Absolution Gap

  Vasko shrugged. “We’ll just have to factor it into our long-term planning. It’s nothing we can’t deal with. The ship’s still headed for Hela, isn’t it? Even the Captain sees that’s the right place to go now.”

  “Just make sure you keep on his right side,” Scorpio said. “Place could get a little uncomfortable otherwise.”

  “The Captain isn’t a problem.”

  “Nor am I, now.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s your call, Scorp.”

  Yes, his call: whether to stand down from command on the grounds of medical unsuitability, or save his dignity by going back into the casket. What was it Valensin had told him? He had a fifty-fifty chance of making it out alive next time. But even if the casket didn’t kill him he would be a wreck, surviving only by a kind of chemical momentum. One more trip into the casket after that and he’d be pushing the statistics to breaking point.

  “You’re still not going to admit this is mutiny?” he asked.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Vasko said. “We still value your input as a colony senior. No one has ever said otherwise. You’ll still be nominally in charge. It’s just that your role will become more of a consultative one.”

  “Rubber-stamping whatever you and Urton and the rest of your gang decide is the next policy decision?”

  “That sounds terribly cynical.”

  “I should have drowned you when I had the chance,” Scorpio said.

  “You shouldn’t say that. I’ve learned as much from you as I did from Clavain.”

  “You knew Clavain for about a day, kid.”

  “And how long did you know him, Scorp? Twenty, thirty years? That still wasn’t a scratch against his lifetime. You think it really makes any difference? If you want to make a point of it, then neither of us knew him.”

  “Maybe I didn’t know him,” Scorpio said, “but I know he’d have let that shuttle in, just the way I did.”

  “You’re probably right,” Vasko said, “but it would still have been a mistake. He wasn’t infallible, you know. They didn’t call him the Butcher of Tharsis for nothing.”

  “You’d have deposed him as well, is that what you’re saying?”

  Vasko considered the point and then nodded. “He’d have been getting old as well. Sometimes you just have to cut out the dead wood.”

  * * *

  AURA CAME TO see him before they put him under again. She stood in front of her mother, knees together, hands together. Khouri was straightening her daughter’s hair, fussing her fringe into shape. They both wore white.

  “I’m sorry, Scorpio,” Aura said. “I didn’t want them to get rid of you.”

  He felt like saying something angry, something that would hurt her, but the words stalled in his mouth. He knew, on some fundamental level, that none of this was Aura’s fault. She had not asked for the things that had been put in her head.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “They’re not getting rid of me. I’m just going to go back to sleep again until they remember how useful I am.”

  “It won’t take them long,” Khouri said. She knelt down so that her head was at the same level as her daughter’s. “You were right,” she said. “No matter what advice Aura gave you, and no matter what the others said, it was the right thing to do. The brave thing. The day we forget that is the day we might as well start calling ourselves wolves as well.”

  “That’s the way I saw it,” Scorpio said. “Thanks for your support. It’s not that I don’t have allies, I just don’t have as many as I need.”

  “None of us are going anywhere in a hurry, Scorp. We’ll still be around when you wake up.”

  He acknowledged that with a nod, but kept his thoughts to himself. She knew as well as he did that there was nothing certain about his chances of waking up again.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Planning to sleep this one out?”

  He had expected Khouri to answer: the question had been addressed at her. But it was Aura who spoke. “No, Scorpio,” she said. “I’m going to stay awake. I’m six now. I want to be older when we reach Hela.”

  “You have it all worked out, don’t you?”

  “Not all of it,” she said, “but I’m remembering more and more each day.”

  “About the shadows?” he asked.

  “They’re people,” she said. “Not exactly like us, but closer than you’d think. They just live on the other side of something. But it’s very bad there. Something’s gone wrong with their home. That’s why they can’t live there any longer.”

  “Sometimes she speaks of brane worlds,” Khouri said, “mumbles mathematics in her sleep, stuff about folded branes and gravitic signalling across the bulk. We think the shadows are entities, Scorp: the inhabitants of an adjacent universe.”

  ‘That’s quite a leap.“

  “It’s all there, in the old theories. They might only be a few millimetres away, in the hyperspace of the bulk.”

  “And what does this have to do with us?”

  “Like Aura says, they can’t live there any longer. They want out. They want to come across the gap, into this brane, but they need help from someone on this side to do it.”

  “Just like that? Would there be something in it for us, as well?”

  “She’s always talked about negotiation, Scorp. I think what she meant was that the shadows might be able to help us out with our own local problem.”

  “Provided we let them cross the gap,” Scorpio said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “You know what?” he said, as the technicians began to plumb him in. “I think I’m going to have to sleep on this one.”

  “What are you holding in your hand?” Khouri asked.

  He opened his fist, showing her the shard of conch material Remontoire had given him. “It’s for luck,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Hela, 2727

  RASHMIKA WAS ON her way to the Clocktower when Grelier emerged from the shadows between two pillars. She wondered how long he had been skulking there, waiting on the off chance that she would select this particular route from her quarters.

  “Surgeon-General,” she said.

  “Like a wee word, if that won’t take too much of your time.”

  “I’m on my way to the garret. The dean has a new Ultra delegation to interview.”

  “This won’t take a moment. I understand how useful you’ve become to him.”

  Rashmika shrugged: clearly she was going nowhere until Grelier was done with her. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing much,” he said, “just a small anomaly in your bloodwork. Thought it worth mentioning.”

  “Then mention it,” she said.

  “Not here, if you don’t mind. Loose lips, and all that.”

  She looked around. There was no one else in sight. There was, now that she thought about it, almost never anyone else in sight when the surgeon-general was in the vicinity. He made witnesses melt into the architecture, especially when he did his rounds with the medical case and its arsenal of loaded syringes. Today all he carried was the cane, the head of which he tapped against the bottom of his chin as he spoke.

  “I thought you said it would only take a moment,” Rashmika said.

  “It will, and it’s on your way. We’ll just make a stop in Bloodwork, and then you can go about your duty.”

  He escorted her to the nearest Clocktower elevator, slid the trelliswork door closed and set the carriage in motion. Outside it was daytime. The coloured light from the stained-glass windows slid tints across his face as they rose.

  “Enjoying your work here, Miss Els?”

  “It’s work,” she said.

  “You don’t sound sparklingly enthusiastic. I’m surprised, frankly. Given what you might have ended up with—dangerous work in a clearance gang—haven’t you landed on your feet?”

  What could she tell him? That she was scared to death by the voices that she had started hearing?

  No. That
wasn’t necessary at all. She had enough rational fears to draw from without invoking the shadows.

  “We’re seventy-five kilometres from Absolution Gap, Surgeon-General,” she said. “In just under three days this cathedral is going to be crossing that bridge.” She mimicked his tone of voice. “Frankly, there are places I’d rather be.”

  “Alarms you, does it?”

  “Don’t tell me that you’re thrilled at the prospect.”

  “The dean knows what he’s doing.”

  “You think so?”

  Green and pink light chased each other across his face. “Yes,” he said.

  “You don’t believe it,” she said. “You’re as scared as I am, aren’t you? You’re a rational man, Surgeon-General. You don’t have his blood in your veins. You know this cathedral can’t be taken over the bridge.”

  ‘There’s a first time for everything,“ he said. Self-conscious of her attention, he was trying so hard to control his expression that a muscle in the side of his temple had started twitching.

  “He has a death wish,” Rashmika said. “He knows that the vanishings are heading towards a culmination. He wants to mark the occasion with a bang. What better way than to smash the cathedral to dust and make a holy martyr of himself in the process? He’s the dean now, but who’s to say he doesn’t have his mind set on sainthood?”

  “You’re forgetting something,” Grelier said. “He’s thinking beyond the crossing. He wants the long-term protection of Ultras. That isn’t the desire of a man planning suicide in three days. What other explanation is there?”

  Unless she was reading him badly, Grelier believed that himself. She began to wonder just how much Grelier really knew about what Quaiche had in mind.

  “I saw something odd when I was on my way here,” Rashmika said.

  Grelier neatened his hair. His usually impeccably tidy white bristle-cut showed signs of distress. It was getting to him, Rashmika thought. He was as scared as everyone else, but he could not let it show.

  “Saw something?” he echoed.

  “Towards the end of the caravan trip,” she said, “after we’d crossed the bridge and were on our way to meet the cathedrals, we passed a huge fleet of machines moving north—excavating equipment, the sort they use to open out the largest scuttler seams. Whatever it was, it was on its way somewhere.”

  Grelier’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing strange in that. They’d have been on their way to fix a problem with the Permanent Way before the cathedrals got there.”

  “They were moving in the wrong direction for that,” Rashmika said. “And whatever they were doing, the quaestor didn’t want to talk about them. It was as if he’d been given orders to pretend they didn’t exist.”

  “This has nothing to do with the dean.”

  “But something on that scale could hardly take place without him knowing about it, surely,” Rashmika said. “In fact, he probably authorised it. What do you think it is? A new scuttler excavation he doesn’t want anyone to know about? Something they’ve found that can’t be left to the usual settlement miners?”

  “I have no idea.” The twitch in the side of his temple had set up camp. “I have no idea and I don’t care. My responsibility is to Bloodwork and the dean’s health. That’s all. I have enough on my plate without worrying about interecumenical conspiracies.” The carriage shuddered to a halt, Grelier shrugging with evident relief. “Well, we’re here, Miss Els. And now, if you don’t mind, it’s my turn to ask the questions.”

  “You said it would only take a wee moment.”

  He smiled. “Well, that may well have been a wee fib.”

  He sat her down in Bloodwork and showed her the results of her blood analysis, which had been correlated against some other sample he had not deigned to identify.

  “I was interested in your gift,” Grelier said, resting his chin on the head of his cane, looking at her with heavy-lidded, heavily bagged eyes. “Wanted to know if there was a genetic component. Fair enough, eh? I’m a man of science, after all.”

  “If you say so,” Rashmika replied.

  “Problem was, I hit a block even before I could start looking for any peculiarities.” Affectionately, Grelier tapped his medical kit. It was resting on a bench. “Blood’s my thing,” he said. “Always has been, always will be. Genetics, cloning, you name it—but it all boils down to good old blood in the end. I dream about the stuff. Torrential, haemorrhaging rivers of it. I’m not what you’d call a squeamish man.”

  “I’d never have guessed.”

  “The thing is, I take a professional pride in understanding blood. Everyone who comes near me gets sampled sooner or later. The archives of the Lady Morwenna contain a compre-hensive picture of the genetic make-up of this world, as it has evolved over the last century. You’d be surprised at how distinctive it is, Rashmika. We haven’t been settled in piecemeal fashion, over many hundreds of years. Almost everyone who now lives on Hela is descended from the colonists of a handful of ships, right back to the Gnostic Ascension, all from single points of origin, and all of those worlds have very distinct genetic profiles. The newcomers—the pilgrims, the evacuees, the chancers—make very little difference at all to the gene pool. And of course even their blood is sampled and labelled at their point of entry.” He took a vial from the case and shook it, inspecting the frothy raspberry-red liquid within. “All of which means that—unless you happen to have just arrived on Hela—I can predict what your blood will look like, to a high degree of precision. Even more accurately if I know where you live, so that I can factor in interbreeding. The Vigrid region’s one of my specialities, actually. I’ve studied it a lot.” He tapped the vial against the side of the display showing the unidentified blood sample. “Take this fellow, for instance. Classic Vigrid. Couldn’t be mistaken for the blood of someone from any other place on Hela. He’s so typical it’s almost frightening.”

  Rashmika swallowed before speaking. “That blood is from Harbin, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “That’s what the archives tell me.”

  “Where is he? What happened to him?”

  “This man?” Grelier made a show of reading fine print at the bottom of his display. “Dead, it looks like. Killed during clearance work. Why? You weren’t going to pretend he was your brother, were you?”

  She felt nothing yet. It was like driving off a cliff. There was an instant when her trajectory carried on normally, as if the world had not been pulled from under her.

  “You know he was my brother,” she said. “You saw us together. You were there when they interviewed Harbin.”

  “I was there when they interviewed someone,” Grelier said. “But I don’t think he could have been your brother.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “In the strict genetic sense, I’m afraid it must be.” He nodded at the display, inviting her to draw her own conclusion. “You’re no more related to him than you are to me. He was not your brother, Rashmika. You were never his sister.”

  “Then one of us was adopted,” she said.

  “Well, funny you should say that, because it crossed my mind as well. And it struck me that perhaps the only way to get to the bottom of this whole mess was to pop up there myself and have a bit of a nose around. So I’m off to the badlands. Won’t keep me away from the cathedral for more than a day. Any messages you’d like me to pass on, while I’m up there?”

  “Don’t hurt them,” she said. “Whatever you do, don’t hurt them.”

  “No one said anything about hurting anyone. But you know how it is with those communities up there. Very secular. Very closed. Very suspicious of interference from the churches.”

  “You hurt my parents,” she said, “and I’ll hurt you back.”

  Grelier placed the vial back in the case, snapped shut its lid. “No, you won’t, because you need me on your side. The dean’s a dangerous man, and he cares very much about his negotiations. If he thought for one moment that you weren’t what you said you were, that you might i
n any way have compromised his discussions with the Ultras… well, I wouldn’t want to predict what he might do.” He paused, sighed, as if they had simply got off on the wrong foot and all he needed to do was spool back to the start of the conversation and everything would be fine. “Look, this is as much my problem as yours. I don’t think you’re everything you say you are. This blood of yours looks suspiciously foreign. It doesn’t look as though you ever had ancestors on Hela. Now, there may be an innocent explanation for this, but until I know otherwise, I have to assume the worst.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you’re not at all who or what you say you are.”

  “And why is that a problem for you, Surgeon-General?” She was crying now, the truth of Harbin’s death hitting her as hard as she had always known it would.

  “Because,” he said, snarling his answer, “I brought you here. It was my bright idea to bring you and the dean together. And now I’m wondering what the hell I’ve brought here. I’m also assuming I’ll be in nearly as much trouble as you if he ever finds out.”

  “He won’t hurt you,” Rashmika said. “He needs you to keep him alive.”

  Grelier stood up. “Well, let’s just hope that’s the case, shall we? Because a few minutes ago you were trying to convince me he had a death wish. Now dry your eyes.”

  RASHMIKA RODE THE elevator alone, up through strata of stained-glass light. She cried, and the more she tried to stop crying the worse the tears became. She wanted to think it was because of the news she had just learned about Harbin. Crying would have been the decent, human, sisterly response. But another part of her knew that the real reason she was crying was because of what she had learned about herself, not her brother. She could feel layers of herself coming loose, peeling away like drying scabs, revealing the raw truth of what she was, what she had always been. The shadows had been right: of that she no longer had any doubt. Nor was there any reason for Grelier to have lied about her blood. He was as disturbed by the discovery as she was.