Absolution Gap (58 page)

Vasko glanced at Urton, but he couldn’t tell if her expression was one of disgust or quiet approval.

The pig waited a breath before continuing. Something was wrong with the transmission, for the earlier image of Clavain had begun to reappear, overlaying Scorpio’s face like a faint nimbus. “There will, however, be an alternative. The administration recommends that all citizens go about their business as usual and do not attempt to leave the island. Nonetheless it recognises that a minority wish to relocate to the
Nostalgia for Infinity
. Beginning at noon tomorrow, therefore, and continuing for as long as necessary, the administration will provide safe authorised transportation to the ship. Designated aircraft will take groups of one hundred people at a time to the
Infinity
. As of six a.m. tomorrow, rules of conveyance, including personal effects allocations, will be available from the High Conch and all other administrative centres, or from uniformed Security Arm personnel. There is no need to panic about being on the first available transport, since—to repeat—the flights will continue until demand is exhausted.”

“They had no choice,” Vasko said quietly. “Scorp’s doing the right thing.”

But the pig was still talking. “For those who wish to board the
Infinity,
understand the following: conditions aboard the ship will be atrocious. For the last twenty-three years, there have seldom been more than a few dozen people aboard it at any one time. Much of the ship is now uninhabitable or simply unmapped. In order to accommodate an influx of hundreds, possibly even thousands, of refugees, the Security Arm will have to enforce strict emergency rule. If you think the crisis measures in the First Camp are Draconian, you have no idea how much worse things will be on the ship. Your sole right will be the right of survival, and we will dictate how that is interpreted.”

“What does he mean by that?” Vasko asked, while Scorpio continued with the arrangements for the transportation.

“He means they’ll have to freeze people,” Urton said. “Squeeze them into those sleep coffins, like they did when the ship came here in the first place.”

“He should tell them, in that case.”

“Obviously he doesn’t want to.”

“Those reefersleep caskets aren’t safe,” Vasko said. “I know what happened the last time they used them. A lot of people didn’t make it out alive.”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Urton said. “He’s still giving them better odds than if they try to make the journey themselves—even without that execution order.”

“I still don’t understand. Why provide that option at all, if the administration doesn’t think it’s the right thing to do?”

Urton shrugged. “Because maybe the administration isn’t sure what to do. If they declare a general evacuation to the ship, they’ll really have a panic on their hands. Looking at it from their point of view, how do they know whether it’s better for the people to evacuate to the ship or remain on the ground?”

“They don’t,” he said. “Whichever they choose, there’ll always be a risk that it might be the wrong decision.”

Urton nodded emphatically. She had nearly finished her beer. “At least this way Scorpio gets to split the difference. Some people will end up in the ship, some will chose to stay at home. It’s the perfect solution, if you want to maximise the chances of
some
people surviving.”

“That sounds very heartless.”

“It is.”

“In which case I don’t think you need worry about Scorpio not being the callous leader you said we needed.”

“No. He’s callous enough,” Urton agreed. “Of course, we could be misreading this entirely. But assuming we aren’t, does it shock you?”

“No, I suppose not. And I think you’re right. We do need someone strong, someone prepared to think the unthinkable.” Vasko put down his glass. It was only half-empty, but his thirst had gone the same way as his appetite. “One question,” he said. “Why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?”

Urton inspected him the way a lepidopterist might examine a pinned specimen. “Because, Vasko, it occurred to me that you might be a useful ally, in the long run.”

 

Hela, 2727

 

The scrimshaw suit said, “We’ve heard the news, Quaiche.”

The sudden voice startled him, as it always did. He was alone. Grelier had just finished seeing to his eyes, swabbing an infected abscess under one retracted eyelid. The metal clamp of the eye-opener felt unusually cruel to him today, as if, while Quaiche was sleeping, the surgeon-general had covertly sharpened all its little hooks. Not while he was really sleeping, of course. Sleep was a luxury he remembered in only the vaguest terms.

“I don’t know about any news,” he said.

“You made your little announcement to the congregation downstairs. We heard it. You’re taking the cathedral across Absolution Gap.”

“And if I am, what business is it of yours?”

“It’s insanity, Quaiche. And your mental health is very much our business.”

He saw the suit in blurred peripheral vision, around the sharp central image of Haldora. The world was half in shadow, bands of cream and ochre and subtle turquoise plunging into the sharp terminator of the nightside.

“You don’t care about me,” he said. “You only care about your own survival. You’re afraid I’ll destroy you when I destroy the Lady Morwenna.”

“‘When,’ Quaiche? Frankly, that’s a little disturbing to us. We were hoping you still had some intention of actually succeeding.”

“Perhaps I do,” he conceded.

“Where nobody has done so before?”

“The Lady Morwenna isn’t any old cathedral.”

“No. It’s the heaviest and tallest on the Way. Doesn’t that give you some slight pause for thought?”

“It will make my triumph all the more spectacular.”

“Or your disaster, should you topple off the bridge or bring the entire thing crashing down. But why now, Quaiche, after all these revolutions around Hela?”

“Because I feel that the time is right,” he said. “You can’t second-guess these things. Not the work of God.”

“You truly are a lost cause,” the scrimshaw suit said. Then the cheaply synthesised voice took on an urgency it had lacked before. “Quaiche, listen to us. Do what you will with the Lady Morwenna. We won’t stop you. But first let us out of this cage.”

“You’re scared,” he said, pulling the stiff tissue of his face into a smile. “I’ve really put the wind up you, haven’t I?”

“It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at the evidence, Quaiche. The vanishings are increasing in frequency. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“The work of God is moving towards its culmination.”

“Or, alternatively, the concealment mechanism is failing. Take your pick. We know which interpretation we favour.”

“I know all about your heresies,” he said. “I don’t need to hear them again.”

“You still think we are demons, Quaiche?”

“You call yourselves shadows. Isn’t that a bit of a giveaway?”

“We call ourselves shadows because that is what we are, just as you are all shadows to us. It’s a statement of fact, Quaiche, not a theological standpoint.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of it.”

It was true: he had heard enough of their heresies. They were lies, engineered to undermine his faith. Time and again he had tried to purge them from his head, but always to no avail. As long as the scrimshaw suit remained with him—as long as the thing inside the scrimshaw suit remained—he would never be able to forget those untruths. In a moment of weakness, a lapse that had been every bit as unforgivable as the one twenty years earlier that had brought them here in the first place, he had even followed up some of their heretical claims. He had delved into the Lady Morwenna’s archives, following lines of enquiry.

The shadows spoke of a theory. It meant nothing to him, yet when he searched the deep archives—records carried across centuries in the shattered and corrupted data troves of Ultra trade ships—he found something, glints of lost knowledge, teasing hints from which his mind was able to suggest a whole.

Hints of something called brane theory.

It was a model of the universe, an antique cosmological theory that had enjoyed a brief interlude of popularity seven hundred years in the past. So far as Quaiche could tell, the theory had not been discredited so much as abandoned, put aside when newer and brighter toys came along. At the time there had been no easy way of testing any of these competing theories, so they had to stand and fall on their strict aesthetic merit and the ease with which they could be tamed and manipulated with the cudgels and barbs of mathematics.

Brane theory suggested that the universe the senses spoke of was but one sliver of something vaster, one laminate layer in a stacked ply of adjacent realities. There was, Quaiche thought, something alluringly theological in that model, the idea of heavens above and hells below, with the mundane substrate of perceived reality squeezed between them. As above, so below.

But brane theory had nothing to do with heaven and hell. It had originated as a response to something called string theory, and specifically a conundrum within string theory known as the hierarchy problem.

Heresy again. But he could not stop himself from delving deeper.

String theory posited that the fundamental building blocks of matter were, at the smallest conceivable scales, simply one-dimensional loops of mass-energy. Like a guitar string the loops were able to vibrate—to
twang
—in certain discrete modes, each of which corresponded to a recognisable particle at the classical scale. Quarks, electrons, neutrinos, even photons, were all just different vibrational modes of these fundamental strings. Even gravity turned out to be a manifestation of string behaviour.

But gravity was also the problem. On the classical scale—the familiar universe of people and buildings, ships and worlds—gravity was much weaker than anyone normally gave it credit for. Yes, it held planets in their orbits around stars. Yes, it held stars in their orbits around the centre of mass of the galaxy. But compared to the other forces of nature, it was barely there at all. When the Lady Morwenna lowered one of its electromagnetic grapples to lift some chunk of metal from a delivery tractor, the magnet was resisting the entire gravitational force of Hela—everything the world could muster. If gravity had been as strong as the other forces, the Lady Morwenna would have been crushed into an atom-thick pancake, a film of collapsed metal on the perfectly smooth spherical surface of a collapsed planet. It was only gravity’s extreme weakness on the classical scale that allowed life to exist in the first place.

But string theory went on to suggest that gravity was really very strong, if only one looked closely enough. At the Planck scale, the smallest possible increment of measurement, string theory predicted that gravity ramped up to equivalence with the other forces. Indeed, at that scale reality looked rather different in other respects as well: curled up like dead woodlice were seven additional dimensions—hyperspaces accessible only on the microscopic scale of quantum interactions.

There was an aesthetic problem with this view, however. The other forces—bundled together as a single unified electroweak force—manifested themselves at a certain characteristic energy. But the strong gravity of string theory would only reveal itself at energies ten million billion times greater than for the electroweak forces. Such energies were far beyond the grasp of experimental procedure. This was the hierarchy problem, and it was considered deeply offensive. Brane theory was one attempt to resolve this glaring schism.

Brane theory—as far as Quaiche understood it—proposed that gravity was really as strong as the electroweak force, even on the classical scale. But what happened to gravity was that it leaked away before it had a chance to show its teeth. What was left—the gravity that was experienced in day-to-day life—was only a thin residue of something much stronger. Most of the force of gravity had dissipated
sideways,
into adjoining branes or dimensions. The particles that made up most of the universe were glued to a particular braneworld, a particular slice of the laminate of branes that the theory referred to as the bulk. That was why the ordinary matter of the universe only ever saw the one braneworld within which it happened to exist: it was not free to drift off into the bulk. But gravitons, the messenger particles of gravity, suffered no such constraint. They were free to drift between branes, sailing through the bulk with impunity. The best analogy Quaiche had been able to come up with was the printed words on the pages of a book, each confined for all eternity to one particular page, knowing nothing of the words printed on the next page, only a fraction of a millimetre away. And then think of bookworms, gnawing at right angles to the text.

But what of the shadows? This was where Quaiche had to fill in the details for himself. What the shadows appeared to be hinting at—the heart of the heresy—was that they were messengers or some form of communication from an adjacent braneworld. That braneworld might have been completely disconnected from our own, so that the only possible means of communication between the two was through the bulk. There was another possibility, however: the two apparently separate braneworlds might have been distant portions of a single brane, one that was folded back on itself like a hairpin. If that were the case—and the shadows had said nothing on the matter either way—then they were messengers not from another reality but merely from a distant corner of the familiar universe, unthinkably remote in both space and time. The light and energy from their region of space could only travel along the brane, unable to slip across the tiny gap between the folded surfaces. But gravity slipped effortlessly across the bulk, carrying a message from brane to brane. The stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies in the shadow brane cast a gravitational shadow on our local universe, influencing the motions of our stars and galaxies. By the same token, the gravity caused by the matter in the local part of the brane leaked through the bulk, into the realm of the shadows.