Absolution Gap

FOURTEEN

The room in which Palfrey had been told to wait for Scorpio was a small annexe off one of the larger storage areas used by bilge management, the branch of the administration tasked with keeping the lower levels of the ship as dry as possible. The curved walls of the little chamber were layered with a glossy grey-green plaque that had hardened into stringy, waxy formations. The smooth floor was sheet metal. Anchored to it with thick bolts was a small, battered desk from Central Amenities, upon which lay an ashtray, a half-empty beaker of something tarlike and the parts of several dismantled bilge pump assemblies. Bookended by the pump parts was what Scorpio took to be a vacuum helmet of antique design, silver paint peeling from its metal shell. Behind the desk, Palfrey sat chain-smoking, his eyes red with fatigue, his sparse black hair messed across the sunburned pink of his scalp. He wore khaki overalls with many pockets, and some kind of breathing apparatus hung around his neck on frayed cords.

“I understand you saw something,” Scorpio said, pulling up another chair, the legs squealing horribly against the metal, and sitting in it the wrong way around, facing the man with his legs splayed either side of the backrest.

“That’s what I told my boss. All right if I go home now?”

“Your boss didn’t give me a very clear description. I’d like to know a bit more.” Scorpio smiled at Palfrey. “Then we can all go home.”

Palfrey stubbed out his current cigarette. “Why? It’s not as if you believe me, is it?”

Scorpio’s headache had not improved. “Why do you say that?”

“Everyone knows you don’t believe in the sightings. You think we’re just finding reasons to skive off the deep-level duties.”

“It’s true that your boss will have to arrange a new detail for that part of the ship, and it’s true that I don’t believe all the reports that reach my desk. Many of them, however, I’m inclined to take seriously. Often they follow a pattern, clustering in one part of the ship, or moving up and down a series of adjacent levels. It’s as if the Captain focuses on an area to haunt and then sticks with it until he’s made his point. You ever seen him before?”

“First time,” Palfrey said, his hands trembling. His fingers were bony, the bright-pink knuckles like blisters ready to pop.

“Tell me what you saw.”

“I was alone. The nearest team was three levels away, fixing another pump failure. I’d gone down to look at a unit that might have been overheating. I had my toolkit with me and that was all. I wasn’t planning to spend much time down there. None of us like working those deep levels, and definitely not alone.”

“I thought it was policy not to send anyone in alone below level six hundred.”

“It is.”

“So what were you doing down there by yourself?”

“If we stuck to the rules you’d have a flooded ship in about a week.”

“I see.” He tried to sound surprised, but he heard the same story about a dozen times a week, all over the colony. Individually, everyone thought they were on the only team being stretched past breaking point. Collectively, the whole settlement was lurching from one barely contained crisis to another. But only Scorpio and a handful of his lieutenants knew that.

“We don’t fiddle the timesheets,” Palfrey volunteered, as if this must have been next thing on Scorpio’s mind.

“Why don’t you tell me about the apparition? You were down looking at the hot pump. What happened?”

“Out of the comer of my eye, I saw something move. Couldn’t tell what it was at first—it’s dark down there, and our lights don’t work as well as they should. You imagine a lot of stuff, so you don’t immediately jump out of your skin the first time you think you see something. But when I shone the light on it and looked properly, there was definitely something there.”

“Describe it.”

“It looked like machinery. Junk. Old pump mechanisms, old servitor parts. Wires. Cables. Stuff that must have been lying down there for twenty years.”

“You saw machinery and you thought that was an apparition?”

“It wasn’t just machinery,” Palfrey said defensively. “It was organised, gathered together, lashed into something larger. It was man-shaped. It just stood there, watching me.”

“Did you hear it approach?”

“No. As I said, it was just junk. It could have been there all along, waiting until I noticed it.”

“And when you did notice it—what happened then?”

“It looked at me. The head—it was made up of hundreds of little bits—moved, as if acknowledging me. And I saw something in the face, like an expression. It wasn’t just a machine. There was a mind there. A distinct purpose.” Redundantly, he added, “I didn’t like it.”

Scorpio drummed the tips of his fingers against the seat-back. “If it helps, what you saw was a class-three apparition. A class one is a localised change in the atmospheric conditions of the ship: an unexplained breeze, or a drop in temperature. They’re the commonest kind, reported almost daily. Only a fraction probably have anything at all to do with the Captain.”

“We’ve all experienced those,” Palfrey said.

“A class two is a little rarer. We define it as a recognisable speech sound, a word or sentence fragment, or even a whole statement. Again, there’s an element of uncertainty. If you’re scared and you hear the wind howl, it’s easy to imagine a word or two.”

“It wasn’t one of those.”

“No, clearly not. Which brings us to a class-three manifestation: a physical presence, transient or otherwise, manifesting either via a local physical alteration of the ship’s fabric—a face appearing in a wall, for instance—or the coopting of an available mechanism or group of mechanisms. What you saw was clearly the latter.”

“That’s very reassuring.”

“It should be. I can also tell you that despite rumours to the contrary no one has ever been harmed by an apparition, and that very few workers have ever seen a class three on more than one Occasion.”

“You’re still not getting me to go down there again.”

“I’m not asking you to. You’ll be reassigned to some other duty, either in the high ship levels or back on the mainland.”

“The sooner I’m off this ship, the better.”

“Good. That’s sorted, then.” Scorpio moved to stand up, the chair scraping against the floor.

‘That’s it?“ Palfrey asked.

“You’ve told me everything I need to know.”

Palfrey poked around in the ashtray with the dead stub of his last cigarette. “I see a ghost and I get interviewed by one of the most powerful men in the colony?”

Scorpio shrugged. “I just happened to be in the area, thought you’d appreciate my taking an interest.”

The man looked at him with a critical expression Scorpio seldom saw in pigs. “Something’s up, isn’t it?”

“Not sure I follow you.”

“You wouldn’t interview someone from bilge management unless something was going down.”

“Take it from me, something’s always going down.”

“But this must be more than that.” Palfrey smiled at him, the way people smiled when they thought they knew something you’d have preferred them not to know, or when they imagined they had figured out an angle they weren’t supposed to see. “I listen. I hear about all the other apparitions, not just the ones on my shift.”

“And your conclusion is?”

“They’ve been growing more frequent. Not just in the last day or so, but over the last few weeks or months. I knew it was only a matter of time before I saw one for myself.”

“That’s a very interesting analysis.”

“The way I see it,” Palfrey said, “it’s as if he—the Captain—is getting restless. But what would I know? I’m just a bilge mechanic.”

“Indeed,” Scorpio said.

“You know something’s happening, though, don’t you? Or you wouldn’t be taking so much interest in a single sighting. I bet you’re interviewing everyone these days. He’s really got you worried, hasn’t he?”

“The Captain’s on our side.”

“You hope.” Palfrey sniggered triumphantly.

“We all hope. Unless you have some other plans for getting off this planet, the Captain’s our only ticket out of here.”

“You’re talking as if there’s some sudden urgency to leave.”

Scorpio considered telling him that there might well be, just to mess with his mind. He had decided that he did not very much like Palfrey. But Palfrey would talk, and the last thing Scorpio needed now was a wave of panic to deal with in addition to Khouri’s little crisis. He would just have to deny himself that small, puissant pleasure.

He leaned across the table, Palfrey’s stench hitting him like a wall. “A word of this meeting to anyone,” he said, “and you won’t be working in effluent management any more. You’ll be part of the problem.”

Scorpio pushed himself up from the chair, intending to leave Palfrey alone with his thoughts.

“You haven’t asked me about this,” Palfrey said, offering Scorpio the battered silver helmet.

Scorpio took it from him and turned it in his hands. It was heavier than he had expected. “I thought it belonged to you.”

“You thought wrong. I found it down there in the junk, when the apparition had gone. I don’t think it was there before.”

Scorpio took a closer look at the helmet. Its design appeared very old. Above the small rectangular porthole of the faceplate were many rectangular symbols containing blocks of primary colour. There were crosses and crescents, stripes and stars.

The pig wondered what they meant.

Now that she had time on her hands, Rashmika used it to explore the caravan. Although there was a great deal of space to investigate inside, she quickly found that one compartment in the caravan was much like another. Wherever she went she encountered the same bad smells, the same wandering pilgrims and traders. If there were variations on these themes they were too dull and nuanced to interest her. What she really wanted was to get outside, on to the roof of the procession.

It was many months since she had seen Haldora, and now that the gas giant had finally crept above the horizon as the caravan narrowed the distance to the cathedrals of the Way, she was struck by a desire to go outside, lie on her back and just look at the huge planet. But the first few times she tried to find a way to the roof, none of the doors would open for her. Rashmika tried different routes and times of the day, hoping to slip through a gap in the caravan’s security, but the roof was well protected, presumably because there was a lot of sensitive navigation equipment up there.

She was backtracking from one dead end when she found her way blocked by the quaestor. He had his little green pet with him, squatting on his shoulder. Was it Rashmika’s imagination or was there something wrong with one of its fore-limbs? It ended in a green-tipped stump that she did not remember seeing before.

“Can I help you, Miss Els?”

“I was just exploring the caravan,” she said. “That’s allowed, isn’t it?”

“Within certain restrictions, yes.” He nodded beyond her, to the door she had found blocked. “The roof, naturally, is one of the places that are out of bounds.”

“I wasn’t interested in the roof.”

“No? Then you must be lost. This door only leads to the roof. There’s nothing up there to interest you, take my word for it.”

“I wanted to see Haldora.”

“You must have seen it many times before.”

“Not recently, and never very far above the horizon,” she said. “I wanted to see it at the zenith.”

“Well, you’ll have to wait for that. Now… if you don’t mind.” He pushed past her, his bulk pressing unpleasantly against her in the narrow squeeze of the corridor.

The green creature tracked her with his faceted eyes. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” it intoned.

“Where are you going, Quaestor? You’re not wearing a suit.”

“Run along now, Miss Els.”

He did something that he obviously did not want her to see, reaching into a shadowed alcove next to the door that a casual visitor would never have noticed. He tried to be quick about it, to hide the gesture. She heard a low click, as if some hidden mechanism had just snapped open.

The door worked for him. He stepped through. In the red-lit space beyond she glimpsed emergency equipment and several racked vacuum suits.

She came back several hours later, when she was certain that the quaestor had returned inside the caravan. She carried her own surface suit in a collapsed bundle, sneaking it through the rumbling innards of the caravan. She tried the door: it was still blocked to her. But when she slipped her hand into the alcove that the quaestor had not wanted her to see she found a concealed control. She applied pressure and heard the click as the locking mechanism relaxed. Presumably there was some further fail-safe that would have prevented the inner door from opening if the outer one was also open. That was not the case now, however, and the door yielded to her as it had to the quaestor. She slipped into the lock, secured the inner door behind her and changed into her own suit. She checked the air, satisfying herself that there was enough in the reservoir, and feeling a moment of déjà vu as she remembered making the same check before leaving her home.

She recalled how the reservoir had not been completely full, as if someone had used her suit recently. She had thought little of it at the time, but now a cluster of thoughts arrived in quick, uneasy succession. There had been foot-prints in the ice around the surface lock, suggesting that someone had used the lock as well as the suit. The prints had been small enough to belong to her mother, but they could just as easily have belonged to Rashmika.

She remembered the constabulary, too, and their suspicion that she had had something to do with the sabotage. She hadn’t helped her case by running away shortly afterwards, but they wouldn’t have come after her unless they had some additional evidence to link her to the act.

What did it mean? If she had been the one who had blown up the store of demolition charges, surely she’d have some memory of doing it. More to the point, why would she have done such a pointless thing? No, she told herself, it couldn’t have been her. It was just an unfortunate set of coincidences.

But she could not dismiss her doubts that easily.

Ten minutes later she was standing under airless sky astride the back of the huge machine. The business with the sabotage still troubled her, but with an effort of will she forced her thoughts on to more immediate matters.

She thought back to what had happened in the corridor, when the quaestor had found her. Convenient, that. Of all the possible entrances to the roof he had bumped into her at precisely the one she had been trying. More than likely he had been spying on her, observing her peregrinations through his little rolling empire. When he had spoken to her he had been hiding something. She was certain of that: it had been written on his face, in the momentary elevation of his eyebrows. His own guilt at spying on her? She doubted that he had the chance to spy on many girls her age, so he was probably making the most of it, him and that horrible pet of his.

She didn’t like the idea of him watching her, but she would not be on the caravan for very long and all she really cared about now was exploring the roof. If he had been observing her, then he would have had plenty of chances to stop her when she was changing into her own suit and finding the steps that led up to the roof. No one had come, so perhaps his attention had been elsewhere, or he had decided it was not worth his bother to stop her going where she wanted.

Quickly she forgot all about him, thrilled to be outside again.

Rashmika had never seen a vanishing. Two had occurred in her lifetime, once when Haldora was visible from the badlands, but she had been in classes at the time. Of course, she knew that the chances of seeing anything were tiny, even if one had the extreme good fortune to be out On the ice when it happened. The vanishings lasted for only a fraction of a second. By the time you knew one had happened, it was always too late. The only people who had ever seen one happen—with the exception of Quaiche, of course, who had started it all—were those who made it their duty to observe Haldora at every possible moment. And even then they had to pray that they did not blink or look away at that critical instant. Deprived of sleep by drugs and elective neurological intervention, they were half-mad to begin with.

Rashmika could not imagine that kind of dedication, but then she had never felt the slightest inclination to join a church in the first place. She wanted to observe a vanishing because she still clung to the notion that it was a rational natural phenomenon rather than evidence of divine intervention on the cosmic scale. And in Rashmika’s view it would be a shame not to be able to say one had seen something so rare, so wondrous. Consequently, ever since she was small, and whenever Haldora was high, she would try to devote some time each day to watching it. It was nothing compared to the endless hours of the cathedral observers, and the statistical odds against seeing anything did not bear contemplation, but she did it anyway, cheerfully ignoring such considerations while chiding those who did not share her particular brand of scientific rationalism.

The caravan’s roof was a landscape of treacherous obstructions. There were crouching generator boxes, radiator grilles and vanes, snaking conduits and power lines. It all looked very old, patched together over many years. She made her way from one side to the other, following the course of a railed catwalk. When she reached the edge she looked over, appalled at how far down the ground was and how slowly it now appeared to move. There was no one else up here, at least not on this particular machine.

She looked up, craning her neck as far as the awkward articulation of the helmet joint permitted. The sky was full of counter-moving lights. It was as if there were two celestial spheres up there, two crystal globes nested one within the other. As always the effect was immediately dizzying. Nor-mally the sense of vertigo was little more than a nuisance, but this high up it could easily kill her.

Rashmika tightened her grip on the railing and looked back down at the horizon again. Then, steeled, she looked up once more.

The illusion that she stood at the centre of two spheres was not entirely inaccurate. The lights pinned to the outermost sphere were the stars, impossibly distant; pinned to the innermost sphere were the ships in orbit around Hela, the sunlight glinting off the polished perfection of their hulls. Occasionally one or other would flicker with the hard gemlike flash of steering thrust as the Ultra crews trimmed their orbits or prepared for departure.

At any one time, Rashmika had heard, there were between thirty and fifty ships in orbit around Hela, always coming and going. Most were not large vessels, for the Ultras distrusted Haldora and preferred to hold their most valuable assets much further out. In general those she saw were in-system shuttles, large enough to hold frozen pilgrims and a modest team of Ultra negotiators. The ships that flew between Hela and orbit were usually even smaller, for the churches did not allow anything large to approach Hela’s surface.

The big ships, the starships—the lighthuggers—made only very rare visits to Hela’s orbit. When they did, they hung in the sky like ornaments, sliding along invisible tracks from horizon to horizon. Rashmika had seen very few of those in her lifetime; they always impressed and scared her at the same time. Her world was a froth of ice lathered around a core of rubble. It was fragile. Having one of those vessels nearby—especially when they made main-drive adjustments—was like holding a welding torch close to a snowball.

The vertigo returned in waves. Rashmika looked back towards the horizon, easing the strain on her neck. The old suit was dependable, but it was not exactly engineered for sightseeing.

Here, instead, was Haldora. Two-thirds of it had risen above the horizon now. Because there was no air on Hela, nothing to blur features on the horizon, there were very few visual cues to enable one to discriminate between something a few dozen kilometres away and something nearly a million kilometres beyond that. The gas giant appeared to be an extension of the world on which she stood. It looked larger when it was near the horizon than the zenith, but Rashmika knew that this was an illusion, an accidental by-product of the way her mind was wired together. Haldora loomed about forty times larger in the sky of Hela than the Moon did in the skies of Earth. She had always wondered about this, for it implied that the Moon was really not a very impressive thing compared to Haldora, in spite of the Moon’s prominence in Earth literature and mythology.

From the angle at which she saw it, Haldora appeared as a fat crescent. Even without the suit’s contrast filters slid down, she made out the bands of equatorial coloration that striped the world from pole to pole: shades of ochre and orange, sepia and buff, vermilion and amber. She saw the curlicues and flukes where the colour bands mingled or bled; the furious scarlet eye of a storm system, like a knot in wood. She saw the tiny dark shadows of the many smaller moons that wheeled around Haldora, and the pale arc of the world’s single ring.

Rashmika crouched down until she was sitting on her haunches. It was as uncomfortable as trying to look up, but she held the posture for as long as she was able. At the same time she kept on looking at Haldora, willing it, daring it to vanish, to do that which had brought them all here in the first place. But the world simply hung there, seemingly anchored to the landscape, close enough to touch, as real as anything she had ever seen in her life.

And yet, she thought, it does vanish. That it happened—that it continued to happen—was not disputed, at least not by anyone who had spent any significant time on Hela. Look at it long enough, she thought, and—unless you are unlucky—you will see it happen.

It just wasn’t her turn today.

Rashmika stood up, then made her way past the point where she had emerged, towards the rear of the vehicle. She was looking back along the procession of the caravan now, and she could see the other machines rising and falling in waves as they moved over slight undulations in the trail. The caravan was even longer than when she had first arrived: at some point, without any fanfare, a dozen more units had tagged on to the rear. It would keep growing until it reached the Permanent Way, at which point it would fragment again as various sections were assigned to specific cathedrals.

She reached the limit of the catwalk, at the back of the vehicle. There was an abyss between her and the next machine, spanned only by a flimsy-looking bridge formed from many metal slats. It had not been apparent from the ground, but now she saw that the distance—vertical and horizontal—was changing all the while, making the little bridge lash and twist like something in pain. Instead of the stiff railings she now held, there were only metal wires. Down below, halfway to the ground, was a pressurised connector that puffed in and out like a bellows. That looked much safer.

Rashmika supposed that she could go back inside the caravan and find her way to that connector. Or she could pretend that she had done enough exploring for one day. The last thing she needed to do was start making enemies this early in her quest. There would be plenty of time for that later on, she was certain.

Rashmika stepped back, but only for a moment. Then she returned to the bridge and spread her arms apart so that each hand could grip one of the wire lines. The bridge writhed ahead of her, the metal plates slipping apart, revealing an awful absence. She took a step forwards, planting one booted foot on the first plate.

It did not feel safe. The plate gave beneath her, offering no hint of solidity.

“Go on,” she said, goading herself.

She took the next step, and both feet were on the bridge. She looked back. The lead vehicle pitched and yawed. The bridge squirmed under her, throwing her from one side to the other. She held on tightly. She wanted desperately to turn back, but a small, quiet voice told her she must not. The voice told her that if she did not have the courage to do this one simple thing, then she could not possibly have the courage to find her brother.

Rashmika took another step along the bridge. She began to cross the gap. It was what she had to do.