Absolution Gap

EIGHTEEN

The internal map of the Nostalgia for Infinity was a long scroll of scuffed, yellowing paper, anchored at one end by Blood’s knife and at the other by the heavy silver helmet Palfrey had found in the junk. The scroll was covered with a dense crawl of pencil and ink lines. In places it had been erased and redrawn so many times that the paper had the thin translucence of animal skin.

“Is this the best we’ve got?” Blood asked.

“It’s better than nothing,” Antoinette said. “We’re doing our best with very limited resources.”

“All right.” The pig had heard that a hundred times in the last week. “So what does it tell us?”

“It tells us that we have a problem. Did you interview Palfrey?”

“No. Scorp took care of that.”

Antoinette fingered the mass of jewellery packed into her earlobes. “I had a little chat with him as well. I wanted to see how the land was lying. Turns out practically everyone in bilge management is convinced that the Captain is changing his haunt patterns.”

“And?”

“Now that we’ve got the last dozen or so apparitions plotted, I’m beginning to think they’re right.”

The pig squinted at the map, his eyes poorly equipped for discerning the smoke-grey pencil marks in the low light of the conference room. Maps had never really been his thing, even during his days under Scorpio in Chasm City. There, it had hardly mattered. Blood’s motto had always been that if you needed a map to find your way around a neighbourhood, you were already in trouble.

But this map was important. It depicted the Nostalgia for Infinity, the very sea-spire in which they were sitting. The ship was a tapering cone of intricate vertical and horizontal lines, an obelisk engraved with crawling, interlocked hieroglyphics. The lines showed floor levels, interconnecting shafts and major interior partitions. The ship’s huge internal storage bays were unmarked cavities in the diagram.

The ship was four kilometres tall, so there was no space on the map for detail at the human scale. Individual rooms were usually not marked at all unless they had some strategic importance. Mostly, mapping it was a pointless exercise. The ship’s slow processes of interior reorganisation—utterly outside the control of its human occupants—had rendered all such efforts nearly useless within a handful of years.

There were other complications. The high levels of the ship were well charted. Crews were always moving around in these areas, and the constant presence of human activity seemed to have dissuaded the ship from changing itself too much. But the deep levels, and especially those that lay below sea level, were nowhere near as well visited. Teams only went down there when they had to, and when they did they usually found that the interior failed utterly to conform to their expectations. And the transformed parts of the ship—warped according to queasy, biological archetypes—were by their very nature difficult to map with any accuracy. Blood had been down into some of the most severely distorted zones of the deep ship levels. The experience had been akin to the exploration of some nightmarish cave system.

It was not only the interior of the ship that remained uncertain. Before descending from orbit, the lighthugger had prepared itself for landing by flattening its stern. In the chaos of that descent, very few detailed observations of the changes had been possible. And since the lower kilometre of the ship—including the twin nacelles of the Conjoiner drives—was now almost permanently submerged, there had been little opportunity to improve matters in the meantime. Divers had explored only the upper hundred metres of the submerged parts, but even their reports had revealed little that was not already known. Sensors could probe deeper, but the cloudy shapes that they returned showed only that the basic form of the ship was more or less intact. The crucial question of whether or not the drives would ever work again could not be answered. Through his own nervous system of data connections the Captain presumably knew the degree of spaceworthiness of ship. But the Captain wasn’t talking.

Until, perhaps, now.

Antoinette had marked with annotated red stars all recent and reliable apparitions of John Brannigan. Blood peered at the dates and comments, the handwritten remarks which gave details of the type of apparition and the associated witness or witnesses. He dabbed at the map with his knife, scraping the blade gently against it, scything arcs and feints against the pencil marks.

“He’s moving up,” Blood observed.

Antoinette nodded. A lock of hair had come loose, hanging across her face. “That’s what I thought, too. Judging by this, I’d say Palfrey and his friends have a point.”

“What about the dates? See any patterns there?”

“Only that things looked pretty normal until a month or so ago.”

“And now?”

“Draw your own conclusions,” she said. “Me, I think the map speaks for itself. The hauntings have changed. The Captain’s suddenly become restless. He’s increased the range and boldness of his haunts, showing up in parts of the ship where we’ve never seen him before. If I included the reports I didn’t think were entirely trustworthy, you’d see red marks all the way up to the administration levels.”

“But you don’t believe those, do you?”

Antoinette pushed back the stray strands of hair. “No, right now I don’t. But a week ago I wouldn’t have believed half of the others, either. Now all it’d take is one good witness above level six hundred.”

“And then what?”

“All bets would be off. We’d have to accept that the Captain’s woken up.”

In Blood’s view this was already a given. “It can’t be down to Khouri, can it? If the Captain had started behaving differ-ently today, then I could believe it. But if this is real, it started weeks ago. She wasn’t here then.”

“But they’d arrived in-system by then,” Antoinette pointed out. “The battle was already here. How do we know the Captain wasn’t sensitive to that? He’s a ship. His senses reach out for light-hours in all directions. Being anchored to a planet doesn’t change that.”

“We don’t know that Khouri was telling the truth,” Blood said.

Antoinette used her red marker to add another star, one that corresponded to Palfrey’s report. “I’d say we do now,” she said.

“All right. One other thing. If the Cap’s woken up…”

She looked at him, waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Yes?”

“Do you think it means he wants something?”

Antoinette picked up the helmet, causing the map to roll back on itself with a snapping sound. “Guess one of us is going to have to ask him,” she replied.

Two hours before dawn something twinkled on the horizon.

“I see it, sir,” Vasko said. “It’s the iceberg, like we saw on the map.”

“I don’t see anything,” Urton said, after peering into the distance for half a minute.

“I do,” Jaccottet said, from the other boat. “Malinin’s right, I think. There’s something there.” He reached for binoculars and held them to his eyes. The wide cowl of the lenses stayed rigidly fixed on target even as the rest of the binoculars wavered in Jaccottet’s hands.

“What do you see?” Clavain asked.

“A mound of ice. At this range, that’s about all I can make out. Still no sign of a ship, though.”

“Good work,” Clavain said to Vasko. “We’ll call you Hawk-eye, shall we?”

On Scorpio’s order the boats slowed to half their previous speed, then veered gradually to port. They commenced a long encirclement of the object, viewing it from all sides in the slowly changing dawn light.

Within an hour, as the boats spiralled nearer, the iceberg had become a small round-backed hummock. There was, in Vasko’s opinion, something deeply odd about it. It sat on the sea and yet seemed a part of it as well, surrounded as it was by a fringe of white that extended in every direction for perhaps twice the diameter of the central core. It made Vasko think of an island, the kind that consisted of a single volcanic mountain, with gently sloping beaches reaching the sea on all sides. He had seen a few icebergs, when they drifted down to the latitude of First Camp, and this was unlike any iceberg in his experience.

The boats circled closer. Now and then, Vasko heard Scorpio speaking to Blood via his wrist radio. The western sky was a bruised purple, with only a scattering of bright stars showing. In the east it was a bleak shade of rose. Against either backdrop the pale mound of the iceberg threw back subtly distorted variations of the same hues.

“We’ve circled it twice,” Urton reported.

“Keep it up,” Clavain instructed. “Reduce our distance by half, but slow to half our present” speed. She may not be alert, and I don’t want to startle her.“

“Something’s not right about that iceberg, sir,” Vasko said.

“We’ll see.” Clavain turned to Khouri. “Can you sense her yet?”

“Skade?” she asked.

“I was thinking more of your daughter. I wondered if there might be some remote cross-talk between your mutual sets of implants.”

“We’re still a long way out.”

“Agreed, but let me know the instant you feel anything. My own implants may not pick up Aura’s emissions at all, or not until we’re much nearer. And in any case you are her mother. I am certain you’ll recognise her first, even if there is nothing unusual about the protocols.”

“I don’t need reminding that I’m her mother,” Khouri said.

“Of course. I just meant…”

“I’m listening for her, Clavain. I’ve been listening for her from the moment you pulled me out of that capsule. You’ll be the first to hear if I pick up Aura.”

Half an hour later they were close enough to make out more detail. It was clear to all of them now that this was no ordinary iceberg, even if one discounted the way it infiltrated the water around it. Indeed, it appeared increasingly unlikely that the thing was any kind of iceberg at all.

Yet it was made of ice.

The sides of the floating mass were weird and crystalline. Rather than facets or sheets, they consisted of a thickening tangle of white spars, a briar formed from interleaved spikes of ice. Stalagmites and stalactites daggered up and down like icy incisors. Vertical spikes bristled like rapiers. At the root of each spike was a flourish of smaller growths thrusting out in all directions, intersecting and threading through their neighbours. In all directions, the spikes varied in size. Some—the major trunks and branches of the structure—were as wide across as the boat. Others were so thin, so fine, that they formed only an iridescent haze in the air, as if the merest breeze would shatter them into a billion twinkling parts. From a distance, the berg had appeared to be a solid block. Now the mound seemed to be formed from a huge haphazardly tossed pile of glass needles. Unthinkable numbers of glass needles. It was a glistening cavity-filled thicket, as much hollow space as ice.

It was easily the most unsettling thing Vasko had ever seen in his life.

They circled closer.

Of all of them, only Clavain seemed unimpressed by the utter strangeness of what lay before them. “The smart maps were accurate,” he said. “The size of this thing… by my reckoning, you could easily hide a moray-class corvette inside it.”

Vasko raised his voice. “You still think there might be a ship inside that thing, sir?”

“Ask yourself a question, son. Do you really think Mother Nature had anything to do with this?”

“But why would Skade surround her ship with all this strange ice?” Vasko persisted. “I wouldn’t have thought it was much use as armour, and all it’s done so far is make her ship more visible on the maps.”

“What makes you so sure she had any choice, son?”

“I don’t follow, sir.”

Scorpio said, “He’s suggesting that all this might mean there’s something wrong with Skade’s ship. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s my working hypothesis,” Clavain said.

“But what…” Vasko abandoned his question before he got himself into even deeper water.

“Whatever’s inside,” Clavain said, “we still have to reach it. We don’t have tunnelling equipment or anything that can blast through thick ice. But if we’re careful, we won’t have,to. We just have to locate a route through to the middle.”

“What if Skade spots-us, sir?” Vasko asked.

“I’m hoping she does. The last thing I want is to have to knock on her front door. Now take us closer. Nice and slowly does it.”

Bright Sun rose. In the early minutes of dawn, the iceberg took on an entirely different character. Against the soft violet of the sky the whole structure seemed magical, as delicate as some aristocrat’s confection. The briar spikes and icy spars were shot through with gold and azure, the colours refracted with the untainted dazzle of cut diamond. There were glorious ha-los, shards and jangles of chromatic purity, colours Vasko had never seen in his life. Instead of shadows, the interior shone turquoise and opal with a radiance that groped and fingered its way to the surface through twisting corridors and canyons of ice. And yet within that shining interior there was a shadowy kernel, a hint of something cocooned.

The two boats had come within fifty metres of the outer edge of the island’s fringe. The water had been calm for much of their journey, but here in the immediate vicinity of the iceberg it moved with the languor of some huge sedated animal, as if every ripple cost the sea great effort. Closer to the edge of the fringe, the sea was already beginning to freeze. It had the slick blue-grey texture of animal hide. Vasko touched his fingers just beneath the surface of the water by the boat and then pulled them back out immediately. Even here, this far from the fringe, the water was much colder than it had been when they had left the shuttle.

“Look at this,” Scorpio said. He had one of the smart maps rolled out before him. Khouri was studying it, too, obviously agreeing with something Scorpio was saying to her as he pointed out features with the blunt-trottered stub of one hand.

Clavain opened his own map. “What is it, Scorp?”

“An update just came through from Blood. Take a look at the iceberg: it’s larger.”

Clavain made his map display the same coordinates/The iceberg leapt into view. Vasko peered over the old man’s shoulder, searching for the pair of boats. There was no sign of them. He assumed that the-Tipdate had taken place before sunset the previous evening.

“You’re right,” Clavain said. “What would you say… thirty, forty per cent larger, by volume?”

“Easily,” Scorpio said. “And this isn’t real-time. If it’s growing this rapidly, it could be ten or twenty per cent larger again by now.”

Clavain folded his map: he had seen enough. “It certainly seems to be refrigerating the surrounding water. Before very long, where we’re sitting will be frozen as well. We’re lucky we arrived when we did. If we’d left it a few more days, we’d never have stood a chance. We’d be looking at a mountain.”

“Sir,” Vasko said, “I don’t understand how it can be getting larger. Surely it should be shrinking. Icebergs don’t last at these latitudes.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know much about them,” Clavain replied.

“I said we don’t see many in the bay, sir.”

Clavain looked at him shrewdly. “It’s not an iceberg. It never was. It’s a shell of ice around Skade’s ship. And it’s growing because the ship is making it grow by cooling the sea around it. Remember what Khouri said? They have ways of making their hulls as cold as the cosmic microwave background.”

“But you also said you didn’t think Skade had any control over this.”

“I’m not sure she has.”

“Sir…”

Clavain cut him off. “I think something may have gone wrong with the cryo-arithmetic engines that keep the hull cold. What, I don’t know. Perhaps Skade will tell us, when we find her.”

Until a day ago Vasko had never heard of cryo-arithmetic engines. But the phrase had cropped up in Khouri’s testimony—it was one of the technologies that Aura had helped Remontoire and his allies to perfect as they raced away from the ruins of the Delta Pavonis system.

In the hours that followed, Vasko had done his best to ask as many questions as possible, trying to fill in the most embarrassing voids in his knowledge. Not all of his questions had met with ready answers, even from Khouri. But Clavain had told him that the cryo-arithmetic engines were not completely new, that the basic technology had already been developed by the Conjoiners towards the end of their war against the Demarchists. At that time, a single cryo-arithmetic engine had been a clumsy thing the size of a mansion, too large to be carried on anything but a major spacecraft. All efforts to produce a miniaturised version had ended in disaster. Aura, however, had shown them how to make engines as small as apples.

But they were still dangerous.

The cryo-arithmetic principle was based on a controlled violation of thermodynamic law. It was an outgrowth from quantum computation, exploiting a class of algorithms discovered by a Conjoiner theorist named Qafzeh in the early years of the Demarchist war. Qafzeh’s algorithms—if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer—led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran. The trick—the really difficult part—was to prevent the computer from running even faster as it chilled, spiralling into a runaway process. The smaller the engine, the more susceptible it was to that kind of instability.

Perhaps that was what had happened to Skade’s ship. In space, the engines had worked to suck heat away from the corvette’s hull, making the ship vanish into the near-zero background of cosmic radiation. But the ship had sustained damage, perhaps severing the delicate web of control systems monitoring the cryo-arithmetic engines. By the time it hit Ararat’s ocean it had become a howling mouth of interstellar cold. The water had begun to freeze around it, the odd patterns and structures betraying the obscene violation of physical law taking place.

Could anyone still be alive inside it?

Vasko noticed something then. It was possible that he was the first. It was a keening sound at the very limit of his hearing, a sensation so close to ultrasound that he barely registered it as noise at all. It was more like a kind of data arriving by a sensory channel he had never known he possessed.

It was like singing. It was like a million fingers circling the wet rims of a million wine glasses.

He could barely hear it, and yet it threatened to split his skull open.

“Sir,” Vasko said, “I can hear something. The iceberg, sir, or whatever it is—it’s making a noise.”

“It’s the sun,” Clavain said, after a moment. “It must be warming the ice, stressing it in different ways, making it creak and shiver.”

“Can you hear it, sir?”

Clavain looked at him with an odd expression on his face. “No, son, I can’t. These days, there are a lot of things I can’t hear. But I’m taking your word for it.”

“Closer,” Scorpio said.

Through dark, dank corridors of the great drowned ship, Antoinette Bax walked alone. She held a torch in one hand and the old silver helmet in the other, her fingers tucked through the neck ring. Lolloping ahead of her with the eagerness of a hunting dog, the wandering golden circle of torchlight defined the unsettling sculptural formations that lined the walls: here an archway that appeared to be made from spinal vertebrae, there a mass of curled and knotted intestinal tubes. The crawling shadows made the tubes writhe and contort like copulating snakes.

A steady damp breeze blew up from the lower decks, and from some unguessable distance Antoinette heard the clanging report of a hesitant, struggling mechanism—a bilge pump, maybe, or perhaps the ship itself remaking a part of its own fabric. Sounds propagated unpredictably through the ship, and the noise could just as easily have originated mere corridors away as from some location kilometres up or down the spire.

Antoinette hitched high the collar of her coat. She would have preferred company—any company—but she knew that this was the way it had to be. On each of the very few occasions in the past when she had elicited anything from the Captain that might be construed as a meaningful response, it had always been when she was alone. She took this as evidence that the Captain was prepared to reveal himself to her, and that there was an element of trust—however small—in their rela-tionship. True or not, Antoinette had always believed that she stood a better chance of communicating with the Captain than her peers did. It was all about history. She had owned a ship herself once, and although that ship had been much smaller than the Nostalgia for Infinity, in some sense it, too, had been haunted.

“Talk to me, John,” she had said on previous occasions. “Talk to me as someone you can trust, as someone who appreciates a little of what you are.”

There had never been an unequivocal answer, but if she looked at all the instances when she had drawn some response, however devoid of content, it appeared to her that the Captain was more likely to do something in her presence than not. Taken together, none of these apparitions amounted to any kind of coherent message. But what if the recent spate of manifestations pointed to him emerging from some dormant state?

“Captain,” she said now, holding aloft the helmet, “you left a calling card, didn’t you? I’ve come to give it back. Now you have to keep your side of the bargain.”

There was no response.

“I’ll be honest with you,” she said. “I really don’t like it down here. Matter of fact, it scares the hell out of me. I like my ships small and cosy, with decor I chose myself.” She cast the torch beam around, picking out an overhanging globular mass filling half the corridor. She stooped under the shock-frozen black bubbles, brushing her fingers against their surprising warmth and softness. “No, this isn’t me at all. But I guess this is your empire, not mine. All I’m saying is that I hope you realise what it takes to bring me down here. And I hope you’re going to make it worthwhile for me.”

Nothing happened. But she had never expected success at first bite.

“John,” she said, deciding to risk familiarity, “we think something may be happening in the wider system. My guess is you may have some suspicions about this as well. I’ll tell you what we think, anyway—then you can decide for yourself.”

The character of the breeze changed. It was warmer now, with an irregularity about it that made her think of ragged breathing.

Antoinette said, “Khouri came back. She dropped out of the sky a couple of days back. You remember Khouri, don’t you? She spent a lot of time aboard, so I’d be surprised if you didn’t. Well, Khouri says there’s a battle going on around Ararat, something that makes the Demarchist-Conjoiner war look like a snowball fight. If she isn’t lying, we’ve got two squabbling human factions up there, plus a really frightening number of wolf machines. You remember the wolves, don’t you, Captain? You saw Ilia throw the cache weapons at them, and you saw what good it did.”

There it was again. The breeze had become a faint suction.

In Antoinette’s estimation that already made it a class-one apparition. “You’re here with me, aren’t you?”

Another shift in the wind. The breeze returned, sharpened to a howl. The howl ripped her hair loose, whipping it in her eyes.

She heard a word whispered in the wind: Ilia.

“Yes, Captain. Ilia. You remember her well, don’t you? You remember the Triumvir. I do, too. I didn’t know her for long, but it was long enough to see that she isn’t the kind of woman you’d forget in a hurry.”

The wind had died down. All that remained was a nagging suction.

A small, sane voice warned Antoinette to stop now. She had achieved a clear result: a class one by anyone’s definition, and almost certainly (if she had not imagined the voice) a class two. That was enough for one day, wasn’t it? The Captain was nothing if not temperamental. According to the records she had left behind, Ilia Volyova had pushed him into a catatonic sulk many times by trying to coax just one more response from him. Often it had taken the Captain weeks to emerge from one of those withdrawals.

But the Triumvir had had months or years to build up her working relationship with the Captain. Antoinette did not think she had anywhere near as much time.

“Captain,” she said, “I’ll lay the cards on the table. The seniors are worried. Scorpio’s so worried he’s pulled Clavain back from his island. They’re taking Khouri seriously. They’ve already gone to see if they can get her baby back for her. If she’s right, there’s a Conjoiner ship already in our ocean, and it was damaged by the wolves. They’re here, Captain. It’s crunch time. Either we sit here and let events happen around us, or we think about the next move. I’m sure you know what I mean by that.”

Abruptly, as if a door or valve had slammed shut somewhere, the suction stopped. No breeze, no noise, only Antoinette standing alone in the corridor with the small puddle of light from her torch.

“Holy shit,” Antoinette said.

But then, ahead of her, a cleft of light appeared. There was a squeal of metal and part of the corridor wall hinged aside. A new sort of breeze hit her face, a new concoction of biomechanical smells.

Through the cleft she saw a new corridor, curving sharply down towards underlying decks. Golden-green light, firefly pale, oozed up from the depths.

“I guess I was right about the calling card,” she said.