Absolution Gap (67 page)

Rashmika approached the figure, weighing possibilities all the while. The figure’s suit was a hard-shelled model, closely fitting the anatomy of its wearer. The helmet and limb parts were olive green, the accordion joints gleaming silver. Unlike the suits she had seen being worn by the walking pilgrims, it was completely lacking in any ornamentation or religious frippery.

The faceplate turned to her. She saw highlights glance off a face behind the glass, the hard shadow beneath well-defined cheekbones.

Pietr extended an arm and with the other hand folded back a flap on the wrist of the outstretched arm. He unspooled a thin optical fibre and offered the other end to Rashmika.

Of course. Secure communication. She took the fibre and plugged it into the corresponding socket on her own suit. Such fibres were designed to allow suit-to-suit communications in the event of a radio or general network failure. They were also ideal for privacy.

“I’m glad you made it,” Pietr said.

“I wish I understood the reason for all the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“Better safe than sorry. I shouldn’t really have talked to you about the vanishings at all, at least not down in the caravan. Do you think anyone overheard us?”

“The quaestor came and had a quiet word with me when you had gone.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Pietr said. “He’s not really a religious man, but he knows which side his bread’s buttered on. The churches pay his salary, so he doesn’t want anyone rocking the boat with unorthodox rumours.”

“You were hardly calling for the abolition of the churches,” Rashmika replied. “From what I remember, all we discussed was the vanishings.”

“Well, that’s dangerous enough, in some people’s views. Talking of which—views, I mean—isn’t this something else?” Pietr pivoted around on his heels, illustrating his point with an expansive sweep of his free hand.

Rashmika smiled at his enthusiasm. “I’m not sure. I’m not really one for heights.”

“Oh, c’mon. Forget all that stuff about the vanishings, forget your enquiry—whatever it is—just for now. Admire the view. Millions of people will never, ever see what you’re seeing now.”

“It feels as if we’re trespassing,” Rashmika said, “as if the scuttlers built this bridge to be admired, but never used.”

“I don’t know much about them. I’d say we haven’t a clue what they thought, if they even built this thing. But the bridge is here, isn’t it? It seems an awful shame not to make some use of it, even if it’s only once in a while.”

Rashmika looked down at the star-shaped smear. “Is it true what the quaestor told me? Did someone once try to take a cathedral across this thing?”

“So they say. Not that you’ll find any evidence of it in any ecumenical records.”

She grasped the railing tighter, still beguiled by the remoteness of the ground so far below. “But it did happen, all the same?”

“It was a splinter sect,” Pietr said. “A one-off church, with a small cathedral. They called themselves the Numericists. They weren’t affiliated to any of the ecumenical organisations, and they had very limited trading agreements with the other churches. Their belief system was . . . odd. It wasn’t just a question of being in doctrinal conflict with any of the other churches. They were polytheists, for a start. Most of the churches are strictly monotheistic, with strong ties to the old Abrahamic religions. Hellfire and brimstone churches, I call them. One God, one Heaven, one Hell. But the ones who made that mess down there . . . they were a lot stranger. They weren’t the only polytheists, but their entire world view—their entire cosmology—was so hopelessly unorthodox that there was no possibility of interecumenical dialogue. The Numericists were devout mathematicians. They viewed the study of numbers as the highest possible calling, the only valid way to approach the numinous. They believed there was one God for every class of number: a God of integers, a God of real numbers, a God of zero. They had subsidiary gods: a lesser god of irrational numbers, a lesser god of the Diophantine primes. The other churches couldn’t stomach that kind of weirdness. So the Numericists were frozen out, and in due course they became insular and paranoid.”

“Not surprising, under the circumstances.”

“But there’s something else. They were interested in a statistical interpretation of the vanishings, using some pretty arcane probability theories. It was tricky. There hadn’t been so many vanishings at that time, so the data was sparser—but their methods, they said, were robust enough to be able to cope. And what they came up with was devastating.”

“Go on,” Rashmika said. She finally understood why Pietr had wanted her to come up on to the roof midway through the crossing.

“They were the first to claim that the vanishings were increasing in frequency, but it was statistically difficult to prove. There was already anecdotal evidence that they occurred in closely spaced clusters, but now, or so the Numericists claimed, the spaces between the clusters were growing shorter. They also claimed that the vanishings themselves were growing longer in duration, although they admitted that the evidence for that was much less ‘significant,’ in the statistical sense.”

“But they were right, weren’t they?”

Pietr nodded, the reflected landscape tilting in his helmet. “At least for the first part. Now even crude statistical methods will show the same result. The vanishings are definitely becoming more frequent.”

“And the second part?”

“Not proven. But all the new data hasn’t disproved it, either.”

Again Rashmika risked a glance down at the smear. “But what happened to them? Why did they end up down there?”

“No one really knows. As I said, the churches don’t even admit that an attempt at a crossing ever took place. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find grudging acknowledgement that the Numericists once existed—paperwork relating to rare trade dealings, for instance—but you won’t find anything about them ever crossing Absolution Gap.”

“It happened, though.”

“They tried it, yes. No one will ever know why, I think. Perhaps it was a last-ditch attempt to steal prestige from the churches that had frozen them out. Perhaps they’d worked out a short cut that would bring them ahead of the main procession without ever losing sight of Haldora. It doesn’t matter, really. They had a reason, they tried to make the crossing, and they failed. Why they failed, that’s something else.”

“The bridge didn’t give way,” Rashmika said.

“No—doesn’t look as if it did. Their cathedral was small, by the standards of the main ones. From the position of the impact point we can tell they made it a good way across the bridge before sliding off, so it wasn’t a question of the bridge buckling. My guess is it was always a delicate balancing act, with the cathedral extending either side of the road, and that midway over they lost navigational control just long enough to topple over. Who knows?”

“But you think there’s another possibility.”

“They hadn’t made themselves popular, what with all that statistical stuff about the vanishings. Remember what I said about the other churches not wanting to know about the increasing frequency?”

“They don’t want the world to change.”

“No, they don’t. They’ve got a nice arrangement as it stands. Keep circling Hela, keep monitoring Haldora, make a living exporting scuttler relics to the rest of human space. In the high church echelons, things are fine as they are, thank you very much. They don’t want any rumours of apocalypse upsetting their gravy train.”

“So you think someone destroyed the Numericists’ cathedral.”

“Like I said, don’t go trying to prove anything. Of course, it could have been an accident. No one has ever said that taking a cathedral across Absolution Gap was a
wise
course of action.”

“Despite all that, Pietr, you still have faith?” She saw his fist close tighter on the rail.

“I believe that the vanishings are a message in a time of crisis. Not just a mute statement of Godlike power, as the churches would have it—a miracle for a miracle’s sake—but something vastly more significant. I believe that they are a kind of clock, counting down, and that zero hour is much closer than anyone in authority will have us believe. The Numericists knew this. Do I believe that the churches are to be trusted? By and large, with one or two exceptions, no. I trust them about as far as I can piss in vacuum. But I still have my faith. That hasn’t changed.”

She thought he sounded as if he was telling the truth, but without a clear view of his face, her guess was as good as anyone’s.

“There’s something else though, isn’t there? You said the churches couldn’t possibly conceal all evidence of the changing vanishings.”

“They can’t. But there
is
an anomaly.” Pietr let go of the railing long enough to pass something to Rashmika. It was little metal cylinder with a screw top. “You should see this,” he said. “I think you will find it interesting. Inside is a piece of paper with some markings on it. They’re not annotated, since that would make them more dangerous should anyone in authority recognise them for what they are.”

“You’re going to have to give me a little more to go on than that.”

“In Skull Cliff, where I come from, there was a man named Saul Tempier. I knew him. He was an old hermit who lived in an abandoned scuttler shaft on the outskirts of the town. He fixed digging machines for a living. He wasn’t mad or violent, or even particularly antisocial; he just didn’t get on well with the other villagers and kept out of their way most of the time. He had an obsessive, methodical streak that made other people feel slightly ill at ease. He wasn’t interested in wives or lovers or friends.”

“And you don’t think he was particularly antisocial?”

“Well, he wasn’t actually rude or inhospitable. He kept himself clean and didn’t—as far as I am aware—have any genuinely unpleasant habits. If you visited him, he’d always make you tea from a big old samovar. He had an ancient neural lute which he played now and then. He’d always want to know what you thought of his playing.” She caught the flash of his smile through the faceplate. “Actually, it was pretty dreadful, but I never had the heart to tell him.”

“How did you come to know him?”

“It was my job to keep our stock of digging machinery in good order. We’d do most of the repairs ourselves, but whenever there was a backlog or something we just couldn’t get to work properly, one of us would haul it over to Tempier’s grotto. I suppose I visited him two or three times a year. I never minded it, really. I actually quite liked the old coot, bad lute playing and all. Anyway, Tempier was getting old. On one of our last meetings—this would have been eleven or twelve years ago—he told me there was something he wanted to show me. I was surprised that he trusted me that much.”

“I don’t know,” Rashmika said. “You strike me as the kind of person someone would find it quite easy to trust, Pietr.”

“Is that intended as a compliment?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, I’ll take it as one, in that case. Where was I?”

“Tempier said there was something he wanted to show you.”

“It’s actually the piece of paper I’ve just given you, or, rather, the paper is a careful copy of the original. Tempier, it turned out, had been keeping a record of the vanishings for most of his life. He had done a lot of background work—comparing and contrasting the public records of the main churches, even making visits to the Way to inspect those archives that were not usually accessible. He was a very diligent and obsessive sort, as I’ve said, and when I saw his notes I realised that they were easily the best personal record of the vanishings I’d ever seen. Frankly, I doubt there’s a better amateur compilation anywhere on Hela. Alongside each vanishing was a huge set of associated material—notes on witnesses, the quality of those witnesses, and any other corroborative data sets. If there was a volcanic eruption the day before, he’d note that as well. Anything unusual—no matter how irrelevant it appeared.”

“He found something, I take it. Was it the same thing that the Numericists discovered?”

“No,” Pietr said. “It was more than that. Tempier was well aware of what the Numericists had claimed. His own data didn’t contradict theirs in the slightest. In fact, he regarded it as rather obvious that the vanishings were growing more frequent.”

“So what did he discover?”

“He found out that the public and official records don’t quite match.”

Rashmika felt a wave of disappointment. She had expected more than that. “Big deal,” she said. “It doesn’t surprise me that the Observers might occasionally spot a vanishing when everyone else misses it, especially if it happened during some other distracting . . .”

“You misunderstand,” Pietr said sharply. For the first time she heard irritation in his voice. “It wasn’t a case of the churches claiming a vanishing that everyone else had missed. This was the other way around. Eight years earlier—which would make it twenty-odd years ago now—there was a vanishing which did not enter the official church records. Do you understand what I’m saying? A vanishing took place, and it was noted by public observers like Tempier, but according to the churches no such thing happened.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would the churches expunge knowledge of a vanishing?”

“Tempier wondered exactly the same thing.”

So perhaps her trip up on to the roof had not been entirely in vain after all. “Was there anything about this vanishing that might explain why it wasn’t admitted into the official record? Something that meant it didn’t quite meet the usual criteria?”

“Such as what?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Was it very brief, for instance?”

“As a matter of interest—if Tempier’s notes are correct—it was one of the longest vanishings ever recorded. Fully one and one-fifth of a second.”

“I don’t get it, in that case. What does Tempier have to say on the matter?”