Absolution Gap

  There were, Scorpio concluded, worse ways to live.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE QUITE HAPPY with this?” Remontoire asked Scorpio.

  They were sitting alone in a spider-legged inspection saloon, a pressurised cabin clutching the sheer clifflike face of the accelerating starship. From an aperture below them—a docking gate framed by bony structures that resembled fused spinal vertebrae—the cache weapons were being unloaded. It would have been a delicate operation at the best of times, but with the Nostalgia for Infinity continuing to accelerate away from Ararat, following the trajectory Remontoire and his projections had specified, it was one that required the utmost attention to detail.

  “I’m happy,” Scorpio said. “I thought you’d be the one with objections, Rem. You wanted all of these things. I’m not letting you have them all. Doesn’t that piss you off?”

  “Piss me off, Scorp?” There was a faint, knowing smile on his companion’s face. Remontoire had prepared a flask of tea and was now pouring it into minuscule glass tumblers. “Why should it? The risk is shared equally. Your own chance of sur-vival—according to our forecasts, at least—is now significantly reduced. I regret this state of affairs, certainly, but I can appreciate your unwillingness to hand over all the weapons. That would require an unprecedented leap of faith.”

  “I don’t do faith,” Scorpio said.

  “In truth, the cache weapons may not make very much difference in the long run. I did not want to say this earlier, for fear of dispiriting our associates, but the fact remains that our forecasts may be too optimistic. When Ilia Volyova rode Storm Bird into the heart of the wolf concentration around Delta Pavonis, the cache weapons she deployed made precious little impact.”

  “As far as we know. Maybe she did slow things down a bit.”

  “Or perhaps she did not deploy the weapons in the most effective manner possible—she was ill, after all—or perhaps those were not the most dangerous weapons in the arsenal. We shall never know.”

  “What about these other weapons,” Scorpio asked, “the ones that they’re making for us now?”

  “The hypometric devices? They have proven useful. You saw how the wolf concentration around your shuttle and the

  Nostalgia for Infinity was dispersed. I also used a hypometric weapon against the wolf aggregate that was causing you difficulties on the surface of Ararat.“

  Scorpio sipped at his tea, holding the little tumbler—it was barely larger than a thimble—in the clumsy vice of his hands. He felt as if at any minute he was going to shatter the glass. “These are the weapons Aura showed you how to make?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you still don’t really know any of it works?”

  “Let’s just say that theory is lagging some distance behind practice, shall we?”

  “All right. It’s not as if I’d be able to understand it even if you knew. But one thing does occur to me. If this shit is so useful, why aren’t the wolves using it against us?”

  “Again, we don’t know,” Remontoire admitted.

  “Doesn’t that worry you? Doesn’t it concern you that maybe there’s some kind of long-term problem with this new technology that you don’t know about?”

  Remontoire arched an eyebrow. “You, thinking ahead, Scorpio? Whatever next?”

  “It’s a legitimate point.”

  “Conceded. And yes, it does, amongst other things, give me pause for concern. But given the choice between extinction now and dealing with an unspecified problem at a later point… well, it’s not much of a contest, is it?” Remontoire peered through the amber belly of his tiny glass, one eye looming large in distortion. “Anyway, there’s another possibility. The wolves may not have this technology.”

  Beyond the observation spider, framed by the brass-ringed eye of one of its portholes, Scorpio saw one of the cache weapons emerge. The weapon—it was all bronze:green lustre and art deco flanges, like an old radio or cinema—was encased in a cradle studded with steering jets. The cradle, in turn, was being grasped by four tugs of Conjoiner manufacture.

  “Then where did this technology come from?”

  “The dead. The collective memories of countless extinct cultures, gathered together in the neutron-crust matrix of the Hades computer. Clearly it wasn’t enough to make a difference to those extinct species; maybe none of the other techniques Aura has given us will make a difference to our eventual fu-ture. But perhaps they have served to slow things down. It might be that all we need is time. If there is something else out there—something more significant, something more potent than the wolves—then all we need is time to discover it.”

  “You think it’s Hela, don’t you?”

  “Doesn’t it intrigue you, Scorpio? Don’t you want to go there and see what you find?”

  “We looked it up, Rem. Hela is an iceball, home to a bunch of religious lunatics tripping on the tainted blood of an indoc-trinal virus carrier.”

  “Yet they speak of miracles.”

  “A planet that disappears. Except no one you’d trust to fix a vac-suit seal has ever seen it happen.”

  “Go there and find out. One-oh-seven Piscium is the system. The Inhibitors haven’t reached it yet, by all accounts.”

  “Thanks for the information.”

  “It will be your decision, Scorpio. You already know what Aura will recommend, but you don’t have to be swayed by that.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But keep this in mind: one-oh-seven Piscium is an outlying system. Reports of wolf incursions into human space are fragmentary at best, but you can be certain that when they move in, the core colonies—the worlds within a dozen or so light years of Earth—will be the first to fall. That’s how they work: identify the hub, attack and destroy it. Then they pick off the satellite colonies and anyone trying to flee deeper into the galaxy.”

  Scorpio shrugged. “So nowhere’s safe.”

  “No. But given your responsibilities—given the seventeen thousand individuals now in your care—it would be far safer to head outwards than to dive back towards those hub worlds. But I sense that you may feel otherwise.”

  “I have unfinished business back home,” Scorpio replied.

  “You don’t mean Ararat, do you?”

  “I mean Yellowstone. I mean the Rust Belt. I mean Chasm City and the Mulch.”

  Remontoire finished his tea, consuming the last drop with the fastidious neatness of a cat. “I understand that you still have emotional ties to that place, but don’t underestimate the danger of returning there. If the wolves have gathered any in-telligence on us, it won’t have taken them very long to identify Yellowstone as a critical hub. It will be high on their list of priorities. They may already be there, building a Singer, as they did around Delta Pavonis.”

  “In which case there’ll be a lot of people needing to get out.”

  “You can’t make enough of a difference to justify the risk,” Remontoire told him.

  “I can try.” Scorpio gestured through the window of the inspection spider, towards the looming presence of the ship. “The Infinity brought one hundred and sixty thousand people from Resurgam. I may not be much of a mathematician, but with only seventeen thousand aboard her now, that means we have some spare capacity.”

  “You will be risking all the lives we have already saved.”

  “I know,” he replied.

  “You will be squandering any advantage you gain in the next few days, as we draw the machines away from you.”

  “I know,” he said again.

  “You will also be risking your own life.”

  “I know that as well, and it isn’t going to make one damned bit of difference, Rem. The more you try to talk me out of it, the more I know I’m going to do it.”

  “If you have the backing of the seniors.”

  “They either back me or sack me. It’s their choice.”

  “You’ll also need the ship to agree to it.”

  “I’ll ask nicely,” Scorpio said.
/>
  The tugs had dragged the cache weapon to a safe distance from the ship. He expected to see their main drives flick on, bright spears of scattered light from plasma exhausts, but the whole assembly just accelerated away, as if moved by an invisible hand.

  “I don’t agree with your stance,” Remontoire said, “but I respect it. You remind me of Nevil, in some ways.”

  Scorpio recalled the ludicrously brief episode of “grieving” Remontoire had undergone. “I thought you were over him now.”

  “None of us are over him,” Remontoire said curtly. Then he gestured to the flask again and his mood lightened visibly. “More tea, Mr. Pink?”

  Scorpio didn’t know what to say. He looked at the bland-faced man and shrugged. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Clock.”

  Hela, 2727

  THE SURGEON-GENERAL ushered Rashmika through the labyrinthine Lady Morwenna. It was clearly not a sightseeing trip. Though she dawdled when she was able—slowing down to look at the windows, or something of equal interest—Grelier always chivvied her on with polite insistence, tapping his cane against the walls and floor to emphasise the urgency of his mission. ‘Time is of the essence, Miss Els,“ he kept saying. That and, ”We’re in a wee bit of a hurry.“

  “It would help if you told me what all this is about,” she said.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” he replied. “Why would it help? You’re here and we’re on our way.”

  He had a point, she supposed. She just didn’t like it very much.

  “What happened with the Catherine of Iron?” she asked, determined not to give up too easily.

  “Nothing that I’m aware of. There was a change of assignment. Nothing significant. You’re still being employed by the First Adventist Church, after all. We’ve just relocated you from one cathedral to another.” He tapped the side of his nose, as if sharing a grand confidence. “Frankly, you’ve done rather well out of it. You don’t know how difficult it is to get into the Lady Mor these days. Everyone wants to work in the Way’s most historic cathedral.”

  “I was given to understand that its popularity had taken a bit of a knock lately,” she said.

  Grelier looked back at her. “Whatever do you mean, Miss Els?”

  “The dean is taking it over the bridge. At least, that’s what people are saying.”

  “And if that were the case?”

  “I wouldn’t be too surprised if people aren’t all that keen to stay aboard. How far from the crossing are we, Surgeon-General?”

  “Navigation’s not really my thing.”

  “You know exactly how far away we are,” she said.

  He flashed a smile back at her. She decided that she did not like his smile at all. It looked altogether too feral. “You’re good, Miss Els. As good as I’d hoped.”

  “Good, Surgeon-General?”

  “The lying thing. The ability to read faces. That’s your little stock in trade, isn’t it? Your little party trick?”

  They had arrived at what Rashmika judged to be the base of the Clocktower. The surgeon-general pulled out a key, slipped it into a lock next to a wooden door and admitted them into what was obviously a private compartment. The walls were made of trellised iron. Inside he pressed a sequence of brass knobs and they began to rise. Through the trelliswork, Rashmika watched the walls of the elevator shaft glide by. Then the walls became stained glass, and as they ascended past each coloured facet the light changed in the compartment: green to red, red to gold, gold to a cobalt blue that made the surgeon-general’s shock of white hair glow as if electrified.

  “I still don’t know what this is about,” she persisted.

  “Are you frightened?”

  “A bit.”

  “You needn’t be.” She saw that he was telling the truth, at least as he perceived it. This calmed her slightly. “We’re going to treat you very well,” he added. “You’re too valuable to us to be treated otherwise.”

  “And if I decide I don’t want to stay here?”

  He looked away from her, glancing out of the window. The light traced the outline of his face with dying fire. There was something about him—a muscular compactness to his body, that bulldog face—that made her think of circus performers she had seen in the badlands, who were actually unemployed miners touring from village to village to supplement their income. He could have been a fire-eater or an acrobat.

  “You can leave,” he said, turning back to her. “There’d be no point keeping you here without your permission. Your usefulness to us depends entirely on your good will.”

  Perhaps she was reading him incorrectly, but she did not think he was lying about that, either.

  “I still don’t see…” she said.

  “I’ve done my homework,” he told her. “You’re a rara avis, Miss Els. You have a gift shared by fewer than one in a thousand people. And you have the gift to a remarkable degree. You’re off the scale. I doubt that there’s anyone else quite like you on the whole of Hela.”

  “I just see when people lie,” she said.

  “You see more than that. Look at me now.” He smiled at her again. “Am I smiling because I am genuinely happy, Miss Els?”

  It was the same feral smile she had seen before. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re right. Do you know why you can tell?”

  “Because it’s obvious,” she said.

  “But not to everyone. When I smile on demand—as I did just then—I make use of only one muscle in my face: the zygomatics major. When 1 smile spontaneously—which I confess does not happen very often—I flex not only my zygomaticus major but I also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis.” Grelier touched a finger to the side of his temple. “That’s the muscle that encircles the eye. The majority of us cannot tighten that muscle voluntarily. I certainly can’t. By the same token the majority of us cannot stop it tightening when we are genuinely pleased.” He smiled again; the elevator was slowing. “Many people do not see the difference. If they notice it, they notice it subliminally, and the information is lost in the welter of other sensory inputs. The crucial data is ignored. But to you these things come screaming through. They sound trumpets. You are incapable of ignoring them.”

  “I remember you now,” she said.

  “I was there when they interviewed your brother, yes. I remember the fuss you made when they lied to him.”

  “Then they did lie.”

  “You always knew it.”

  She looked at him: square in the face, alert to every nuance. “Do you know what happened to Harbin?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  The trelliswork carriage rattled to a halt.

  * * *

  GRELIER LED HER into the dean’s garret. The six-sided room was alive with mirrors. She saw her own startled expression jangling back at her, fragmented like a cubist portrait. In the confusion of reflections she did not immediately notice the dean himself. She saw the view through the windows, the white curve of Hela’s horizon reminding her of the smallness of her world, and she saw the suit—the strange, roughly welded one—that she recognised from the Adventist insignia. Rash-mika’s skin prickled: just looking at the suit disturbed her. There was something about it, an impression of evil radiating from it in invisible lines, flooding the room; a powerful sense of presence, as if the suit itself embodied another visitor to the garret.

  Rashmika walked past the suit. As she neared it the impression of evil became perceptibly stronger, almost as if invisible rays of malevolence were boring into her head, fingering their way into the private cavities of her mind. It was not like her to respond so irrationally to something so obviously inanimate, but the suit had an undeniable power. Perhaps, buried inside it, was a mechanism for inducing disquiet. She had heard of such things: vital tools in certain spheres of negotiation. They tickled the parts of the brain responsible for stimulating dread and the registering of hidden presences.

  Now that she thought she could explain the suit’s power she felt less disturbed by it. All the
same, she was glad when she reached the other side of the garret, into full view of the dean. At first she thought he was dead. He was lying back on his couch, hands clasped across his blanketed chest like a man in the repose of the recently deceased. But then the chest moved. And the eyes—splayed open for examination—were horribly alive within their sockets. They trembled like little warm eggs about to hatch.

  “Miss Els,” the dean said. “I hope your trip here was an enjoyable one.”

  She couldn’t believe she was in his presence. “Dean Quaiche,” she said. “I heard… I thought…”

  “That I was dead?” His voice was a rasp, the kind of sound an insect might have manufactured by the deft rubbing of chitinous surfaces. “I have never made any secret of my continued existence, Miss Els… for all these years. The congregation has seen me regularly.”

  “The rumours are understandable,” Grelier said. The surgeon-general had opened a medical cabinet on the wall and was now fishing through its innards. “You don’t show your face outside of the Lady Morwenna, so how are the rest of the population expected to know?”

  “Travel is difficult for me.” Quaiche pointed with one hand towards a small hexagonal table set amid the mirrors. “Have some tea, Miss Els. And sit down, take the weight off your feet. We have much to talk about.”

  “I have no idea why I am here, Dean.”

  “Didn’t Grelier tell you anything? I told you to brief the young lady, Grelier. I told you not to keep her in the dark.”

  Grelier turned from the wall and walked towards Quaiche, carrying bottles and swabs. “I told her precisely what you asked me to tell her: that her services were required, and that our use for her depended critically on her sensitivity to facial microexpressions.”

  “What else did you tell her?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  Rashmika sat down and poured herself some tea. There appeared little point in refusing. And now that she was being offered a drink she realised that she was very thirsty.

  “I presume you want me to help you,” she ventured. “You need my skill, for some reason or other. There is someone you’re not sure if you trust or not.” She sipped at the tea: whatever she thought of her hosts, it tasted decent enough. “Am I warm?”