Absolution Gap rs-4

by Alastair Reynolds

  The second of the trio, a pig named Flenser, said, “We heard you were more likely to be hanging around with administration stiffs.”

  Vasko looked at the docket. He couldn’t see his name against any of the regular duties. “Like Scorpio, you mean?”

  “I bet you know a lot more than we do about what’s going on,” Gunderson said. “Don’t you?”

  “If I did, I’d hardly be in a position to talk about it.” Vasko pinned the sheet back on the wall. “Truthfully, I don’t know very much more.”

  “You’re lying,” the third one—a man named Cory—said. “You want to climb that ladder, Malinin, you’d better learn how to lie better than that.”

  “Thanks,” he said, smiling, “but I’ll settle for learning how to serve this colony.”

  “You want to know where to go?” Gunderson asked him.

  “It would help.”

  “They told us to pass you a message,” she said. “You’re expected in the High Conch at eight.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.” He turned to leave.

  “Fuck you, Malinin,” he heard her say to his back. “You think you’re better than us, is that it?”

  “Not at all,” he replied, surprised by his calmness. He turned back to face her. “I think my abilities are average. I just happen to feel a sense of responsibility, an obligation to serve Ararat to the best of my abilities. I’d be astonished if you felt differently.”

  “You think that now Clavain’s out of the picture, you can slime your way to the top?”

  He looked at Gunderson with genuine surprise. “That thought never crossed my mind.”

  “Well, that’s good, because if it had, you’d be making a se-rious mistake. You don’t have what it takes, Malinin. None of us have got what it takes, but you especially don’t have it.”

  “No? And what exactly is it that I don’t have?”

  “The balls to stand up against the pig,” she said, as if this should have been obvious to all present.

  In the High Conch, Antoinette Bax was already seated at the table, a compad open in front of her. Cruz, Pellerin and several other colony seniors had joined her, and now Blood came in, swaggering like a wrestler.

  “There’d better be a good reason for this,” he said. “It’s not as if I haven’t got a shitload of other things I really need to be taking care of.”

  “Where’s Scorpio?” she asked.

  “In the infirmary, checking on mother and daughter. He’ll be here as soon as he can,” Blood replied.

  “And Malinin?”

  “I had someone leave a message for him. He’ll get here eventually.” Blood collapsed into a seat. Reflexively, he took out his knife and began to scrape the blade against his chin. It made a thin, insectile noise.

  “Well, we’ve got a problem,” Antoinette said. “In the last six hours, the neutrino flux from the ship has about trebled. If the flux increases another ten, fifteen per cent, that ship’s going to have nowhere to go but up.”

  “There’s no exhaust yet?” asked Cruz.

  “No,” Antoinette replied, “and I’m pretty worried about what will happen when those drives do start thrusting. No one was living around the bay when she came down. We need to think seriously about an evacuation to inland areas. I’d recommend moving everyone to the outlying islands, but I know that’s not possible given the existing load on aircraft and shuttles.”

  “Yeah, dream on,” Blood said.

  “All the same, we have to do something. When the Captain decides to take off, we’re going to have tidal waves, clouds of superheated steam, noise so loud it will deafen everyone within hundreds of kilometres, all kinds of harmful radiation spewing out… ” Antoinette trailed off, hoping she had made her point. “Basically, this isn’t going to be the kind of environment you want to be anywhere near unless you’re inside a spacesuit.”

  Blood buried his face in his hands, making a mask of his stubby pig fingers. Antoinette had seen Scorpio do something similar when crises pressed on him from all sides. With Clavain gone and Scorpio absent, Blood was experiencing the responsibility he had always craved. Antoinette doubted that the novelty of command had lasted for more than about five minutes.

  “I can’t evacuate the town,” he said.

  “You have no choice,” Antoinette insisted.

  He lowered his hands and jabbed a finger at the window. “That’s our fucking ship. We shouldn’t be speculating about what it’s going to do. We should be giving it orders, where and when it suits us.”

  “Sorry, Blood, but that isn’t how it works,” Antoinette said.

  “There’ll be panic,” Cruz said. “Worse than anything we’ve seen. All the processing stations wilt have to be closed down and relocated. It’ll delay exodus flights to the Infinity by at least a day. And where are those relocated people going to sleep tonight? There’s nothing for them inland—just a bunch of rocks. We’d have hundreds dead of exposure by daybreak.”

  “I don’t have all the answers,” Antoinette said. “I’m just pointing out the difficulties.”

  “There must be something else we can do,” Cruz said. “Damn, we should have had contingencies in place for this.”

  “Should haves don’t count,” Antoinette said. It was something her father had always told her. It had annoyed her intensely, and she was dismayed to hear the same words coming out of her mouth before she could stop them.

  “Pellerin,” Blood said, “what about swimmer corps intervention? Ararat seems to be on our side, or it wouldn’t have made a channel for the boats to reach the ship. Anything you can offer?”

  Pellerin shook her head. “Sorry. Not now. If the Jugglers show signs of returning to normal activity patterns, we might sanction an exploratory swim, but not before then. I’m not sending someone to their death, Blood, not when there’s so little chance of a useful outcome.”

  “I understand,” the pig said.

  “Wait,” Cruz said. “Let’s turn this around. If it’s going to be such a bad thing to be anywhere near the ship when it lifts, maybe we should be looking at ways to speed up the exodus.”

  “We’re already moving ‘em out as fast as we can,” Blood said.

  “Then cut back on the bureaucracy,” Antoinette said. “Just move them and worry about the details later. And don’t take all day doing it. We may not have that much time left. Shit, what I wouldn’t give for Storm Bird now.”

  “Perhaps there is something you can do for us,” Cruz said, gazing straight at her.

  Antoinette returned the one-eyed woman’s stare. “Name it.”

  “Go back aboard the Infinity. Reason with the Captain. Tell him we need some breathing space.”

  It was not what she wanted to hear. She had, if anything, become even more frightened of the Captain since their conversation; the thought of summoning him again filled her with renewed dread.

  “He may not want to talk,” she said. “Even if he does, he may not want to hear anything I have to say.”

  “You might still buy us time,” Cruz said. “In my book, that’s got to be better than nothing.”

  “I guess,” Antoinette agreed, reluctantly.

  “So you may as well try it,” Cruz said. “There’s no shortage of transport to the ship, either. With administration privileges, you could be aboard in half an hour.”

  As if this was meant to encourage her.

  Antoinette was staring at her fingers, lost in the metal intricacies of her home-made jewellery and hoping for some remission from this duty, when Vasko Malinin entered the room. He was flushed, his hair glistening with rain or sweat. Antoinette thought he looked terribly young to be sitting amongst these seniors; it seemed unfair to taint him with such matters. The young were still entitled to believe that the world’s problems always had clear solutions.

  “Have a seat,” Blood said. “Anything I can get you—coffee, tea?”

  “I had trouble collecting my orders from my duty station,” Vask
o said. “The crowds are getting quite heavy. When they saw my uniform, they wouldn’t let me leave until I’d more or less promised them seats on one of those shuttles.”

  The pig played with his knife. “You didn’t, I hope.”

  “Of course not, but I hope everyone understands the severity of the problem.”

  “We’ve got a rough idea, thanks,” Antoinette said. Then she stood up, pulling down the hem of her formal blouse.

  “Where are you going?” Vasko asked.

  “To have a chat with the Captain,” she said.

  In another part of the High Conch, several floors below, a series of partially linked, scalloplike chambers had been opened out of the conch matter with laborious slowness and much expenditure of energy. The chambers now formed the wards of the main infirmary for First Camp, where the citizenry received what limited medical services the administration could provide.

  The doctor’s two green servitors budged aside as Scorpio entered, their spindly jointed limbs clicking against each other. He pushed between them. The bed was positioned centrally, with an incubator set on a trolley next to it on one side and a chair on the other.

  Valensin stood up from the chair, placing aside a compad he had been consulting.

  “How is she?” Scorpio asked.

  “Mother or daughter?”

  “Don’t be clever, doc. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Mother is fine—except, of course, for the obvious and predictable side effects of stress and fatigue.” Milky-grey daylight filtered into the room from one high slit of a window, which was actually a part of the conch material left unpainted; the light flared off the glass in Valensin’s rhomboid spectacles. “I do not believe she requires any particular care other than time and rest.”

  “And Aura?”

  “The child is as well as can be expected.”

  Scorpio looked at the small thing in the incubator. It was surprisingly shrivelled and red. It twitched like some beached thing struggling for air.

  “That doesn’t tell me much.”

  “Then I’ll spell it out for you,” Valensin said. Highlights in the doctor’s slicked-back hair gleamed cobalt blue. “The child has already undergone four potentially traumatic procedures. The first was Remontoire’s insertion of the Conjoiner implants to permit communication with the child’s natural mother. Then the child was surgically kidnapped, removed from her mother’s womb. Then she was implanted inside Skade, perhaps following another period in an incubator. Finally, she was removed from Skade under less than optimal field surgical conditions.”

  Scorpio assumed Valensin had heard the full story of what happened in the iceberg. “Take my word for it: there wasn’t a lot of choice.”

  Valensin laced his fingers. “Well, she is resting. That’s good. And there do not appear to be any immediate and obvious complications. But in the long run? Who can tell? If what Khouri tells us is true, then it isn’t as if she was ever destined for a normal development.” Valensin lowered himself back down into the seat. His legs folded like long hinged stilts, the crease in his trousers razor-sharp. “On a related matter, Khouri had a request. I thought it best to refer it to you first.”

  “Go on.”

  “She wants the girl put back into her womb.”

  Scorpio looked again at the incubator and the child within it. It was a larger, more sophisticated version of the portable unit they had taken to the iceberg. Incubators were amongst the most valued technological artefacts on Ararat, and great care was taken to keep them running.

  “Could it be done?” he asked.

  “Under ordinary circumstances, I would never contemplate such a thing.”

  “These aren’t ordinary circumstances.”

  “Putting a child back inside a mother isn’t like putting a loaf of bread back into an oven,” Valensin said. “It would require delicate microsurgery, hormonal readjustment… a host of complex procedures.”

  Scorpio let the doctor’s condescension wash over him. “But it could be done?”

  “Yes, if she wants it badly enough.”

  “But it would be risky?”

  Valensin nodded after a moment, as if until then he had considered only the technical hurdles, rather than the hazards. “Yes. To mother and child both.”

  “Then it doesn’t happen,” Scorpio said.

  “You seem rather certain.”

  “That child cost the life of my friend. Now that we’ve got her back, I’m not planning on losing her.”

  “I hope you’ll be the one to break the news to the mother, in that case.”

  “Leave it to me,” Scorpio said.

  “Very well.” Scorpio had the feeling that the doctor was disappointed. “One other thing: she mentioned that word again, in her sleep.”

  “What word?”

  “Hella,” Valensin said. “Or something like it.”

  Hela, 2727

  Rashmika’s estimate turned out to have been optimistic. She had expected another two or three hours of travel before the caravan reached the eastern side of the bridge, but after four hours they appeared only to have made up half the distance. There had been many frustrating periods where the caravan doubled back on itself, following sinuous reverse-loops in the walls. There were times when they had to squeeze through runnels in the cliff, moving at little more than walking pace while the ice scraped against either side of the procession. Two or three times they had come to a complete halt while some technical matter was attended to—no explanation was ever forthcoming. She had the impression that the drivers tried to make up time after these delays, but the subsequent recklessness—which caused the vehicles to bounce and swerve perilously close to the edge—only added to her anxiety. When the quaestor had told her that they would be taking the bridge she had felt great apprehension, but now she was inclined to think it preferable to the many hazards of the ledge traverse. The road along the ledge was a human artefact: it had been blasted or cut into the cliffs within the last century and had probably been repaired and realigned several times since then. Doubt-less bits of it had collapsed over the years, and many vehicles must have taken the long, ballistic plunge to the bottom of the Rift. But the bridge was surely older than that. Now that she had given the matter some thought, it struck her as highly unlikely that it would choose her lifetime in which to come crashing down. It would actually be a remarkable privilege were that to happen.

  Even so, she would still be glad when they reached the other side.

  She was looking out of the viewing window when she saw another quick succession of flashes, like those she had observed from the roof. They were brighter now—she was undoubtedly closer to the source of whatever they were—and they left hemispherical purple after-images on her eyes, even when she blinked.

  “You’re wondering what they are,” a voice said.

  She turned. She was expecting to see Quaestor Jones, but the voice did not quite have his timbre. It was the voice of a younger man, with an accent from somewhere in the badlands.

  Harbin, she wondered for an instant? Could it possibly be Harbin?

  But it wasn’t her brother.

  She didn’t recognise the man at all. He was taller than her and a little older, she guessed, although there was something in his expression—something in his eyes, now that she narrowed it down—that made him appear to be a lot older. He was not really bad-looking, she supposed. He had a thin, serious face, with prominent cheekbones and a jawline so sharp it hurt. His hair was cut very short, shorter than she liked it, so that she could see the exact shape of his skull: a phrenologist’s dream date. He had small ears that stuck out more than he might have wished. His neck was thin and his Adam’s apple was prominent in a way that always alarmed her in men, as if something inside his neck had popped out of alignment and needed to be pushed back before harm was done.

  “How do you know what I’m wondering?” Rashmika asked.

  “Well, you are, aren’t you?”

  She half-scowled. “
And you’d know all about them, I suppose?”

  “They’re charges,” he said amicably, as if he was accustomed to this kind of rudeness. “Nuclear demolition charges. They’re being used by Permanent Way teams clearing the road ahead of the cathedrals. God’s Fire.”

  She had already guessed that the explosions had something to do with the Way. “I didn’t think they ever used anything like that.”

  “Mostly they don’t. I haven’t been keeping up with the news, but they must have hit some unusually heavy obstructions. They could clear it with conventional charges and digging, if they had all the time in the world. But of course that’s the one thing they never have, not when those cathedrals are coming closer all the while. My guess is it was a rearguard spoiler action:”

  “Oh, do please enlighten me.”

  “It’s what happens when the cathedrals at the back begin to lose ground. Sometimes they sabotage the Way behind them to cause trouble for the leading cathedrals when they come round again on the next loop. Of course, it’s nothing anyone can ever prove…”

  She studied his clothing: trousers and a high-collared loose-sleeved shirt; light, flat-soled shoes; everything grey and nondescript. No indication of rank, status, wealth or religious affiliation.

  “Who are you?” Rashmika asked. “You’re talking to me as if we’ve already met, but I don’t know you at all.”

  “But you do know me,” the young man said.

  His face said that he was telling the truth, or at least not believing himself to be lying. His certainty made her all the less willing to give ground, irrational as that was.

  “I think you’re mistaken.”

  “What I mean is, we have met. And I believe you owe me a debt of gratitude.”

  “Do I, now?”

  “I saved your life—when you were on the roof, looking down the access shaft. You nearly fell, and I caught you.”

  “That wasn’t you,” she said. “That was…”

  “An Observer? Yes, it was. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Rashmika said.