Absolution Gap (38 page)

If that was the case, then everything had meaning. The bridge meant something. He had witnessed a miracle, had called out for salvation and been granted it. And the death of Morwenna must have had some inexplicable but ultimately benign function in the greater plan of which Quaiche was himself only a tiny, ticking, barely conscious part.

“I have to stay here,” he had told Grelier. “I have to stay on Hela until I know the answer. Until it is revealed unto me.”

That was what he had said: “revealed unto me.”

Grelier had smiled. “You can’t stay here.”

“I’ll find a way.”

“She won’t let you.”

But Quaiche had made a proposal to Grelier then, one that the surgeon-general had found difficult to dismiss. Queen Jasmina was an unpredictable mistress. Her moods, even after years of service, were largely opaque to him. His relationship with her was characterised by intense fear of disapproval.

“In the long run, she’ll get you,” Quaiche had said. “She’s an Ultra. You can’t read her, can’t second-guess her. To her, you’re just furniture. You serve a need, but you’ll always be replaceable. But look at me—I’m a baseline human like yourself, an outcast from mainstream society. She said it herself: we have much in common.”

“Less than you think.”

“We don’t have to worship each other,” Quaiche had said. “We just have to work together.”

“What’s in it for me?” Grelier had asked.

“Me not telling her your little secret, for one. Oh, I know all about it. It was one of the last things Morwenna found out before Jasmina put her in the suit.”

Grelier had looked at him carefully. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean the body factory,” Quaiche had said, “your little problem with supply and demand. There’s more to it than just meeting Jasmina’s insatiable taste for fresh bodies, isn’t there? You’ve also got a sideline in body usage yourself. You like them small, undeveloped. You take them out of the tanks before they’re reached adulthood—sometimes even before they’ve reached childhood—and you
do
things to them. Vile, vile things. Then you put them back in the tanks and say they were never viable.”

“They have no minds,” Grelier had said, as if this excused his actions. “Anyway, what exactly are you proposing—blackmail?”

“No, just an incentive. Help me dispose of Jasmina, help me with other things, and I’ll make sure no one ever finds out about the factory.”

Quietly, Grelier had said, “And what about my needs?”

“We’ll think of something, if that’s what it takes to keep you working for me.”

“Why should I prefer you as my master in place of Jasmina? You’re as insane as each other.”

“Perhaps,” Quaiche had said. “The difference is, I’m not murderous. Think about it.”

Grelier had, and before very long had decided that his short-term best interests lay beyond the
Gnostic Ascension
. He would co-operate with Quaiche for the immediate future, and then find something better—something less submissive—at the earliest opportunity.

Yet here he was, over a century later. He had underestimated his own weakness to a ludicrous degree. For in the Ultras, with their ships crammed full of ancient, faulty reefersleep caskets, Quaiche had found the perfect means of keeping Grelier in his service.

But Grelier had known nothing of this future in the earliest days of their liaison.

Their first move had been to engineer Jasmina’s downfall. Their plan had consisted of three steps, each of which had to be performed with great caution. The cost of discovery would be huge, but—Grelier was certain now—in all that time she had never once suspected that the two former rivals were plotting against her.

That didn’t mean that things had gone quite according to plan, however.

First, a camp had been established on Hela. There were habitation modules, sensors and surface rovers. Some Ultras had come down, but as usual their instinctive dislike of planetary environments had made them fidgety, anxious to get back to their ship. Grelier and Quaiche, by contrast, had found it the perfect venue in which to further their uneasy alliance. And they had even made a remarkable discovery, one that only aided their cause. It was during their earliest scouting trips away from the base, under the eye of Jasmina, that they had found the very first scuttler relics. Now, at last, they had some idea of who or what had made the bridge.

The second phase of their plan had been to make Jasmina unwell. As master of the body factory, it had been a trivial matter for Grelier. He had tampered with the clones, slowing their development, triggering more abnormalities and defects. Unable to anchor herself to reality with regular doses of self-inflicted pain, Jasmina had grown insular. Her judgement had become impaired, her grasp on events tenuous.

That was when they had attempted the third phase: rebellion. They had meant to engineer a mutiny, taking over the
Gnostic Ascension
for their own ends. There were Ultras—former friends of Morwenna—who had showed some sympathy to Quaiche. During their initial explorations of Hela, Quaiche and Grelier had located a fourth fully functional sentry of the same type that had downed the
Scavenger’s Daughter
. The idea had been to exploit Jasmina’s flawed judgement to drag the
Gnostic Ascension
within range of the remaining sentry weapon. Ordinarily, she would have resisted bringing her ship within light-hours of a place like Hela, but the spectacle of the bridge, and the discovery of the scuttler relics, had overridden her better instincts.

With the expected damage from the sentry—ultimately superficial, but enough to cause panic and confusion amongst her crew—the ship would have been ripe for takeover.

But it hadn’t worked. The sentry had attacked with greater force than Quaiche had anticipated, inflicting fatal, spreading damage on the
Gnostic Ascension
. He had wanted to cripple the ship and occupy it for his own purposes, but instead the vessel had blown up, waves of explosions stuttering away from the impact points on her hull until the wave front of destruction had reached the Conjoiner drives. Two bright new suns had flared in Hela’s sky. When the light faded, there had been nothing left of Jasmina, or of the great lighthugger that had brought Quaiche and Grelier to this place.

Quaiche and Grelier had been stranded.

But they were not doomed. They’d had all they needed to survive on Hela for years to come, courtesy of the surface camp already established. They had begun to explore, riding out in the surface rovers. They had collected scuttler parts, trying to fit the weird alien fossils together into some kind of coherent whole, always failing. To Quaiche it had become an obsessive enterprise. Above him, the puzzle of Haldora. Below, the maddening taxonomic jigsaw of the scuttlers. He had thrown himself into both mysteries, knowing that somehow they were linked, knowing that in finding the answer he would understand why he had been saved and Morwenna sacrificed. He had believed that the puzzles were tests from God. He had also believed that only he was truly capable of solving them.

A year had passed, then another. They circumnavigated Hela, using the rovers to carve out a rough trail. With each circumnavigation, the trail became better defined. They had made excursions to the north and south, veering away from the equator to where the heaviest concentrations of scuttler relics were to be found. Here they had mined and tunnelled, gathering more pieces of the jigsaw. Always, however, they had returned to the equator to mull over what they had found.

And one day, in the second or third year, Quaiche had realised something critical: that he must witness another vanishing.

“If it happens again, I have to see it,” he had told Grelier.

“But if it does happen again—for no particular reason—then you’ll know it isn’t a miracle.”

“No,” Quaiche had said, emphatically. “If it happens twice, I’ll know that God wanted to show it to me again for a reason, that he wanted to make sure there could no doubt in my mind that such a thing had already happened.”

Grelier had decided to play along. “But you have the telemetry from the
Dominatrix
. It confirms that Haldora vanished. Isn’t that enough for you?”

Quaiche had dismissed this point with a wave of his hand. “Numbers in electronic registers. I didn’t see it with my own eyes. This means something to me.”

“Then you’ll have to watch Haldora for ever.” Hastily, Grelier had corrected himself. “I mean, until it vanishes again. But how long did it disappear for last time? Less than a second? Less than an eyeblink? What if you miss it?”

“I’ll have to try not to.”

“For half a year you can’t even see Haldora.” Grelier had pointed out, sweeping his arm overhead. “It rises and falls.”

“Only if you don’t follow it. We circled Hela in under three months the first time we tried; under two the second time. It would be easier still to travel slowly, keeping pace with Haldora. One-third of a metre a second, that’s all it would take. Keep up that pace, stay close to the equator, and Haldora will always be overhead. It’ll just be the landscape that changes.”

Grelier had shaken his head in wonderment. “You’ve already thought this through.”

“It wasn’t difficult. We’ll lash together the rovers, make a travelling observation platform.”

“And sleep? And blinking?”

“You’re the physician,” Quaiche had said. “You figure it out.”

And figure it out he had. Sleep could be banished with drugs and neuro-surgery, coupled with a little dialysis to mop up fatigue poisons. He had taken care of the blinking as well.

“Ironic, really,” Grelier had observed to Quaiche. “This is what she threatened you with in the scrimshaw suit: no sleep and an unchanging view of reality. Yet now you welcome it.”

“Things changed,” Quaiche had said.

Now, standing in the garret, the years collapsed away. For Grelier, time had passed in a series of episodic snapshots, for he was only revived from reefersleep when Quaiche had some immediate need of him. He remembered that first slow circumnavigation, keeping pace with Haldora, the rovers lashed together like a raft. A year or two later another ship had arrived: more Ultras, drawn by the faint flash of energy from the dying
Gnostic Ascension
. They were curious, naturally cautious. They kept their ship at a safe distance and sent down emissaries in expendable vehicles. Quaiche traded with them for parts and services, offering scuttler relics in turn.

A decade or two later, following trade exchanges with the first ship, another had arrived. They were just as wary, just as keen to trade. The scuttler relics were exactly what the market wanted. And this time the ship was willing to offer more than components: there were sleepers in its belly, disaffected émigrés from some colony neither Quaiche nor Grelier had ever heard of. The mystery of Hela—the rumours of miracle—had drawn them across the light-years.

Quaiche had his first disciples.

Thousands more had arrived. Tens of thousands, then hundreds. For the Ultras, Hela was now a lucrative stopover on the strung-out, fragile web of interstellar commerce. The core worlds, the old places of trade, were now out of bounds, touched by plague and war. Lately, perhaps, by something worse than either. It was difficult to tell: very few ships were making it out to Hela from those places now. When they did, they brought with them confused stories of things emerging from interstellar space, fiercely mechanical things, implacable and old, that ripped through worlds, engorging themselves on organic life, but which were themselves no more alive than clocks or orreries. Those who came to Hela now came not only to witness the miraculous vanishings, but because they believed that they lived near the end of time and that Hela was a point of culmination, a place of final pilgrimage.

The Ultras brought them as paid cargo in their ships and pretended to have no interest in the local situation beyond its immediate commercial value. For some, this was probably true, but Grelier knew Ultras better than most and he believed that lately he had seen something in their eyes—a fear that had nothing to do with the size of their profit margins and everything to do with their own survival. They had seen things as well, he presumed. Glimpses, perhaps: phantoms stalking the edge of human space. For years they must have dismissed these as travellers’ tales, but now, as news from the core colonies stopped arriving, they were beginning to wonder.

There were Ultras on Hela now. Under the terms of trade, their lighthugger starships were not permitted to come close to either Haldora or its inhabited moon. They congregated in a parking swarm on the edge of the system, dispatching smaller shuttles to Hela. Representatives of the churches inspected these shuttles, ensuring that they carried no recording or scanning equipment pointed at Haldora. It was a gesture more than anything, one that could have been easily circumvented, but the Ultras were surprisingly pliant. They wanted to play along, for they needed the business.

Quaiche was completing his dealings with an Ultra when Grelier arrived in the garret. “Thank you, Captain, for your time,” he said, his ghost of a voice rising in grey spirals from the life-support couch.

“I’m sorry we weren’t able to come to an agreement,” the Ultra replied, “but you appreciate that the safety of my ship must be my first priority. We are all aware of what happened to the
Gnostic Ascension
.”

Quaiche spread his thin-boned fingers by way of sympathy. “Awful business. I was lucky to survive.”

“So we gather.”

The couch angled towards Grelier. “Surgeon-General Grelier . . . might I introduce Captain Basquiat of the lighthugger
Bride of the Wind
?”

Grelier bowed his head politely at Quaiche’s new guest. The Ultra was not as extreme as some that Grelier had encountered, but still odd and unsettling by baseline standards. He was very thin and colourless, like some desiccated weather-bleached insect, but propped upright in a blood-red support skeleton ornamented with silver lilies. A very large moth accompanied the Ultra: it fluttered before his face, fanning it.