Absolution Gap (94 page)

“I don’t like the sound of any of this,” Quaiche said. “But I
do
like the sound of protection. I take it you have studied the rest of my terms?”

“They seem reasonable enough.”

“You agree to the presence of a small Adventist delegation on your ship?”

“We don’t really see why it’s necessary.”

“Well, it is. You don’t understand the politics of this system. It’s no criticism: after only a few weeks here, I wouldn’t expect you to. But how are you going to know the difference between a genuine threat and an innocent transgression? I can’t have you shooting at everything that comes within range of Hela. That wouldn’t do at all.”

“Your delegates would take those decisions?”

“They’d be there in an advisory capacity,” Quaiche said, “nothing more. You won’t have to worry about every ship that comes near Hela, and I won’t have to worry about your weapons being ready when I need them.”

“How many delegates?”

“Thirty,” Quaiche said.

“Too many. We’ll consider ten, maybe twelve.”

“Make it twenty, and we’ll say no more on the matter.”

The Ultra looked at Rashmika again, as if it was her advice that he sought. “I’ll have to discuss this with my crew,” he said.

“But in principle, you don’t have any strong objections?”

“We don’t like it,” Malinin said. He stood up, straightened his uniform. “But if that’s what it takes to get your permission, we may have no choice but to accept it.”

Quaiche bobbed his head emphatically, sending a sympathetic ripple through his attendant mirrors. “I’m so pleased,” he said. “The moment you came through that door, Mr. Malinin, I knew you were someone I could do business with.”

When the Ultras’ shuttle had departed, Quaiche turned to her and said, “Well? Are they the ones?”

“I think they are,” she said.

“The ship looks very suitable from a technical standpoint, and they certainly want the position very badly. The woman didn’t give us much to go on. What about the man: did you sense that Malinin was hiding anything?”

This was it, she thought: the crux moment. She had known that Vasko Malinin meant something important as soon as she heard his name: it had felt like the right key slipping into a lock after so many wrong ones, like the sequenced falling of well-oiled tumblers.

She had felt the same thing when she had heard the woman’s name.

I know these people,
she thought. They were older than she remembered them, but their faces and mannerisms were as familiar to her as her own flesh and blood.

There had been something in Malinin’s manner, too: he knew her, just as she knew him. The recognition went both ways. And she had sensed, too, that he was hiding something. He had lied blatantly about his motive for coming to Hela, but there had been more to it than that. He wanted more than just the chance to make an innocent study of Haldora.

This was it: the crux moment.

“He seemed honest enough,” Rashmika said.

“He did?” the dean asked.

“He was nervous,” she replied, “and he was hoping you wouldn’t ask too many questions, but only because he wants his ship to get the position.”

“It’s odd that they should show such an interest in Haldora. Most Ultras are only interested in trade advantages.”

“You heard what he said: the market’s crashed.”

“Still doesn’t explain his interest in Haldora, though.”

Rashmika sipped at her tea, hoping to hide her own expression. She was nowhere near as successful at lying as she was adept at its detection.

“Doesn’t really matter, does it? You’ll have your representatives aboard their ship. They won’t be able to get up to anything fishy with a bunch of Adventists breathing down their necks.”

“There’s still something,” Quaiche said. With no visitors to intimidate he had replaced his sunglasses, clipping them into place over the eye-opener. “Something I just can’t put my finger . . . I know, did you see the way he kept looking at you? And the woman, too? Odd, that. The others have barely looked at you.”

“I didn’t notice,” she said.

 

Hela Orbit, 2727

 

Vasko felt his weight increase as the shuttle pushed them back towards orbit. As the vessel altered its course, he saw the Lady Morwenna again, looking tiny and toylike compared to when they had first approached it. The great cathedral sat alone on its own diverging track of the Permanent Way, so far from the others that it appeared to have been cast into the icy wilderness for some unspeakable heresy, excommunicated from the main family of cathedrals. He knew it was moving, but at this distance the cathedral might as well have been fixed to the landscape, turning with Hela. It took ten minutes to travel its own length, after all.

He looked at Khouri, sitting next to him. She had said nothing since they left the cathedral.

An odd thought occurred to him, popping into his mind from nowhere. All this trouble that the cathedrals went to—the great circumnavigation of Hela’s equator—was undertaken to ensure that Haldora was always overhead, so that it could be observed without interruption. And that was because Hela had not quite settled into synchronous rotation around the larger planet. How much simpler it would have been had Hela reached that state, so that it always kept the same face turned towards Haldora. Then all the cathedrals could have gathered at the same spot and set down roots. There would have been no need for them to move, no need for the Permanent Way, no need for the unwieldy culture of support communities that the cathedrals both depended upon and nurtured. And all it would have taken was a tiny adjustment in Hela’s rotation. The planet was like a clock that almost kept time. It only needed a tiny nudge to fall into absolute, ticking synchrony. How much? Vasko ran the numbers in his head, not quite believing what they told him. The length of Hela’s day would only have to be changed by one part in two hundred. Just twelve minutes out of the forty hours.

He wondered how any of them could keep their faith knowing that. For if there was anything miraculous about Haldora, why would the Creator have slipped up over a matter of twelve minutes in forty hours when arranging Hela’s diurnal rotation? It was a glaring omission, a sign of cosmic sloppiness. Not even that, Vasko corrected himself. It was a sign of cosmic obliviousness. The universe didn’t know what was happening here. It didn’t know and it didn’t care. It didn’t even
know
that it didn’t know.

If there was a God, he thought, then there wouldn’t be wolves. They weren’t part of anyone’s idea of heaven and hell.

The shuttle banked away from the cathedral. He could see the rough, ungraded surface of the Permanent Way stretching ahead of the Lady Morwenna. But it did not stretch very far before meeting the dark, shadowed absence of Ginnungagap Rift. Vasko knew exactly what the locals called it.

The Way appeared to end at the edge of Absolution Gap. On the far side of the Rift, forty kilometres from the near side, the road continued. There appeared to be nothing in between but forty kilometres of empty space. It was only when the shuttle had climbed a little higher that a particular angle of the light picked out the absurdly delicate filigree of the bridge, as if it had been breathed into being just at that moment.

Vasko looked at the bridge, then back to the cathedral. It still appeared to be stationary, but he could see that the landmarks that had been next to it a few minutes earlier were now just behind it. The crawl was slug-slow, but there was also an inevitability about it.

And the bridge did not look remotely capable of carrying the cathedral to the other side of the rift.

He opened the secure channel to the larger shuttle waiting in orbit, the one that would relay his signal to the
Nostalgia for Infinity,
which was still waiting in the parking swarm.

“This is Vasko,” he said. “We’ve made contact with Aura.”

“Did you get anything?” asked Orca Cruz.

He looked at Khouri. She nodded, but said nothing.

“We got something,” Vasko said.

 

Aboard the
Nostalgia for Infinity,
Parking Swarm, 107 Piscium, 2727

 

Scorpio came to consciousness knowing that this sleep had been even longer than the one before. He could feel the messages of chemical protestation from his cells flooding his system as they were cajoled back towards the grudging labour of metabolism. They were picking up tools like disgruntled workers, ready to down them for good at the slightest provocation. They had had enough mistreatment for one lifetime.
Join the club,
Scorpio thought. It was not as if the management was enjoying it, either.

He groped back into memory. He recalled, clearly enough, the episode of waking in the Yellowstone system. He remembered seeing the evidence of the wolves’ handiwork, Yellowstone and its habitats reduced to ruins, the system gutted. He remembered also the part he had played in the dispute over the evacuees. He had won that particular battle—the shuttle had been allowed aboard—but it seemed that he had lost the war. The choice had been his: surrender command and submit to a passive role as an observer, or go into the freezer again. Practically, the two amounted to the same thing: he would be out of the picture, leaving the running of the ship to Vasko and his allies. But at least if frozen he would not have to stand there watching it happen. It was a small compensation, but at his point in life it was the small compensations that mattered.

And now at last he was being awoken. His position aboard the ship might be just as compromised as before he went under, but at least he would have the benefit of some different scenery.

“Well?” he asked Valensin, while the doctor ran his usual battery of tests. “Ducked the odds again, didn’t I?”

“You always had an even chance of surviving it, Scorpio, but that doesn’t make you immortal. You go into that thing again, you won’t come out of it.”

“You said I had a ten per cent chance of survival the next time.”

“I was trying to cheer you up.”

“It’s worse than that?”

Valensin pointed at the reefersleep casket. “You climb into that box one more time, we might as well paint it black and put handles on it.”

But the true state of his current health, even when he filtered out Valensin’s usual tendency to put a positive spin on things, was still bad. In some respects it was as if he had not been in the casket at all; as if the flow of time had operated on him with stealthy disregard for the supposed effects of cryogenic stasis. His vision and hearing had degenerated further. He could barely see anything in his peripheral vision now, and even in full view, things that had been sharp before now appeared granular and milky. He kept having to ask Valensin to speak up above the churn of the room’s air conditioners. He had never had to do that before. When he walked around he found himself tiring quickly, always looking for somewhere to rest and catch his breath. His heart and lung capacities had weakened. Pig cardiovascular systems had been engineered by commercial interests for maximum ease of transgenic transplantation. The same interests hadn’t been overly concerned about the longevity of their products. Planned obsolescence, they called it.

He had been fifty when he left Ararat. To all intents and purposes he was still fifty: he had lived through only a few subjective weeks of additional time. But the transitions to and from reefersleep had put another seven or eight years on the clock, purely because of the battering his cells had taken. It would have been worse if he had stayed awake, living through all those years of shiptime, but not by very much.

Still, he was alive. He had lived through more years of worldtime than most pigs. So what if he was pushing the envelope of pig longevity? He was weakened, but he wasn’t on his back just yet.

“So where are we?” he asked Valensin. “I take it we’re around 107 Piscium. Or did you just wake me up to tell me how bad an idea it was to wake me up?”

“We’re around 107 Piscium, yes, but you still need to do a little catching up.” Valensin helped him off the examination couch, Scorpio noticing that the two old servitors had finally broken down and been consigned to new roles as coat racks, standing guard on either side of the door.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Scorpio said. “How long has it been? What’s the year?”

“Twenty-seven twenty-seven,” Valensin said. “And no, I don’t like the sound of that any more than you do. One other thing, Scorpio.”

“Yes?”

Valensin handed him a curved white shard, like a flake of ice. “You were holding this when you went under. I presumed it had some significance.”

Scorpio took the piece of conch material from the doctor.

 

There was something wrong, something that no one was telling him. Scorpio looked at the faces around the conference table, trying to see it for himself. Everyone that he would have expected to be there was present: Cruz, Urton, Vasko, as well as a good number of seniors he did not know so well. Khouri was also there. But now that he saw her he realised the obvious, screaming absence. There was no sign of Aura.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“She’s all right, Scorp,” Vasko said. “She’s safe and well. I know because I’ve just seen her.”

“Someone tell him,” Khouri said. She looked older than last time, Scorpio thought. There were more lines on her face, more grey in her hair. She wore it short now, combed across her brow. He could see the shape of her skull shining through the skin.

“Tell me what?” he asked.

“How much did Valensin explain?” Vasko asked him.

“He told me the date. That was about it.”

“We had to take some difficult decisions, Scorp. In your absence, we did the best we could.”

In my absence,
Scorpio thought: as if he had walked out on them, leaving them in the lurch when they most needed him; making him feel as if he was the one at fault, the one who had shirked his responsibilities.