Absolution Gap (88 page)

“And?”

“They came back to help me when the wolf aggregate was about to finish me off. A suicidal move on their part. I think it convinced me and my associates to accept terms of co-operation from Skade’s people. But there was something else.”

“The shard?”

“Not the shard itself, but data pertaining to the same mystery. I viewed it with suspicion, as I still do. I can’t rule out the possibility that it may have been a piece of disinformation sown by Skade when she knew her days were numbered. Just like her to throw a posthumous spanner into our works, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her for a second,” Scorpio replied. Now that he knew it had some deeper significance, the piece of conch material felt like some holy relic in his hands. He held it with reverential care, as if he might damage it. “What did the data tell you?”

“Before they transmitted the data, they spoke of the situation around Ararat being more complicated than we had assumed. I didn’t admit it at the time, but what they said chimed with my own observations. There had, for some time, been hints of something else in the game. Not my people, nor Skade’s, not even the Inhibitors, but another party, lurking on the very edge of events, like spectators. Of course, in the confusion of battle it was easy to dismiss such speculation: ghost returns from mass sensors, vague phantom forms glimpsed during intense energy bursts. There
was
a great deal of deliberate confusion.”

“And the data?”

“It only confirmed those fears. Added to my own observations, the conclusion was inescapable: we were being watched. Something else—neither human nor Inhibitor—had followed us to Ararat. It may even have been there before us.”

“How do you know they weren’t part of the Inhibitors? We know so little about them.”

“Because their movements suggested they were as wary of the Inhibitors as we were. Not to the same degree, but cautious nonetheless.”

“Then who are they?”

“I don’t know, Scorp. I only have this shard. It was recovered after an engagement during which one of their vehicles may have been damaged by drifting too close to the battle. It is a piece of debris, Scorp. The same applies, I think, to every piece of conch material you have ever found on Ararat. They are the remains of ships, fallen into the sea.”

“Then who made them?”

“We don’t know.”

“What do they want with us?”

“We don’t know that, either, only that they have taken an
interest
.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“I’m not sure I like it either. They haven’t contacted us directly, and everything they’ve done suggests they have no intention of making their presence known. They’re more advanced than us, that’s for sure. They may skulk in the darkness, slinking around the Inhibitors, but they’ve survived. They’re still out there, when we’re on the brink of extinction.”

“They could help us.”

“Or they could turn out to be as bad for us as the Inhibitors.”

Scorpio looked into the old Conjoiner’s face: so maddeningly calm, despite the vast implications of their conversation. “You sound as if you think we’re being judged,” he said.

“I wonder if that isn’t the case.”

“And Aura? What does she have to say?”

“She has never made any mention of another party,” Remontoire said.

“Perhaps these are the shadows, after all.”

“Then why go to Hela to make contact with them? No, Scorp: these aren’t the shadows. They’re something else, something she either doesn’t know about, or chooses not to tell us.”

“Now you’re making me nervous.”

“That, Mr. Pink, was very much the idea. Someone has to know this, and it might as well be you.”

“If she doesn’t know about the other party, how can we be sure the rest of her information’s correct?”

“We can’t. That’s the difficulty.”

Scorpio fingered the shard. It was cool to the touch, barely heavier than the air it displaced. “I could talk to her about it, see if she remembers.”

“Or you could keep the information to yourself, because it is too dangerous to reveal to her. Remember: it may be misinformation created by Skade to destroy our confidence in Aura. If she were to deny knowledge of it, will you be able to trust her any more?”

“I’d still like the data,” Scorpio said.

“Too dangerous. If I passed it to you, it might find its way into her head. She’s one of us, Scorp: a Conjoiner. You’ll have to make do with the shard—call it an
aide-mémoire
—and this conversation. That should suffice, should it not?”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t tell her, ever?”

“No, I’m merely saying you must make that decision for yourself, and that it should not be taken lightly.” Remontoire paused, and then offered a smile. “Frankly, I don’t envy you. Rather a lot may depend on it, you see.”

Scorpio pushed the shard into his pocket.

Hela, 2727

 

[Help us, Rashmika,] the voice said, when she was alone. [Don’t let us die when the cathedral dies.]

“I can’t help you. I’m not even sure I want to.”

[Quaiche is unstable,] the voice insisted. [He will destroy us, because we are a chink in the armour of his faith. That cannot be allowed to happen, Rashmika. For your sakes—for the sake of all your people—don’t make the same mistake as the scuttlers. Don’t close the door on us.]

She thrashed her head into the damp landscape of her pillow, smelling her own days-old sweat worked into the yellowing fabric during sleepless, voice-tormented nights such as this. All she wanted was for the voice to silence itself; all she wanted was a return to the old simplicities, where all she had to worry about was the imposition of her own self-righteous convictions.

“How did you get here? You still haven’t told me. If the door is closed—”

[The door was opened, briefly. During a difficult period with the supply of the virus, Quaiche endured a lapse of faith. In that crisis he began to doubt his own interpretation of the vanishings. He arranged for the firing of an instrument package into the face of Haldora, a simple mechanical probe crammed with electronic instrumentation.]

“And?”

[He provoked a response. The probe was injected into Haldora during a vanishing. It caused the vanishing to last longer than usual, more than a second. In that hiatus, Quaiche was granted a glimpse of the machinery the scuttlers made to contact us across the bulk.]

“So was everyone else who happened to see it.”

[That’s why that particular vanishing had to be stricken from the public record,] the voice said. [It couldn’t be
allowed
to have happened.]

She remembered what the shadows had told her about the mass-synthesiser. “Then the probe allowed you to cross over?”

[No. We are still not physically embodied in this brane. What it did reestablish was the communication link. It had been silenced since the last time the scuttlers spoke to us, but in the moment of Quaiche’s intervention it was reopened, briefly. In that window we transmitted an aspect of ourselves across the bulk, a barely sentient ghost, programmed only to survive and negotiate.]

So that was what she was dealing with: not the shadows themselves, but their stripped-down minimalist envoy. She did not suppose that it made very much difference: the voice was clearly at least as intelligent and persuasive as any machine she had ever encountered.

“How far did you get?” Rashmika asked.

[Into the probe, as it fell within the Haldora projection. From there—following the probe’s telemetry link—we reached Hela. But no further. Ever since then, we have been trapped within the scrimshaw suit.]

“Why the suit?”

[Ask Quaiche. It has some deeply personal significance for him, irrevocably entwined with the nature of the vanishings and his own salvation. His lover—the original Morwenna—died in it. Afterwards, Quaiche couldn’t bring himself to destroy the suit. It was a reminder of what had brought him to Hela, a spur to keep looking for an answer, for Morwenna’s memory. When it came time to send the probe into Haldora, Quaiche filled the suit with the cybernetic control system necessary to communicate with the probe. That is why it has become our prison.]

“I can’t help you,” she said again.

[You
must,
Rashmika. The suit is strong, but it will not survive the destruction of the Lady Morwenna. Yet without us, you will have lost your one channel of negotiation. You might establish another, but you cannot guarantee it. In the meantime, you will be at the mercy of the Inhibitors. They’re coming closer, you know. There isn’t much time left.]

“I can’t do this,” she said. “You’re asking too much of me.
You’re just a voice in my head
. I won’t do it.”

[You will if you know what’s good for you. We don’t know all that we would like to know about you, Rashmika, but one thing is clear: you are most certainly not who you claim to be.]

She pulled her face from the pillow, brushed lank, damp hair from her eyes. “So what if I’m not?”

[It would probably be for the best if Quaiche didn’t find out, don’t you think?]

The surgeon-general sat alone in his private quarters in the Office of Bloodwork, high in the middle levels of the Clocktower. He hummed to himself, happy in his environment. Even the faint swaying motion of the Lady Morwenna—exaggerated now that she was moving over the rough ground of the ungraded and potholed road that led to the bridge—was pleasing to him, the sense of continuing motion spurring him to work. He had not eaten in many hours and his hands trembled with anticipation as he waited for the assay to finish. The task of prolonging Quaiche’s life had offered many challenges, but he had not felt this sense of intellectual excitement since his days in the service of Queen Jasmina, when he was the master of the body factory.

He had already pored over the results of Harbin’s blood analysis. He had been looking for some explanation in his genes for the gift that had been so strongly manifested in his sister. There had never been any suggestion that Harbin had the same degree of hypersensitivity to expressions, but that might simply mean that the relevant genes had only been activated in his sister’s case. Grelier did not know exactly what he was looking for, but he had a rough idea of the cognitive areas that ought to have been affected. What she had was a kind of inverse autism, an acute sensitivity to the emotional states of the people around her, rather than blank indifference. By comparing Harbin’s DNA against Bloodwork’s genetic database, culled not just from the inhabitants of Hela but from information sold to him by Ultras, he had hoped to see something anomalous. Even if it was not immediately obvious, the software ought to be able to tease it out.

But Harbin’s blood had turned out to be stultifyingly normal, utterly deficient in anything anomalous. Grelier had gone back into the library and found a back-up sample, just in case there had been a labelling error. It was the same story: there was nothing in Harbin’s blood that would have suggested anything unusual in his sister.

So perhaps, Grelier reasoned, there was something uniquely anomalous in her blood, the result of some statistical reshuffling of her parents’ genes that had somehow failed to manifest in Harbin. Alternatively, her blood could turn out to be just as uninteresting. In that case he would have to conclude that her hypersensitivity had in some way been learned, that it was a skill anyone could acquire, given the right set of stimuli.

The analysis suite chimed, signalling that it had finished its assay. He leant back in his chair, waiting for the results to be displayed. Harbin’s analysis—histograms, pie charts, genetic and cytological maps—were already up for inspection. Now the data from Rashmika Els’s blood appeared alongside it. Almost immediately the analysis software began to search for correlations and mismatches. Grelier crackled his knuckles. He could see his own reflection, the ghostly white nimbus of his hair floating in the display.

Something wasn’t right.

The correlation software was struggling. It was throwing up red error messages, a plague of them appearing all over the read-out. Grelier was familiar with this: it meant that the software had been told to hunt for correlations at a statistical threshold far above the actual situation. It meant that the two blood samples were far less alike than he had expected.

“But they’re siblings,” he said.

Except they weren’t. Not according to their blood. Harbin and Rashmika Els did not appear to be related at all.

In fact, it looked rather unlikely that Rashmika Els had even been born on Hela.

In the instant of awakening he assumed there had been a mistake. He was still in the black cabinet. Only a moment earlier the technicians had been cutting him open, stuffing tubes into him, pulling pieces out, examining and replacing them like children looking for treats. Now they were here again, white-hooded forms shuffling around him in a gauzy haze of vapour. He found it difficult to focus on them, the white forms blurring and joining like clouds.

“What . . .” he started to say. But he couldn’t speak. There was something packed into his mouth, chafing his throat with sharp edges.

One of the technicians leant into his field of view. The blur of white relaxed into a face framed in a hood, the lower half concealed behind a surgical mask.

“Easy, Scorp, don’t try talking for a moment.”

He made a sound that was both furious and interrogative. The technician appeared to understand. He pushed back his hood and lowered the mask, revealing a face that Scorpio almost recognised. A man, like the older brother of someone he knew.

“You’re safe,” the man said. “Everything worked.”

He grunted another question. “The wolves?”

“We took care of them. In the end they evolved—or deployed—some defence against the hypometric weaponry. It just stopped working against them. But we still had the cache weapons we didn’t give to Remontoire.”