  “I’m no pilgrim,” she said.

  The quaestor smiled and popped something into his pet’s mouth. “We’re all either pilgrims or martyrs. In my experience, it’s better to be a pilgrim.”

  Ararat, 2675

  Antoinette put on the goggles. The view through them was like a smoky counterpart of the real room, with red Canasian numerals tumbling in her right visual field. For a moment nothing else changed. The haphazard skeletal machine—the class-three apparition—continued to stand amid the discarded slurry of junk from which it had been birthed, one limb frozen in the act of tossing her the goggles.

  “Captain…” she began.

  But even as she spoke the apparition and its detritus were merging into the background, losing sharpness and contrast against the general clutter of the chamber. The goggles were not working perfectly, and in one square part of her visual field the skeletal machine remained unedited, but elsewhere it was vanishing like buildings into a wall of sea fog.

  Antoinette did not like this. The machinery had not threatened her, but it troubled her not to have a good idea of where it was. She was reaching up for the goggles, ready to slip them off, when a voice buzzed in her ear.

  “Don’t. Keep them on. You need them to see me.”

  “Captain?”

  “I promise I won’t hurt you. Look.”

  She looked. Something was emerging now, being slowly edited into her visual field. A human figure—utterly real, this time—was forming out of thin air. Antoinette took an involuntary step backwards, catching her torch against an obstruction and dropping it to the floor.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” he told her. “This is what you came for, isn’t it?”

  “Right now I’m not sure,” she breathed.

  The human figure had stepped out of history. He wore a truly ancient space suit, a baggy, bulging affair of crinkled rust-orange fabric. His boots and thick-fingered gloves were clad in the same tawny material, ripped here and there to reveal a laminated mesh of underlying layers. He wore a dull silver belt festooned with numerous tools of unclear function. A rugged square box hung on the chest region of his suit, studded with chunky plastic-sealed controls large enough to be worked despite the handicap of the gloves. An even larger box sat on his back, rising above his neck. Moulded from bright red plastic, a thick ribbed hose dangled from the backpack over his left shoulder, its open end resting against the upper shelf of the chest-pack. The silver band of the suit’s neck ring was a complexity of locking mechanisms and black rubberised seals. Between the neck ring and the upper part of the suit were many unrecognisable logos and insignia.

  He wore no helmet.

  The Captain’s face looked too small for the suit. On his scalp—which appeared shaven—he wore a padded black and white cap veined with monitor wires. In the smoky light of the goggles she couldn’t guess at the shade of his skin. It was smooth, stretched tight over his cheekbones, shadowed with a week’s growth of patchy black beard. He had very fine razor-cut eyebrows, which arched quizzically above wide-set, doglike eyes. She could see the whites of those eyes between the pupil and the lower eyelid. He had the kind of mouth—thin, straight, perfect for a certain superciliousness—that she might find either fascinating or untrustworthy, depending on her mood. He did not look like a man much inclined to small talk. Usually that was all right with Antoinette.

  “I brought this back,” she said. She stooped down and picked up the helmet.

  “Give it to me.”

  She moved to throw it.

  “No,” he said sharply. “Give it to me. Walk closer and hand it to me.”

  “I’m not sure I’m ready to do that,” she said.

  “It’s called a gesture of mutual trust. You either do it or the conversation ends here. I’ve already said I won’t hurt you. Didn’t you believe me?”

  She thought of the machinery that the goggles had edited out of her vision. Perhaps if she took them off, so that she saw the apparition as it really was…

  “Leave the goggles on. That’s also part of the deal.”

  She took a step closer. It was clear that she had no choice.

  “Good. Now give me the helmet.”

  Another step. Then one more. The Captain waited with his hands at his sides, his eyes encouraging her forwards.

  “I understand that you’re scared,” he said. “That’s the point. If you weren’t frightened, there’d be no show of trust, would there?”

  “I’m just wondering what you’re getting out of this.”

  “I’m trusting you not to let me down. Now pass me the helmet.”

  She held it out in front of her, as far as her arms would stretch, and the Captain reached out to take it from her. The goggles lagged slightly, so that a flicker of machinery was briefly visible as his arms moved. His gloved fingers closed around the helmet. She heard the rasp of metal on metal.

  The Captain took a step back. “Good,” he said, approvingly. He rolled the helmet in his hands, inspecting it for signs of wear. Antoinette noticed now that there was a vacant round socket in one side, into which the red umbilical was meant to plug. “Thank you for bringing this down to me. The gesture is appreciated.”

  “You left it with Palfrey. That wasn’t an accident, was it?”

  “I suppose not. What did you say
it was—a ‘calling card?’ Not far from the truth, I guess.”

  “I took it as a sign that you were willing to talk to someone.”

  “You seemed very anxious to talk to me,” he said.

  “We were. We are.” She looked at the apparition with a mixture of fear and dangerous, seductive relief. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” She took his silence to indicate assent. “What shall I call you? ‘Captain’ doesn’t seem quite right to me, not now that we’ve been through the mutual-trust thing.”

  “Fair point,” he conceded, not sounding entirely convinced. “John will do for now.”

  “Then, John, what have I done to deserve this? It wasn’t just my bringing back the helmet, was it?”

  “Like I said, you seemed anxious to talk.”

  Antoinette bent down to pick up her torch. “I’ve been trying to reach you for years, with no success at all. What’s changed?”

  “I feel different now,” he said.

  “As if you were asleep but have finally woken up?”

  “It’s more as if I need to be awake now. Does that answer your question?”

  “I’m not sure. This might sound rude, but… who am I talking to, exactly?”

  “You’re talking to me. As I am. As I was.”

  “No one really knows who you were, John. That suit looks pretty old to me.”

  A gloved hand moved across the square chest-pack, tracing a pattern from point to point. To Antoinette it looked like a benediction, but it might equally have been a rote-learned inspection of critical systems. Air supply, pressure integrity, thermal control, comms, waste management … she knew that litany herself.

  “I was on Mars,” he said.

  “I’ve never been there,” she said.

  “No?” He sounded disappointed.

  “Fact of the matter is, I really haven’t seen all that many worlds. Yellowstone, a bit of Resurgam, and this place. But never Mars. What was it like?”

  “Different. Wilder. Colder. Savage. Unforgiving. Cruel. Pristine. Bleak. Beautiful. Like a lover with a temper.”

  “But this was a while back, wasn’t it?”

  “Uh huh. How old do you think this suit is?”

  “It looks pretty damn antique to me.”

  “They haven’t made suits like this since the twenty-first century. You think Clavain’s old, a relic from history. I was an old man before he took a breath.”

  It surprised her to hear him mention Clavain by name. Clearly the Captain was more aware of shipboard developments than some gave him credit for. “You’ve come a long way, then,” she said.

  “It’s been a long, strange trip, yes. And just look where it’s brought me.”

  “You must have some stories to tell.” Antoinette reckoned that there were two safe areas of conversation: the present and the very distant past. The last thing she wanted was to have the Captain dwelling on his recent sickness and bizarre transformation.

  “There are some stories I don’t want told,” he said. “But isn’t that true for us all?”

  “No argument from me.”

  His thin slit of a mouth hinted at a smile. “Dark secrets in your own past, Antoinette?”

  “Nothing I’m going to lose any sleep over, not when we have so much else we need to worry about.”

  “Ah.” He rotated the helmet in his gloved hands. “The difficult matter of the present. I am aware of things, of course, perhaps more than you realise. I know, for instance, that there are other agencies in the system.”

  “You feel them?”

  “It was their noises that woke me from long, calm dreams of Mars.” He regarded the icons and decals on the helmet, stroking them with the stubby tip of one gloved finger. Antoinette wondered about the memories they stirred, preserved across five or six hundred years of experience. Memories thick with the grey dust of centuries.

  “We thought that you were waking,” she said. “In the last few weeks we’ve become more aware of your presence. We didn’t think it was coincidence, especially after what Khouri told us. I know you remember Khouri, John, or you wouldn’t have brought me down here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “With Clavain and the others.”

  “And Ilia? Where is Ilia?”

  Antoinette was sweating. The temptation to lie, to offer a soothing platitude, was overwhelming. But she did not doubt for one instant that the Captain would see through any attempt at deception. “Ilia’s dead.”

  The black and white cap bowed down. “I thought I might have dreamed it,” he said. “That’s the problem now. I can’t always tell what’s real and what’s imagined. I might be dreaming you at this very moment.”

  “I’m real,” she said, as if her assurance would make any difference, “but Ilia’s dead. You remember what happened, don’t you?”

  His voice was soft and thoughtful, like a child remembering the significant events in a nursery tale. “I remember that she was here, and that we were alone. I remember her lying in a bed, with people around her.”

  What was she going to tell him now? That the reason Ilia had been in a bed in the first place was because she had suffered injuries during her efforts to thwart the Captain’s own suicide attempt, when he had directed one of the cache weapons against the hull of the ship. The scar he had inflicted on the hull was visible even now, a vertical fissure down one side of the spire. She was certain that on some level he knew all this but also that he did not need to be reminded of it now.

  “She died,” Antoinette said, “trying to save us all. I gave her the use of my ship, Storm Bird, after we’d used it to rescue the last colonists from Resurgam.”

  “But I remember her being unwell.”

  “She wasn’t so unwell that she couldn’t fly a ship. Thing is, John, she felt she had something to atone for. You remember what she did to the colonists, when your crew were trying to find Sylveste? Made them think she’d wiped out a whole settlement in a fit of pique? That’s why they wanted her for a war criminal. Towards the end, I wonder whether she didn’t start believing it herself. How are we to know what went through her head? If enough people hate you, it can’t be easy not to start thinking they might be right.”

  “She wasn’t a particularly good woman,” the Captain said, “but she wasn’t what they made her out to be. She only ever did what she thought right for the ship.”

  “I guess that makes her a good woman in my book. Right now the ship is about all we have, John.”

  “Do you think it worked for her?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Atonement, Antoinette. Do you think it made the slightest difference, in the end?”

  “I can’t guess what went through her mind.”

  “Did it make any difference to the rest of you?”

  “We’re here, aren’t we? We got out of the system alive. If Ilia hadn’t taken her stand, we’d probably all be smeared over a few light-hours of local solar space around Resurgam.”

  “I hope you’re right. I did forgive her, you know.”

  Antoinette knew that it had been Ilia who had allowed the Captain’s Melding Plague to finally engulf the ship. At the time she did it, it had seemed the only way to rid the ship of a different kind of parasite entirely. Antoinette did not think that Ilia had taken the decision lightly. Equally—based on her very limited experience of the woman—she did not think consideration of the Captain’s feelings had had very much influence on her decision.

  “That’s pretty generous of you,” she said.

  “I realise that she did it for the ship. I realise also that she could have killed me instead. I think she wanted to, after she learned what I had done to Sajaki.”

  “Sorry, but that’s way before my time.”

  “I murdered a good man,” the Captain said. “Ilia knew. When she did this to me, when she made me what I am, she knew what I’d done. I would have sooner she’d killed me.”

  “Then you’ve paid for whatever you did,” Antoinette said. “And
even if you hadn’t then, even if she hadn’t done whatever she did, it doesn’t matter. What counts is that you saved one hundred and sixty thousand people from certain death. You’ve repaid that one crime a hundred thousand times over and more.”

  “You imagine that’s the way the world works, Antoinette?”

  “It’s good enough for me, John, but what do I know? I’m just a space pilot’s daughter from the Rust Belt.”

  There was a lull. Still holding the helmet, The Captain took the end of the ribbed red umbilical and connected it to the socket in the side of the helmet. The interface between the real object and the simulated presence was disturbingly seamless.

  “The trouble is, Antoinette, what good was it to save those lives, if all that happens is that they die now, here on Ararat?”

  “We don’t know that anyone’s going to die. So far the Inhibitors haven’t touched us down here.”

  “All the same, you’d like some insurance.”

  “We need to consider the unthinkable, John. If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll need to leave Ararat. And you’re going to have to be the man with the plan.”

  He slipped the helmet on to his neck ring, twisting it to and fro to engage the latching mechanisms. The faceplate glass was still up. The whites of his eyes were two bright crescents in the shadowed map of his face. Green and red numerals were back-reflected on to his skin.

  “It took some guts to come down here on your own, Antoinette.”

  “I don’t think this is a time for cowards,” she said.

  “It never was,” he said, beginning to slide down the faceplate glass. “About what you want of me?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll give the matter some thought.”

  Then he turned around and walked slowly into the darkness. A skirl of red-brown dust swelled up to block him from view. It was like a sandstorm on Mars.

  Hela, 2727

  The Ultra captain was called Heckel, his ship the Third Gazometric. He had come down in a red-hulled shuttle of very ancient design—a triad of linked spheres with large, stylised tarantula markings.

  Even by recent standards, Heckel struck Quaiche as a very strange individual. The mobility suit in which he came aboard the Lady Morwenna was a monstrous contraption of leather and brass, with rubberised accordion joints and gleaming metal plates secured by rivets. Behind the tiny grilled-over eyeholes of his helmet, wiper blades flicked back and forth to clear condensation. Steam vented from poorly maintained joints and seals. Two assistants had accompanied him: they were constantly opening and closing hatches in the suit, fiddling with brass knobs and valves. When Heckel spoke, his voice emerged from a miniature pipe organ projecting from the top of his helmet. He had to keep making adjustments to knobs in his chest area to stop the voice becoming too shrill or deep.