Absolution Gap

  That hurt. That really fucking hurt.

  But he had dared to think that he had put all that resentment behind him. Or if not behind him, then at least in a small, sealed mental compartment which he only ever opened in times of crisis.

  And even then he kept the resentment under control, used it to give him strength and resolve. The positive side was that it had forced him to try to be better than they expected. It had made him delve inside himself for qualities of leadership and compassion he had never suspected he possessed. He would show them what a pig was capable of. He would show them that a pig could be as statesmanlike as Clavain; as forward-thinking and judicial; as cruel and as kind as circumstances merited.

  And for twenty-three years it had worked, too. The resentment had made him better. But in all that time, he now realised, he had still been in Clavain’s shadow. Even when Clavain had gone to his island, the man had not really abdicated power.

  Except that now Clavain was gone, and only a few dozen hours into this new regime, only a few dozen hours after stum-bling into the hard scrutiny of real leadership, Scorpio had failed. He had lashed out against Hallatt, against a man who in that instant of rage had personified the entire corpus of baseline humanity. He knew it was Blood who had thrown the knife, but his own hand had been on it just as surely. Blood had merely been an extension of Scorpio’s intent.

  He knew he had never really liked Hallatt. Nothing about that had changed. The man was compromised by his involvement in the totalitarian government on Resurgam. Nothing could be proved, but it was more than likely that Hallatt had at least been aware of the beatings and interrogation sessions, the state-sanctioned executions. And yet the evacuees from Resurgam had to be represented in some form. Hallatt had also done a lot of good during the final days of the exodus. People that Scorpio judged to be reasonable and trustworthy had been prepared to testify on his behalf. He was tainted, but he wasn’t incriminated. And—when one looked at the data closely—there was something unfortunate in the personal history of just about everyone who had come from Resurgam. Where did one draw the line? One hundred and sixty thousand evacuees had come to Ararat from the old world, and very few of them had lacked some association with the government. In a state like that, the machinery of government touched more lives than it left alone. You couldn’t eat, sleep or breathe without being in some small way complicit in the functioning of the machine.

  So he didn’t like Hallatt. But Hallatt wasn’t a monster or a fugitive. And because of that—in that instant of incandescent rage—he had struck out against a fundamentally decent man that he just happened not to like. Hallatt had pushed him to the edge with his understandable scepticism about the matter of Aura, and Scorpio had allowed that provocation to touch him where it hurt. He had struck at Hallatt, but it could have been anyone. Even, had the provocation been severe enough, someone that he actually liked, like Antoinette, Xavier Liu or one of the other human seniors.

  What almost made it worse was the way the rest of the party had reacted. When the rage had died, when the enormity of what he had done had begun to sink in, he had expected mutiny. He had at least expected some open questioning of his fitness for leadership.

  But there had been nothing. It was almost as if they had all just turned a blind eye, regretting what he had done but accepting that this flash of madness was part of the package. He was a pig, and with pigs you had to tolerate that kind of thing.

  He was sure that was what they were all thinking. Even, perhaps, Blood.

  Hallatt had survived. The knife had touched no major organs. Scorpio didn’t know whether to put this down to spectacular accuracy on Blood’s behalf, or spectacular inaccuracy instead.

  He didn’t want to know.

  As it turned out, no one else really liked Hallatt either. The man’s days as a colony senior were over, his avowed distrust of Khouri not helping his case. But since the Resurgam representatives were cycled around anyway, Hallatt’s enforced standing-down was not the dramatic thing it might have been. The circumstances of his resignation would be kept secret, but something would inevitably filter out. There would be rumours of violence, and Scorpio’s name would surely feature somewhere in the telling.

  Let it happen. He could live with that easily enough. There had been violent episodes in the past, and the rumours of those had become suitably exaggerated as they did the rounds. They had done him no real harm in the long run.

  But those violent episodes had been justified. There had been no hatred behind them, no attempt to redress the sins visited upon Scorpio and his kind by their human elders. They had been necessary gestures. But what he had done to Hallatt had been personal, nothing whatsoever to do with the security of the planet.

  He had failed himself, and in that sense he had also failed Ararat.

  “Scorp? Are you all right?”

  It was Khouri, sitting in the darkened portion of the shuttle. Valensin’s servitors were still monitoring Aura’s incubator, but Khouri was keeping her own vigil. Once or twice he had heard her talking softly to the child, even singing to her. It seemed odd to him, given that they were already bonded on a neural level.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You look preoccupied. Is it what happened in the iceberg?”

  Her remark surprised him. Most of the time, his expressions were completely opaque to outsiders. “Well, there’s the small business of the war we’re caught up in, and the fact that I’m not sure any of us are going to make it into next week, but other than that…”

  “We’re all bothered by the war,” she said, “but with you there’s something else. I didn’t see it before we went to find Aura”

  He had the shuttle form a chair for him, something at pig-height, and sat down next to her. He noticed that Valensin was snoozing, his head bobbing up at periodic intervals as he tried to stay awake. They were all exhausted, all functioning at the limits of endurance.

  “I’m surprised that you want to talk to me,” he said.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because of what you asked of me, and what I refused to give you.” In case his point was not obvious to her, he gestured at Aura. “I thought you’d hate me for that. You’d have had every right.”

  “I didn’t like it, no.”

  “Well, then.” He offered her his palms, accepting his fate.

  “But it wasn’t you, Scorp. You didn’t stop me taking her back inside me. It was the situation, the mess we’re in. You simply acted in the only way that made sense to you. I’m not over it, but don’t cut yourself up about it, all right? This is war. Feelings get hurt. I can cope. I still have my daughter.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Scorpio said. He didn’t believe it, but it seemed the right sort of thing to say under the circumstances.

  “Really?” she asked.

  He looked at the wrinkled, pink-red child. “Really.”

  “I was worried you’d hate her, Scorp, because of what she cost.”

  “Clavain wouldn’t have hated her,” he said. “That’s good enough for me.”

  “Thanks, Scorp.”

  They sat in silence for a minute or so. Above, through the transparent hull, the light show continued. Something—some weapon or device in near-Ararat space—was scribing lines across the sky. There were arcs and angles and straight lines, and each mark took a few seconds to fade into the purple-black background. There was something nagging him about those lines, Scorpio,thought, some sense that there was a meaning implicit in them, if only he had the quickness of mind to tease it out.

  “There’s something else,” he said, quietly.

  “Concerning Aura?”

  “No. Concerning me, actually. You weren’t there, but I hurt a man today.” Scorpio looked down at his small, childlike shoes. He had misjudged the height of the seat slightly, so that his toes did not quite reach the floor.

  “I’m sure you had your reasons,” Khouri said.

  ‘That’s the problem: I didn’t. I hurt him
out of blind rage. Something inside me snapped, something I’d kidded myself that I had under control for the last twenty-three years.“

  “We all have days like that,” she said.

  “I try not to. For twenty-three years, all I’ve ever tried to do is get through the day without making that kind of mistake. And today I failed. Today I threw it all away, in one moment of weakness.”

  She said nothing. He took that as permission to continue.

  “I used to hate humans. I thought I had good enough reasons.” Scorpio reached up and undid the fastenings on his leather tunic, exposing his right shoulder. Three decades Of ageing—not to mention the slow accretion of later, fresher wounds—had made the scar less obvious now. But still it made Khouri avert her eyes for an instant, before she looked back unflinchingly.

  “They did that to you?”

  “No. I did it to myself, using a laser.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I was burning away something else.” He traced the coastline of the scar, obedient to every inlet and peninsula of raised flesh. “There was a tattoo there, a green scorpion. It was a mark of ownership. I didn’t realise that at first. I thought it was a badge of honour, something to be proud of.”

  “I’m sorry, Scorp.”

  “I hated them for that, and for what I was. But I paid them back, Ana. God knows, I paid them back.”

  He began to do up the tunic again. Khouri leaned over and helped with the fastenings. They were large, designed for clumsy fingers.

  “You had every right,” she said.

  “I thought I was over it. I thought I’d got it out of my system.”

  She shook her head. “That won’t ever happen, Scorp. Take it from me, you won’t ever lose that rage. What happened to me can’t compare with what they did to you—I’m not saying that. But I do know what it’s like to hate something you can’t ever destroy, something that’s always out of reach. They took my husband from me, Scorp. Faceless army clerks screwed up and ripped him away from me.”

  “Dead?” he asked.

  “No. Just out of reach, at the wrong fucking end of a thirty-year starship crossing. Same thing, really. Except worse, I suppose.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “That’s as bad as anything they did to me.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It isn’t for me to make those comparisons. But all I know is this: I’ve tried to forgive and forget. I’ve accepted that Fazil and I will never see each other again. I’ve even accepted that Fazil’s probably long dead, wherever he really ended up. I have a daughter by another man. I suppose that counts as moving on.”

  He knew that the father of her child was dead as well, but that was not obvious in the tone of her voice when she mentioned him.

  “Not moving on, Ana. Just staying alive.”

  “I knew you’d understand, Scorp. But you also understand what I’m saying about forgiving and forgetting, don’t you?”

  “That it ain’t gonna happen,” he said.

  “Never in a million years. If one of those people came into this room—one of those fools who screwed up my life with one moment of inattention—I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself. What I’m saying is, the rage doesn’t go away. It gets smaller, but it also gets brighter. We just pack it deep down and kindle it, like a little fire we’re never going to let die. It’s what keeps us going, Scorp.”

  “I still failed.”

  “No, you didn’t. You did damn well to keep it bottled up for twenty-three years. So you lost it today.” Suddenly she was angry. “So what? So fucking what! You went through something in that iceberg that I wouldn’t wish on any one of those clerks, Scorp. I know what Clavain meant to you. You went through hell on Earth. The wonder of it isn’t that you’ve lost it once, but that you’ve managed to keep your shit together at all. Honestly, Scorp.“ Her anger shifted to insistence. ”You’ve got to go easy on yourself, man. What happened out there? It wasn’t a walk in the park. You earned the right to throw a few punches, OK?“

  “It was a bit more than a punch.”

  “Is the guy going to pull through?”

  “Yes,” he said, grudgingly.

  Khouri shrugged. ‘Then chill out. What these people need now is a leader. What they don’t need is someone moping around with a guilty conscience.“

  He stood up. “Thank you, Ana. Thank you.”

  “Did I help, or did I just screw things up even more?”

  “You helped.”

  The seat melted back into the wall.

  “Good. Because, you know, I’m not the most eloquent of people. I’m just a grunt at heart, Scorp. A long way from home, with some weird stuff in my head, and a daughter I’m not sure I’ll ever understand. But really, I’m still just a grunt.”

  “It’s never been my policy to underestimate grunts,” he said. Now, inevitably, it was his turn to feel ineloquent. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. I hope one day…” He looked around, noticing that Vasko was moving down the opaque line of the floor towards Aura’s niche. “Well, I don’t know. Just that you find something to make that rage a little smaller and brighter. Maybe when it gets small and bright enough it will just pop away.”

  “Would that be a good thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She smiled. “Me neither. But I guess you and I are the ones who’ll find out.”

  “Scorpio?” Vasko said.

  “Yes?”

  “You should see this. You, too, Ana.”

  They woke Valensin. Vasko ushered them to a different part of the shuttle, then made some modifications to the hull to increase the visibility of the night sky, calling bulkheads into existence and enhancing the brightness of the transmitted light to compensate for the reflected glare from the shuttle’s wings. He did so with an ease that suggested he had been working with such systems for half his life, rather than the few days that was actually the case.

  Above, Scorpio saw only the same appearing and fading scratches of light that he had noticed earlier. The nagging feeling that they meant something still troubled him, but the scratches made no more sense to him now than they had before.

  “I’m not seeing it, Vasko.”

  “I’ll have the hull add a latency, so that the marks take longer to fade out.”

  Scorpio frowned. “Can you do that?”

  “It’s easy.” Vasko patted the cold, smooth surface of the inner fuselage. “There’s almost nothing these old machines won’t do, if you know the right way to ask.”

  “So do it,” Scorpio said.

  All four of them looked up. Even Valensin was fully awake now, his eyes slits behind his spectacles.

  Above, the scratches of light took longer to fade. Before, only two or three had ever been visible at the same time. Now dozens lingered, bright as the images scorched on to the retina by the setting sun.

  And now they most definitely meant something.

  “My God,” Khouri said.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ararat, 2675

  IN THE GLADE, everything changed. The sky above had turned midnight-black; no birds moved from tree to tree now, and the trees themselves formed only a darker frame to the night sky, looming in on all sides like encroaching thunder clouds. The animals had fallen silent, and Antoinette could no longer hear the simmering hiss of the waterfall. Perhaps it had never been real.

  When she turned her attention back to the Captain, he was sitting alone at the table. Again he had slipped forward some years, reiterating another slice from his history. The last time she had seen him, in the silver armoured suit, one of his arms had been mechanical. Now the process of mechanisation had marched on even more. It was difficult to judge how much of him had been replaced by prosthetic components because of the suit, but she could at least see his head since the helmet was resting in front of him on the table. His scalp was completely bald, his face hairless save for a moustache that drooped on either side of his mouth. It was the same mouth she remembered from
the first apparition: compact, straight, probably not much given to small talk. But that was about the only point of reference she recognised. She couldn’t see his eyes at all. They were lost under a complicated-looking band of some sort that reached from one side of his face to the other. Optics twinkled beneath the band’s pearly coating. The skin across his scalp was quilted with fine white lines. Glued tight to his skull, it revealed irregular raised plates just under the skin.

  “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Antoinette asked.

  “Look up.”

  She complied, and saw immediately that something had changed in the few scant minutes during which she had been studying the Captain’s latest manifestation. Scratches of light cut across the sky. She thought of someone making quick, neat, butcherlike gashes in soft skin. The scratches looked random at first, but then she began to discern the emergence of a pattern.

  “John…”

  “Keep looking.”

  The scratches increased in frequency. They became a flicker, then a frenzy, then something that almost appeared permanent.

  The scratches formed letters.

  The letters formed words.

  The words said: LEAVE NOW.

  “I just wanted you to know,” John Brannigan said.

  That was when she felt the entire floor of the glade rumble. She had barely had time to register this when she felt her own weight increasing. She was being pressed into the roughly formed wooden seat. It was a gentle pressure, but that was no surprise. A ship with a mass of several million metric tonnes didn’t just leap into space. Especially not when it had been sitting in a kilometre of water for twenty-three years.

  ACROSS THE BAY, lighting up the sea and land all the way to the horizon, a temporary day had come to Ararat. At first, all that Vasko could see was a mountain of steam, a scalding eruption of superheated water engulfing first the lower flanks of the ship and then the entire green-clad structure. A blue-white light shone out through the steam, like a lantern in a mound of tissue paper. It was painfully bright even through the darkening filter of the shuttle’s fuselage. It shaded to violet and left jagged pink shadows on his retinae. Even far away from the edge of the steam column, the water shone a luminous turquoise. It was beautiful and strange, like nothing he had seen in his twenty years of existence.