Absolution Gap

ELEVEN

Rashmika looked up at the scuttler fossil. A symbol of conspicuous wealth, it hung from the ceiling in a large atrium area of the caravan vehicle. Even if it was a fake, or a semi-fake botched together from incompatible parts, it was still the first apparently complete scuttler she had ever seen. She wanted to find a way to climb up there and examine it properly, taking note of the abrasion patterns where the hard carapacial sections slid against each other. Rashmika had only ever read about such things, but she was certain that with an hour of careful study she would be able to tell whether it was authentic, or at the very least exclude the possibility of its being a cheap fake.

Somehow she didn’t think it was very likely to be either cheap or fake.

Mentally, she classified the scuttler body morphology. DK4V8M, she thought. Maybe a DK4V8M, if she was being confused by the play of dust and shadows around the trailing tail-shell. At least it was possible to apply the usual morphological classification scheme. The cheap fakes sometimes threw body parts together in anatomically impossible formations, but mis was definitely a plausible assemblage of components, even if they hadn’t necessarily come from the same burial site.

The scuttlers were a taxonomist’s nightmare. The first time one had been unearthed, it had appeared to be a simple case of reassembling the scattered body parts to make something that looked like a large insect or lobster. The scuttler exhibited a complexity of body sections, with many different highly spe-cialised limbs and sensory organs, but they had all snapped back together in a more or Jess logical fashion, leaving only the soft interior organs to be conjectured.

But the second scuttler hadn’t matched the first. There were a different number of body sections, a different number of limbs. The head and mouth parts looked very dissimilar. Yet—again—all the pieces snapped together to make a complete specimen, with no embarrassing bits left over.

The third hadn’t matched the first or second. Nor the fourth or fifth.

By the time the remains of a hundred scuttlers had been unearthed and reassembled, there were a hundred different versions of the scuttler body-plan.

The theorists groped for an explanation. The implication was that no two scuttlers were born alike. But two simultaneous discoveries shattered that idea overnight. The first was the unearthing of an intact clutch of infant scuttlers. Though there were some differences in body-plan, there were identical infants. Based on their frequency of occurrence, statistics argued that at least three identical adults should already have been discovered. The second discovery—which happened to explain the first—was the unearthing of a pair of adult scuttlers in the same area. They had been found in separated but connected chambers of an underground tunnel system. Their body parts were reassembled, providing another two unique morphologies. But upon closer examination something unexpected was discovered. A young researcher named Kimura had begun to take a particular interest in the patterns caused by the body sections scraping against each other. Something struck her as not quite right about the two new specimens. The scratch marks were inconsistent: a scrape on the edge of one carapace had no matching counterpart on the adjoining one.

At first, Kimura assumed the two clusters of body parts were hoaxes; there was already a small market for that kind of thing. But something made her dig a little deeper. She worried at the problem for weeks, convinced that she was missing something obvious. Then one night, after a particularly busy day examining the scratches at higher and higher magnifications, she slept on it. She dreamed feverish dreams, and when she woke she dashed back to her lab and confirmed her nagging suspicion.

There was a precise match for every scratch—but it was always to be found on the other scuttler. The scuttlers interchanged body parts with each other. That was why no two scuttlers were ever alike. They made themselves dissimilar: swapping components in ritualised ceremonies, then crawling away to their own little hollows to recuperate. As more scuttler pairs were unearthed, so the near-infinite possibilities of the arrangement became apparent. The exchange of body parts had pragmatic value, allowing scuttlers to adapt themselves for particular duties and environments. But there was also an aesthetic purpose to the ritualised swapping: a desire to be as atypical as possible. Scuttlers that had deviated far from the average body plan were socially successful creatures, for they must have participated in many exchanges. The ultimate stigma—so far as Kimura and her colleagues could tell—was for one scuttler to be identical to another. It meant that at least one of the pair was an outcast, unable to find a swap-partner.

Bitter arguments ensued among the human researchers. The majority view was that this behaviour could not have evolved naturally; that it must stem from an earlier phase of conscious bioengineering, when the scuttlers tinkered with their own anatomies to allow whole body parts to be swapped from creature to creature without the benefit of microsurgery and antirejection drugs.

But a minority of researchers held that the swapping was too deeply ingrained in scuttler culture to have arisen in their recent evolutionary history. They suggested that, billions of years earlier, the scuttlers had been forced to evolve in an intensely hostile environment—the evolutionary equivalent of a crowded lobster pot. So hostile, in fact, that there had been a survival value not just in being able to regrow a severed limb, but also in actually being able to reattach a severed limb there and then, before it was eaten. The limbs—and later, major body parts—had evolved in turn, developing the resilience to survive being ripped from the rest of the body. As the survival pressure increased, the scuttlers had evolved intercompatibility, able to make use not just of their own discarded parts but those of their kin.

Perhaps even the scuttlers themselves had no memory of when the swapping had begun. Certainly, there was no obvious allusion to it in the few symbolic records that had ever been found on Hela. It was too much a part of them, too fundamentally a part of the way they viewed reality, for them to have remarked upon it.

Looking up at the fantastic creature, Rashmika wondered what the scuttlers would have made of humanity. Very probably they would have found the human race just as bizarre, regarding its very immutability horrific, like a kind of death.

Rashmika knelt down and propped the family compad on the slope of her legs. She flipped it open and pulled the stylus from its slot in the side. It wasn’t comfortable, but she would only be sitting like that for a few minutes.

She began to draw. The stylus scratched against the compad with each fluid, confident stroke of her hand. An alien animal took shape on the screen.

Linxe had been right about the caravan: no matter how frosty the reception had been, it still afforded them all the chance to get out of the icejammer for the first time in three days.

Rashmika was surprised at the difference it made to her general mood. It wasn’t just that she had stopped worrying about the attention of the Vigrid constabulary, although the question of why they had come after her continued to nag at her. The air was fresher in the caravan, with interesting breezes and varying smells, none of which were as unpleasant as those aboard the icejammer.

There was room to stretch her legs, as well: the interior of just this one caravan vehicle was generously laid out, with wide, tall gangways, comfortable rooms and bright lights. Everything was spick-and-span and—compared at least to the welcome—the amenities were more than adequate. Food and drink were provided, clothes could be washed, and for once it was possible to reach a state of reasonable cleanliness. There were even various kinds of entertainment, even though it was all rather bland compared to what she was used to. And there were new people, faces she hadn’t seen before.

She realised, after some reflection, that she had been wrong in her initial judgement of the relationship between the quaestor and Crozet. While there did not appear to be much love lost between them, it was obvious now that both parties had been of some use to each other in the past. The mutual rudeness had been a charade, concealing an icy core of mutual respect. The quaestor was fishing for titbits, aware that Crozet might still have something he could use. Crozet, meanwhile, needed to leave with mechanical spares or other barterable goods.

Rashmika had only intended to sit in on a few of the negotiation sessions, but she quickly realised that she could, in a small way, be of practical use to Crozet. To facilitate this she sat at one end of the table, a sheet of paper and a pen before her. She was not allowed to bring the compad into the room, in case it contained voice-stress-analysis software or some other prohibited system.

Rashmika noted down observations about the items Crozet was selling, writing and sketching with the neatness she had always taken pride in. Her interest was genuine, but her presence also served another purpose.

In the first negotiation session, there had been two buyers. Later, there was sometimes a third or fourth, and the quaestor or one of his deputies would always attend as an observer. Each session would begin with one of the buyers asking Crozet what he had to offer them.

“We aren’t looking for scuttler relics,” they said the first time. “We’re simply not interested. What we want are artefacts of indigenous human origin. Things left on Hela in the last hundred years, not million-year-old rubbish. There’s a declining market for useless alien junk, what with all the rich solar systems being evacuated. Who wants to add to their collection, when they’re busy selling their assets to buy a single freezer slot?”

“What sort of human artefacts?”

“Useful ones. These are dark times: people don’t want art and ephemera, not unless they think it’s going to bring them luck. Mainly what they want are weapons and survival systems, things they think might give them an edge when whatever they’re running from catches up with them. Contraband Conjoiner weapons. Demarchist armour. Anything with plague-tolerance, that’s always an easy sell.”

“As a rule,” Crozet said, “I don’t do weapons.”

‘Then you need to adapt to a changing market,“ one of the men replied with a smirk.

“The churches moving into the arms trade? Isn’t that a tiny bit inconsistent with scripture?”

“If people want protection, who are we to deny them?”

Crozet shrugged. “Well, I’m all out of guns and ammo. If anyone’s still digging up human weapons on Hela, it isn’t me.”

“You must have something else.”

“Not a hell of a lot.” He made as if to leave at that point, as he did in every subsequent session. “Best be on my way, I think—wouldn’t want to be wasting anyone’s time, would I?”

“You’ve absolutely nothing else?”

“Nothing that you’d be interested in. Of course, I have some scuttler relics, but like you said…” Crozet’s voice accurately parodied the dismissive tones of the buyer. “No market for alien junk these days.”

The buyers sighed and exchanged glances; the quaestor leaned in and whispered something to them.

“You may as well show us what you have,” one of the buyers said, reluctantly, “but don’t raise your hopes. More than likely we won’t be interested. In fact, you can more or less guarantee it.”

But this was a game and Crozet knew he had to abide by its rules, no matter how pointless or childish they were. He reached under his chair and emerged with something wrapped in protective film, like a small mummified animal.

The buyers’ faces wrinkled in distaste.

He placed the package on the table and unwrapped it solemnly, taking a maddening time to remove all the layers. All the while he maintained a spiel about the extreme rarity of the object, how it had been excavated under exceptional circumstances, weaving a dubious human-interest story into the vague chain of provenance.

“Get on with it, Crozet.”

“Just setting the scene,” he said.

Inevitably he came to the final layer of wrapping. He spread this layer wide on the table, revealing the scuttler relic cocooned within.

Rashmika had seen this one before: it was one of the objects she had used to buy her passage aboard the icejammer.

They were never very much to look at. Rashmika had seen thousands of relies unearthed from the Vigrid digs, had even been allowed to examine them before they passed into the hands of the trading families, but in all that time she had never seen anything that made her gasp in admiration or delight. For while the relics were undoubtedly artificial, they were in general fashioned from dull, tarnished metals or grubby unglazed ceramics. There was seldom any hint of surface ornamentation—no trace of paint, plating or inscription. Once in a thousand finds they uncovered something with a string of symbols on it, and there were even researchers who believed they understood what some of those symbols meant. But most scuttler relics were blank, dull, crude-looking. They resembled the dug-up leftovers of an inept bronze-age culture rather than the gleaming products of a starfaring civilisation—one that had certainly not evolved in the 107 Piscium system.

Yet for much of the last century there had been a market for the relics. Partly this was because none of the other extinct cultures—the Amarantin, for instance—had left behind a comparable haul of day-to-day objects. Those cultures had been so thoroughly exterminated that almost nothing had survived, and the objects that had were so valuable that they remained in the care of large scientific organisations like the Sylveste Institute. Only the scuttlers had left behind enough objects to permit private collectors to acquire artefacts of genuine alien origin. It didn’t matter that they were small and unglamorous: they were still very old, and still very alien. And they were still tainted by the tragedy of extinction.

No two relics were ever quite alike, either. Scuttler furniture, even scuttler dwellings, exhibited the same horror of similarity as their makers. What had begun with their anatomies had now spread into their material environment. They had mass production, but it was a necessary end-stage of that process that every object be worked on by a scuttler artisan, until it was unique.

The churches controlled the sale of these relics to the outside universe. But the churches themselves had always been uncomfortable with the deeper question of what the scuttlers represented, or how they slotted into the mystery of the Quaiche miracle. The churches needed to keep up the drip-feed supply of relics so that they had something to offer the Ultra traders who visited the system. But at the same time there was always the fear that the next scuttler relic to be unearthed would be the one that threw a spanner into the midst of Quaicheist doctrine.

It was now the view of almost all the churches that the Hal-doran vanishings were a message from God, a countdown to some event of apocalyptic finality. But what if the scuttlers had also observed the vanishings? It was difficult enough to decipher their symbols at the best of times, and so far nothing had been found that appeared to relate directly to the Haldora phenomenon. But there were a lot of relics still under Hela’s ice, and even those that had been unearthed to date had never been subjected to rigorous scientific study. The church-sponsored archaeologists were the only ones who had any kind of overview of the entire haul of relics, and they were under intense pressure to ignore any evidence that conflicted with Quaicheist scripture. That was why Rashmika wrote them so many letters, and why their infrequent replies were always so evasive. She wanted an argument; she wanted to question the entire accepted view of the scuttlers. They wanted her to go away.

Thus it was that the buyers in the caravan affected an air of tolerant disapproval while Crozet turned on the hard sell.

“It’s a plate cleaner,” Grozet said, turning a grey, cleft-tipped, bonelike object this way and that. “They used it to scrape dead organic matter out of the gaps between their carapacial sections. We think they did it communally, the way monkeys pick ticks out of each other’s hair. Must have been very relaxing for them.”

“Filthy creatures.”

“Monkeys or scuttlers?”

“Both.”

“I wouldn’t be too harsh, mate. Scuttlers are paying your wages.”

“We’ll give you fifty ecumenical credit units for it, Crozet. No more.”

“Fifty ecus? Now you’re taking the piss.”

“It’s a revolting object serving a revolting function. Fifty ecus is… quite excessively generous.”

Crozet looked at Rashmika. It was only a glance, but she was ready for it when it came. The system they had arranged was very simple: if the man was telling the truth—if this really was the best offer he was prepared to make—then she would push the sheet of paper a fraction closer to the middle of the table. Otherwise, she would pull it towards her by the same tiny distance. If the man’s reaction was ambiguous, she did nothing. This did not happen very often.

Crozet always took her judgement seriously. If the offer on the table was as good as it was going to get, he did not waste his energies trying to talk them up. On the other hand, if there was some leeway, he haggled the hell out of them.

In that first negotiating session, the buyer was lying. After a rapid-fire back and forth of offer and counter-offer, they reached an agreement.

“Your tenacity does you credit,” the buyer said with visible bad grace, before writing him out a chit for seventy ecus that was only redeemable within the caravan itself.

Crozet folded it neatly and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. “Pleasure doing business, mate.”

He had other scuttler plate cleaners, as well as several things that might have served some entirely different function. Now and then he came back to the negotiation sessions with something that Linxe or Culver had to help him carry. It might be an item of furniture, or some kind of heavy-duty domestic tool. Scuttler weapons were rare, appearing to have had only ceremonial value, but they sold the best of all. Once, he sold them what appeared to be a kind of scuttler toilet seat. He only got thirty-five ecus for that: barely enough, Crozet said, for a single servo-motor.

But Rashmika tried not to feel too sorry for him. If Crozet wanted the best pickings from the digs, the kinds of relics that picked up three- or four-figure payments, then he needed to rethink his attitude towards the rest of the Vigrid communities. The truth of the matter was that he liked scabbing around on the perimeter.

It went on like that for two days. On the third, the buyers suddenly demanded that Crozet be alone during the negotia-tions. Rashmika had no idea if they had guessed her secret. There was, as far as she was aware, no law against being an adept judge of whether people were lying or not. Perhaps they had just taken a dislike to her, as people often did when they sensed her percipience.

Rashmika was fine with that. She had helped Crozet out, paid him back a little more in addition to the scuttler relics for the help he had given her. He had, after all, taken an extra, unforeseen risk when he found out about the constabulary pursuing her.

No: she had nothing bad on her conscience.

Khouri protested as they took her away from the capsule into the waiting infirmary. “I don’t need an examination,” she said. “I just need a boat, some weapons, an incubator and someone good with a knife.”

“Oh, I’m good with a knife,” Clavain said.

“Please take me seriously. You trusted Ilia, didn’t you?”

“We came to an arrangement. Mutual trust never had much to do with it.”

“You respected her judgement, though?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, she trusted me. Isn’t that good enough for you? I’m not making excessive demands here, Clavain. I’m not asking for the world.”

“We’ll consider your requests in good time,” he said, “but not before we’ve had you examined.”

“There isn’t time,” she said, but from her tone of voice it was clear she knew she had already lost the argument.

Within the infirmary, Dr. Valensin waited with two aged medical servitors from the central machine pool. The swan-necked robots were a drab institutional green, riding on hissing air-cushion pedestals. Many specialised arms emerged from their slender chess-piece bodies. The physician would be keeping a careful eye on the machines while they did their work: left alone, their creaking circuits had a nasty habit of absent-mindedly switching into autopsy mode.

“I don’t like robots,” Khouri said, eyeing the servitors with evident disquiet.

“That’s one thing we agree on,” Clavain said, turning to Scorpio and lowering his voice. “Scorp, we’ll need to talk to the other seniors about the best course of action as soon as we have Valensin’s report. My guess is she’ll need some rest before she goes anywhere. But for now I suggest we keep as tight a lid on this as possible.”

“Do you think she’s telling the truth?” Scorpio asked. “All that stuff about Skade and her baby?”

Clavain studied the woman as Valensin helped her on to the examination couch. “I have a horrible feeling she might be.”

After the examination, Khouri fell into a state of deep and apparently dreamless sleep. She awakened only once, near dawn, when she summoned one of Valensin’s aides and again demanded the means to rescue her daughter. After that they administered more relaxant and she fell asleep for another four or five hours. Now and then she thrashed wildly and uttered fragments of speech. Whatever she was trying to say always sounded urgent, but the meaning never quite cohered. She was not properly awake and cognizant until the middle of the morning.

By the time Dr. Valensin deemed that Khouri was ready for visitors, the latest storm had broken. The sky above the compound was a bleak powder-blue, marbled here and there by strands of feathered cirrus. Out to sea, the Nostalgia for Infinity gleamed shades of grey, like something freshly chiselled from dark rock.

They sat down on opposite sides of her bed—Clavain in one chair, Scorpio in another, but reversed so that he sat with his arms folded across the top of the backrest.

“I’ve read Valensin’s report,” Scorpio began. “We were all hoping he’d tell us you were insane. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “And that gives me a really bad headache.”

Khouri pushed herself up in the bed. “I’m sorry about your headache, but can we skip the formalities and get on with rescuing my daughter?”

“We’ll discuss it when you’re up on your feet,” Clavain said.

“Why not now?”

“Because we still need to know exactly what’s happened. We’ll also need an accurate tactical assessment of any scenario involving Skade and your daughter. Would you define it as a hostage situation?” Clavain asked.

“Yes,” Khouri replied, grudgingly.

“Then until we have concrete demands from Skade, Aura is in no immediate danger. Skade won’t risk hurting her one asset. She may be cold-hearted, but she’s not irrational.”

Guardedly, Scorpio observed the old man. He appeared as alert and quick-witted as ever, yet to the best of Scorpio’s knowledge Clavain had allowed himself no more than two hours of sleep since returning to the mainland. Scorpio had seen that kind of thing in other elderly human men: they needed little sleep and resented its imposition by those younger than themselves. It was not that they necessarily had more energy, but that the division between sleep and waking had become an indistinct, increasingly arbitrary thing. He wondered how that would feel, drifting through an endless succession of grey moments, rather than ordered intervals of day and night.

“How much time are we talking about?” Khouri said. “Hours or days, before you act?”

“I’ve convened a meeting of colony seniors for later this morning,” Clavain said. “If the situation merits it, a rescue operation could be underway before sunset.”

“Can’t you just take my word that we need to act now?”

Clavain scratched his beard. “If your story made more sense, I might.”

“I’m not lying.” She gestured in the direction of one of the servitors. “The doctor gave me the all-clear, didn’t he?”

Scorpio smiled, tapping the medical report against the back of his chair. “He said you weren’t obviously delusional, but his examination raised as many questions as it answered.”

“You talk about a baby,” Clavain said before Khouri had a chance to interrupt, “but according to this report you’ve never given birth. Nor is there any obvious sign of Caesarean surgery having been performed.”

“It wouldn’t be obvious—it was done by Conjoiner medics. They can sew you up so cleanly it’s as if it never happened.“ She looked at each of them in turn, her anger and fear equally clear. ”Are you saying you don’t believe me?“

Clavain shook his head. “I’m saying we can’t verify your story, that’s all. According to Valensin there is womb distension consistent with you having very recently been pregnant, and there are hormonal changes in your blood that support the same conclusion. But Valensin admits that there could be other explanations.”

“They don’t contradict my story, either.”

“But we’ll need more convincing before we organise a military action,” Clavain said.

“Again: why can’t you just trust me?”

“Because it’s not only the story about your baby that doesn’t make sense,” Clavain replied. “How did you get here, Ana? Where’s the ship that should have brought you? You didn’t come all the way from the Resurgam system in that capsule, and yet there’s no sign of any other spacecraft having entered our system.”

“And that makes me a liar?”

“It makes us suspicious,” Scorpio said. “It makes us wonder if you’re what you appear to be.”

“The ships are here,” she said, sighing, as if spoiling a carefully planned surprise. “All of them. They’re concentrated in the immediate volume of space around this planet. Remon-toire, the Zodiacal Light, the two remaining starships from Skade’s taskforce—they’re all up there, within one AU of this planet. They’ve been in your system for nine weeks. That’s how I got here, Clavain.”

“You can’t hide ships that easily,” he said. “Not consistently, not all the time. Not when we’re actively looking for them.”

“We can now,” she said. “We have techniques you know nothing about. Things we’ve learned… things we’ve had to learn since the last time you saw us. Things you won’t believe.”

Clavain glanced at Scorpio. The pig tried to guess what was going through the old man’s mind and failed.

“Such as?” Clavain asked.

“New engines,” she said. “Dark drives. You can’t see them. Nothing sees them. The exhaust… slips away. Camouflaging screens. Free-force bubbles. Miniaturised cryo-arithmetic engines. Reliable control of inertia on bulk scales. Hypometric weapons.” She shivered. “I really don’t like the hypometric weapons. They scare me. I’ve seen what happens when they go wrong. They’re not right.”

“All that in twenty-odd years?” Clavain asked, incredulously.

“We had some help.”

“Sounds as if you had God on the end of the phone, taking down your wish list.”

“It wasn’t God, believe me. I should know. I was the one who did the asking.”

“And who exactly did you ask?”

“My daughter,” Khouri said. “She knows things, Clavain. That’s why she’s valuable. That’s why Skade wants her.”

Scorpio felt dizzy: it seemed that every time they scratched back one layer of Khouri’s story, there was something even less comprehensible behind it.

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t signal your arrival from orbit,” Clavain said.

“Partly because we didn’t want to draw attention to Ararat,” Khouri said. “Not until we had to. There’s a war going on up there, understand? A major space engagement, with heavily stealthed combatants. Any kind of signalling is a risk. There’s also a lot of jamming and disruption going on.”

“Between Skade’s forces and your own?”

“It’s more complicated than that. Until recently, Skade was fighting with us, rather than against us. Even now, aside from the personal business between Skade and myself, I’d say we’re in what you might call a state of uneasy truce.”

“Then who the hell are you fighting?” Clavain asked.

“The Inhibitors,” Khouri said. “The wolves, whatever you want to call them.”

“They’re here?” Scorpio asked. “Actually in this system?”

“Sorry to rain on your parade,” Khouri said.

“Well,” Clavain said, looking around, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but that certainly puts a dent in my day.”

“That was the idea,” Khouri said.

Clavain ran a finger down the straight line of his nose. “One other thing. Several times since you arrived here you’ve mentioned a word that sounds like ‘hella.’ You even said we had to get there. The name means nothing to me. What is its significance?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even remember saying it.”