Absolution Gap (86 page)

No one said anything.

“But there’s a problem,” Scorpio said. “And the problem is that it isn’t our choice to make. This isn’t a democracy. All we can do is present our arguments and let Captain John Brannigan make up his mind.”

He reached into a pocket in his leather tunic and pulled out the small handful of red dust he had carried there for days.

It was finely graded iron oxide, collected from one of the machine shops—as close to Martian soil as it was possible to get, twenty-seven light-years from Mars. It trailed between the short stubs of his fingers even as he stood up and held it over the centre of the table, between the Y and the H.

This was it, he knew: the crux moment. If nothing happened—if the ship did not immediately signal its intentions by making the dust point unambiguously to one letter or other, he was over. No matter how much he wanted to see things through, he would have made a mockery of himself. But Clavain had never shirked from these moments. His whole life had lurched from one point of maximum crisis to another.

Scorpio looked up. The dust was beginning to run out.

“Your call, John.”

Hela, 2727

 

At night, in her room, the voice returned. It always waited until Rashmika was alone, until she was away from the garret. She had hoped, the first time, that it might turn out to be some temporary delusion, the effect, perhaps, of Quaicheist viral agents somehow entering her system and playing havoc with her sanity. But the voice was too rational for that, entirely too quiet and calm, and what it said was specifically directed at Rashmika and her predicament, rather than some ill-defined generic host.

[Rashmika,] it said, [listen to us, please. The time of crisis grows near, in more ways than one.]

“Go away,” she said, burying her head in the pillow.

[We need your help now,] the voice said.

She knew that if she did not answer the voice it would keep pestering her, its patience endless. “My help?”

[We know what Quaiche intends to do with this cathedral, how he plans to drive it over the bridge. He won’t succeed, Rashmika. The bridge won’t take the Lady Morwenna. It wasn’t ever meant to take something like a cathedral.]

“And you’d know, would you?”

[The bridge wasn’t made by the scuttlers. It’s a lot more recent than that. And it won’t withstand the Lady Mor.]

She sat up in her narrow cot of a bed and turned the shutters to admit stained-glass light. She felt the rumble and sway of the cathedral’s progress, the distant churning of engines. She thought of the bridge, shining somewhere ahead, delicate as a dream, oblivious to the vast mass sliding slowly towards it.

What did the voice mean, that it was a lot more recent?

“I can’t stop it,” she said.

[You don’t have to stop it. You just have to get us to safety, before it’s too late.]

“Ask Quaiche.”

[Don’t you think we’ve tried, Rashmika? Don’t you think we’ve spent hours trying to persuade him? But he doesn’t care about us. He’d rather we didn’t exist. Sometimes, he even manages to convince himself that we don’t. When the cathedral falls from the bridge, or the bridge collapses, we’ll be destroyed. He’ll let that happen, because then he doesn’t have to think about us any more.]

“I can’t help you,” she said. “I don’t want to help you. You scare me. I don’t even know what you are, or where you’ve come from.”

[You know more than you imagine,” the voice said. “You came here to find
us,
not Quaiche.]

“Don’t be silly.”

[We know who you are, Rashmika, or rather we know who you aren’t. That machinery in your head, remember? Where did all that come from?]

“I don’t know about any machinery.”

[And your memories—don’t they sometimes seem to belong to someone else? We heard you talking to the dean. We heard you talk about the Amarantin, and your memories of Resurgam.]

“It was a slip,” she said. “I didn’t mean . . .”

[You meant every word of it, but you just don’t realise it yet. You are vastly more than you think, Rashmika. How far back do your memories of life on Hela really stretch? Nine years? Not much more, we suspect. So what came before?]

“Stop talking like that,” she said.

The voice ignored her. [You aren’t what you seem. These memories of life on Hela are a graft, nothing more. Beneath them lies something else entirely. For nine years they’ve served you well, allowing you to move amongst these people as if born to them. The illusion was so perfect, so seamless, that you didn’t even suspect it yourself. But all along your true mission was at the back of your mind. You were waiting for something: some conjunction of events. It brought you from the badlands, down to the Permanent Way. Now, nearing the end of your quest, you are coming out of the dream. You are starting to remember who you really are, and it thrills and terrifies you in equal measure.]

“My mission?” she asked, almost laughing at the absurdity of it.

[To make contact with us,] the voice said, [the shadows. Those you were sent to negotiate with.]

“Who are you?” she asked quietly. “
Please
tell me.”

[Go to sleep, little girl. You’ll dream of us, and then you’ll know everything.]

Rashmika went to sleep. She dreamed of shadows, and more. She dreamed the kinds of dream she had always associated with shallow sleep and fever: geometric and abstract, highly repetitious, filled with inexplicable terrors and ecstasies. She dreamed the dream of a hunted people.

They were far away, so far away that the distance separating them from the familiar universe—in both space and time—was incomprehensibly large, beyond any sensible scheme of measurement. But they
were
people, of a kind. They had lived and dreamed, and they had a history that was itself a kind of dream: unimaginably far-reaching, unimaginably complex, an epic now grown too long for the telling. All that it was necessary for her to know—all that she
could
know, now—was that they had reached a point where their memory of interstellar colonisation on the human scale was so remote, so faded and etiolated by time, that it almost seemed to merge with their earliest prehistory, barely separable from a faint ancestral recollection of fire-making and the bringing down of game.

They had colonised a handful of stars, and then they had colonised their galaxy, and then they had colonised much more than that, leap-frogging out into ever-larger territories, dancing from one hierarchical structure to the next. Galaxies, then groups of galaxies, then sprawling superclusters of tens of thousands of galaxy-groups, until they called across the starless voids between superclusters—the largest structures in creation—like apes howling from one tree-top to the next. They had done wonderful and terrible things. They had reshaped themselves and their universe, and they had made plans for eternity.

They had failed. Across all that dizzying history, from one leap of scale to the next, there had never been a time when they were not running from something. It wasn’t the Inhibitors, or anything very like them. It
was
a kind of machinery, but this time more like a blight, a transforming, ravening disease that they themselves had let loose. The dream’s details were vague, but what she understood was this: in their very earliest history they had made something, a tool rather than weapon, its intended function peaceful and utilitarian, but which had slipped from their control.

The tool neither attacked the people nor showed any great evidence of recognising them. What it did—with the mindless efficiency of wildfire—was rip matter apart, turning worlds into floating clouds of rubble, shells of rock and ice surrounding entire stars. Mirrors in the swarms of machinery gathered starlight, focusing life-giving energy on to the grains of rubble; transparent membranes trapped that energy around each grain and allowed tiny bubblelike ecologies to grow. Within these warm emerald-green pockets the people were able to survive, if they chose. But that was their only choice, and even then only a certain kind of existence was possible. Their only other option was flight: they could not stop the advancement of the transforming machines, only keep running from the leading edge of the wave. They could only watch as the transforming fire swept through their vast civilisation in a mere flicker of cosmic time, as the great swarms of machine-stimulated living matter turned stars into green lanterns.

They ran, and they ran. They sought solace in satellite galaxies, and for a few million years they thought they were safe. But the machines eventually reached the satellites, and began the same grindingly slow process of stellar consumption. The people ran again, but it was never far enough, never fast enough. No weapons worked: they either did more damage than the blight, or helped spread it faster. The transforming machines evolved, becoming steadily more agile and clever. Yet one thing never changed: their central task remained the smashing of worlds, and the remaking of them into a billion bright-green shards.

They had been created to do something, and that was what they were going to do.

Now, at the tail end of their history, the people had run as far as it was possible to run. They had exhausted every niche. They could not go back, could not make an accommodation with the machines. Even the transformed galaxies were now uninhabitable, their chemistries poisoned, the ecological balance of stellar life and death upset by the swarming industry of the machines. Out-of-control weapons, designed originally to defeat the machines, were themselves now as much of a hazard as the original problem.

So the people turned elsewhere. If they were being squeezed out of their own universe, then perhaps it was time to consider moving to another.

Fortunately, this was not as impossible as it sounded.

In her dream, Rashmika learned about the theory of braneworlds. There was a hallucinatory texture to it: velvety curtains of light and darkness rippled in her mind with the languor of auroral storms. What she understood was this: everything in the visible universe, everything that she saw—from the palm of her hand to the Lady Morwenna, from Hela itself out to the furthest observable galaxy—was necessarily trapped on one brane, like a pattern woven into a sheet of fabric. Quarks and electrons, photons and neutrinos—everything that constituted the universe in which she lived and breathed, including herself, was forced to travel along the surface of this one brane alone.

But the brane itself was only one of many parallel sheets floating in the higher-dimensional space that was called the bulk. The sheets were stacked closely together; were even, perhaps, joined at their edges, like the folded musical program of some vast cosmic orchestrion. Some of the sheets had very different properties from others: although the same fundamental rules of nature applied in each, the strengths of the coupling constants—and hence the properties of the macroscopic universe—depended on where a particular brane lay within the bulk. Life within those distant branes was bizarre and strange, assuming that the parochial physics even allowed anything as complex as life. Elsewhere, some sheets were brushing against each other, the glancing impact of their collisions generating primordial events in each brane that looked very much like the Big Bangs of traditional cosmology.

If the local brane was connected to another, then the fold point—the crease—lay at a cosmological distance beyond even the Hubble length scale. But there was nothing to prevent matter and radiation making the journey around that fold, given time. If one travelled far enough along the surface of one of these connected branes—through countless megaparsecs, far enough through the conventional universe of matter and light—one would eventually end up on the next closest brane in the multidimensional void of the bulk.

Rashmika could not see the topological relationship between her brane and the brane of the shadows. Were they joined, or separate? Were the shadows deliberately withholding this information, or was it just not known to them?

It probably didn’t matter.

What did matter—the
only
thing that mattered—was that there was a way to signal across the bulk. Gravity was not like the other elements of her universe: it was only imperfectly bound to a particular brane. It could take the long way around—oozing along an individual brane like a slowly spreading wine stain—but it could also leak through, taking the short cut across the bulk.

The people—the shadows, she now realised—had used gravity to send messages across the bulk, from brane to brane. And with their usual patience—for they were nothing if not patient—they had waited until someone answered.

Finally, someone had. They were the scuttlers: a starfaring species in their own right. Their history was much shorter than that of the shadows; only a few million years had passed since they had emerged from their birth world, in some lost corner of the galaxy. They were a peculiar species, with their strange habit of swapping body parts and their utter abhorrence of similarity and duplication. Their culture was impenetrably weird: nothing about it made any sense to any other species that the scuttlers ever met. Because of this they had established few trading partners, made few allegiances, and accumulated very little knowledge from other societies. They lived on cold worlds, favouring the moons of gas giants. They kept themselves to themselves, and had no ambitions beyond the modest settlement of a few hundred systems in their local galactic sector. Because of their solitary habits, it took them a while to draw down the attentions of the Inhibitors.

It made no difference. The Inhibitors didn’t distinguish between the meek and aggressive: the rules applied equally to all. By the time the scuttlers had made contact with the shadows, they had been pushed to the edge of extinction. They were, needless to say, ready to consider anything.

The shadows learned of the scuttlers’ travails. They listened, amused, at the stories of entire species being wiped out by the swarming black machines.