Absolution Gap (63 page)

The Captain did not answer her. He pulled down the visor and vanished back into the storm, still angling his body against the tremendous lacerating force of that invisible wind. And Antoinette began to wonder whether this visit hadn’t after all been a grave mistake, exactly the sort of reckless behaviour that her father had always warned her about.

 

“No joy,” she told her companions back in the High Conch.

Around the table sat a quorum of colony seniors. She did not notice any obvious absences except for Pellerin, the swimmer. Even Scorpio was now present. It was the first she had seen of him since Clavain’s death, and there was, Antoinette thought, something in his gaze that she had never seen there before. Even when he looked directly at her his eyes were focused on something distant and almost certainly hostile—a glint on some imagined horizon, an enemy sail or the gleam of armour. She had seen that look somewhere else recently, but it took her a moment to remember where. The old man had been sitting in the same place at the table, fixated on the same remote threat. It had taken years of pain and suffering to bring Clavain to that state, but only days to do it to the pig.

Antoinette knew that something awful had happened in the iceberg. She had flinched from the details. When the others had told her she did not need to know—that she was much better off
not
knowing—she had decided to believe them. But although she had never been very good at reading the expressions of pigs, in Scorpio’s face half the story was already laid out for her inspection, the horror anatomised if only she had the wit to read the signs.

“What did you tell him?” Scorpio asked.

“I told him we’d be looking at tens of thousands of casualties if he decided to lift off.”

“And?”

“He more or less said ‘too bad.’ His only immediate concern was for the people already aboard the ship.”

“Fourteen thousand at the last count,” Blood commented.

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Vasko said. “That’s—what? Not far off a tenth of the colony already?”

Blood toyed with his knife. “You want to come and help us squeeze in the next five hundred, son, you’re more than welcome.”

“It’s that difficult?” Vasko asked.

“It gets worse with every consignment. We might manage to get it up to twenty thousand by dawn, but only if we start treating them like cattle.”

“They’re human beings,” Antoinette said. “They deserve better treatment than that. What about the freezers? Aren’t they helping?”

“The caskets aren’t working as well as they used to,” Xavier Liu said, addressing his wife exactly as he would any other colony senior. “Once they’re cooled down they’re OK, but putting someone under means hours of supervision and tinkering. There’s no way to process them fast enough.”

Antoinette closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. She saw turquoise rings, like ripples in water. “This is about as bad as things can get, isn’t it?” Then she reopened her eyes and tried to shake some clarity into her head. “Scorp—any contact with Remontoire?”

“Nothing.”

“But you’re still convinced he’s up there?”

“I’m not convinced of anything. I’m merely acting on the best intelligence I have.”

“And you think we’d have seen a sign by now, some attempt to communicate with us, if he were up there.”

“Khouri was that sign,” Scorpio said.

“Then why haven’t they sent down someone else?” Antoinette replied. “We need to know, Scorp: do we sit tight or get the hell off Ararat?”

“Believe me, I’m aware of the options.”

“We can’t wait for ever,” Antoinette said, frustration seeping into her voice. “If Remontoire loses the battle, we’ll be looking at a sky full of wolves. No way out once that happens, even if they don’t touch Ararat. We’ll be locked in.”

“As I said, I’m aware of the options.”

She had heard the menace in his voice. Of course he was aware. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just . . . don’t know what else we can do.”

No one spoke for a while. Outside, an aircraft swept low overhead, curving away with another consignment of refugees. Antoinette did not know if they were being taken to the ship or the far side of the island. Once the need to get people to safety had been recognised, the evacuation effort had been split down the middle.

“Did Aura offer anything useful?” Vasko asked.

Scorpio turned to him, the leather of his uniform creaking. “What sort of thing were you thinking of?”

“It wasn’t Khouri that was the sign,” Vasko said, “it was Aura. Khouri may know things, but Aura is the hotline. She’s the one we really need to talk to, the one who might know the right thing to do.”

“I’m glad you’ve given the matter so much consideration,” Scorpio said.

“Well?” Vasko persisted.

Antoinette stiffened. The atmosphere in the meeting room had never exactly been relaxed, but now it made the hairs on the back of her hands tingle. She had never dared speak to Scorpio like that, and she did not know many who had.

But Scorpio answered calmly. “She—Khouri—said the word again.”

“The word?” Vasko repeated.

“Hela. She’s said it several times since we revived her, but we didn’t know what it meant, or even if it had any particular significance. But there was another word this time.” Again the leather creaked as he shifted his frame. For all that he appeared disconnected from events in the room, the violence of which he was capable was a palpable thing, waiting in the wings like an actor.

“The other word?” Vasko asked.

“Quaiche,” Scorpio replied.

 

The woman walked to the sea. Overhead the sky was a brutal, tortured grey and the rocks under her feet were slippery and unforgiving. She shivered, more in apprehension than cold, for the air was humid and oppressive. She looked behind her, along the shoreline towards the ragged edge of the encampment. The buildings on the fringe of the settlement had a deserted and derelict air to them. Some of them had collapsed and never been reoccupied. She thought it very unlikely that there was anyone around to notice her presence. Not, of course, that it mattered in the slightest. She was entitled to be here, and she was entitled to step into the sea. The fact that she would never have asked this of her own swimmers did not mean that her actions were in any way against colony rules, or even the rules of the swimmer corps. Foolhardy, yes, and very probably futile, but that could not be helped. The pressure to do something had grown inside her like a nagging pain, until it could not be ignored.

It had been Vasko Malinin who had tipped her over the edge. Did he realise the effect his words had had?

Marl Pellerin halted where the shoreline began to curve back around on itself, enclosing the waters of the bay. The shore was a vague grey scratch stretching as far as the eye could see, until it became lost in the mingled wall of sea-mist and cloud that locked in the bay in all directions. The spire of the ship was only intermittently visible in the silvery distance, and its size and remoteness varied from sighting to sighting as her brain struggled to cope with the meagre evidence available to it. Marl knew that the spire reached three kilometres into the sky, but at times it looked no larger than a medium-sized conch structure, or one of the communications antennae that ringed the settlement. She imagined the squall of neutrinos streaming out from the spire—actually from the submerged part of it, of course, where the engines lay underwater—as a shining radiance, a holy light knifing through her. The particles sang through her cell membranes, doing no damage as they sprinted for interstellar space at a hair’s breath below the speed of light. They meant that the engines were gearing up for starflight. Nothing organic could detect those squalls, only the most sensitive kinds of machine. But was that really true? The Juggler organisms—taken as a single planet-spanning entity—constituted a truly vast biomass. The Juggler organisms on a single planet outweighed the cumulative mass of the entire human species by a factor of a hundred. Was it so absurd to think that the Jugglers in their entirety might not be as oblivious to that neutrino flux as people imagined? Perhaps they, too, sensed the Captain’s restlessness. And perhaps in their slow, green, nearly mindless fashion they comprehended something of what his departure would mean.

At the sea’s edge something caught Marl’s eye. She walked over to examine it, skipping nimbly from rock to rock. It was a lump of metal, blackened and twisted like some melted sugar confection, strange folds and creases marring its surface. Smoke coiled up from it. The thing buzzed and crackled, and an articulated part resembling the sectioned tail of a lobster twitched horribly. It must have come down recently, perhaps in the last hour. All around Ararat, wherever there were human observers, one heard reports of things falling from the sky. There were too many near these outposts to be accidental. Efforts were being concentrated above centres of human population. Someone—or something—was trying to get through. Occasionally, some small shard succeeded.

The thing disturbed her. Was it alien or human? Was it friendly-human or Conjoiner-human? Was anyone still making that kind of distinction?

Marl walked past the object and stopped at the water’s edge. She disrobed. Preparing to enter the sea, she had a weird flash of herself from the sea’s perspective. Her vision seemed to bob up and down from the water. She was a thin, naked thing, a pale upright starfish on the shore. The smashed object pushed a quill of smoke into the sky.

Marl wet her hands in water that had gathered in a rockpool. She splashed her face, wetting back her hair. The water stung her eyes, made them blur with tears. Even the water in the pools was fetid with Juggler life. Pellerin’s skin itched, especially in the band across her face where she already showed signs of Juggler takeover. The two colonies of micro-organisms—the one in the water and the one buried in her face—were recognising each other, fizzing with excitement.

Those who monitored such things considered Marl a marginal case. Her signs of takeover were by no means the worst anyone had ever seen. On statistical grounds, she ought to be safe for another dozen swims, at the very least. But there were always exceptions. Sometimes the sea consumed those who had only very slight indications of takeover. Rarely, it took complete newcomers the first time they swam.

That was the point about the Pattern Jugglers. They were alien.
It
, the Juggler biomass, was alien. It would not succumb to human analysis, to neatly circumscribed cause and effect. It was as quixotic and unpredictable as a drunkard. You could guess how it might behave given certain parameters, but once in a while you might be terribly, terribly wrong.

Marl knew this. She had never pretended otherwise. She knew that any swim brought risks.

She had been lucky so far.

She thought of Shizuko, waiting in the psychiatric section for one of Marl’s visits—except she wasn’t really waiting in the usual sense of the word. Shizuko might have been aware that Marl was due to arrive, and she might have varied her activities accordingly. But when Marl showed up, Shizuko merely looked at her with the distracted passing interest of someone who has seen a crack in a wall that they did not remember, or a fleeting suggestion of meaningful shape in a cloud. The flicker of interest was waning almost as soon as Marl had noticed it. Sometimes Shizuko would laugh, but it was an idiot’s laugh, like the chime of small, stupid bells.

Shizuko would then return to her scratching, her fingers always bleeding under the nails, ignoring the crayons and chalks offered to her as substitutes. Marl had stopped visiting some months ago. Once she had acknowledged and accepted that she now meant nothing to Shizuko, there had been an easing. Counterpointing it, however, had also been a dispiriting sense of betrayal and weakness.

She thought now of Vasko. She thought of his easy certainties, his conviction that the only thing that stood between the swimmers and the sea was fear.

She hated him for that.

Marl took a step into the water. A dozen or so metres out, a raft of green matter twirled in response, sensing that she had entered its realm. Marl took in a deep breath. She was impossibly scared. The itch across her face had become a burn. It made her want to swoon into the water.

“I’m here,” she said. And she stepped towards the mass of Juggler organisms, submerging up to her thighs, up to her waist, then deeper. Ahead, the biomass formed shapes with quickening intensity, the breeze of its transformations blowing over her. Alien anatomies shuffled through endless permutations. It was a pageant of monsters. The water too deep now to walk through, she kicked off from the bed of rocks and began to swim towards the show.

 

Vasko looked at the others present. “Quaiche? That doesn’t mean anything more to me than the first word.”

“They meant nothing to me either,” Scorpio said. “I wasn’t even sure of the spelling of the first word. But now I’m certain. The second word locks it. The meaning is unambiguous.”

“So are you going to enlighten us?” Liu asked.

Scorpio gestured to Orca Cruz.

“Scorp’s right,” she said. “Hela means nothing significant in isolation. Query the databases we brought with us from Resurgam or Yellowstone and you’ll find thousands of possible explanations. Same if you try variant spellings. But put in Quaiche and Hela and it’s a different kettle of fish. There’s really only one explanation, bizarre as it seems.”

“I’m dying to hear it,” Liu said. Next to him, Vasko nodded in agreement. Antoinette said nothing and conveyed no visible interest, but her curiosity was obviously just as strong.

“Hela is a world,” Cruz said. “Not much of one, just a medium-sized moon orbiting a gas giant named Haldora. Still not ringing any bells?”

No one said anything.

“What about Quaiche?” Vasko asked. “Another moon?”