Absolution Gap

TWENTY-NINE

The shuttle loitered over First Camp.

The sun was almost down. In the last, miserly light of the day, Vasko and his companions watched the green-clad spire slip beyond the headland. The towering thing had cast its own slanted shadow in the final minutes of daylight, a shadow that moved not just with the descent of the sun but also with the changing position and tilt of the ship. The movement was almost too slow to make out from moment to moment. It was like watching the hour hand of a clock: the movement was only really apparent when you looked away for a minute or two. But the ship was moving, being dragged along by that cloak of bio-mass, and now a tongue of land stood between the ship and the bay. It was not much of a tongue, just the last hundred metres of headland, and surely not enough to completely deflect the anticipated tidal waves; but it was bound to make some difference, and as the ship moved further along its course the sheltering effect would become larger and larger.

“Did she make it aboard?” Khouri asked, her eyes wide and unfocused. Aura seemed to be sleeping again, Khouri once more speaking for herself alone.

“Yes,” Vasko said.

“I hope she can talk some sense into him.”

“What happened back there…” Vasko said. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something, but nothing came. “When Aura spoke to us…?”

“Yes?”

“That was really her, right?”

Khouri looked at him, one eye slightly narrowed. “Does that bother you? Does my daughter disturb you?”

“I just want to know. She’s sleeping now, isn’t she?”

“She isn’t in my head, no.”

“But she” was?“

“Where are you going with this, Malinin?”

“I want to know how it works,” he said. “I think she might be useful to us. She’s already helped us, but that’s only the start, isn’t it?”

“I told you already,” Khouri said, “Aura knows stuff. We just have to listen.”

Rashmika sat alone in her room, the night after the caravan had crossed the bridge. She opened the little metal canister that Pietr had given her with trembling hands, fearing—despite herself—some deception or trick. But there was nothing in the canister except a rolled-up spool of thin yellow paper. It slid into her hands, the colour of tobacco. She flattened it carefully, and then inspected the faint sequences of grey marks on one side of the paper.

To the untrained eye they meant precisely nothing. At first they reminded her a little of something, and she had to think for a while before it came to her. The spaced vertical dashes—clustered and clumped, but sliding closer and closer together as her eye panned from left to right—brought to mind a diagram of the chemical absorption lines in a star’s spectrum, bunching closer and closer towards a smeared continuum of states. But these lines represented individual vanishings, and the smeared continuum lay in the future. But what exactly did it signify? Would the vanishings become the norm, with Haldora stuttering in and out of reality like a defective light fitting? Or would the planet just vanish, popping out of existence for evermore?

She examined the paper again. There was a second sequence of marks above the other. They agreed closely, except at one point where the lower sequence had an additional vertical mark where none was present above it.

Twenty-odd years ago, Pietr had said.

Twenty-odd years ago, Haldora had winked out of existence for one and one-fifth of a second. A long cosmic blink. Not just a moment of divine inattention, but a fully-fledged deific snooze.

And during that absence, something had happened that the churches did not like. Something that might even have been worth the life of a harmless old man.

She looked at the paper again, and for the first time it occurred to Rashmika to wonder why Pietr had given it to her, and what she was meant to do with it.

The elevator had been descending for several minutes when Antoinette felt a lurch as it shifted from its usual track. She cried out at first, thinking the elevator was about to crash, but the ride continued smoothly for a dozen seconds before she felt another series of jolts and swerves as the car switched routes again. There was no guessing where she was, only that she was deep inside the ship. Perhaps she was even below the water-line, in the last few hundred metres of the submerged hull. Any maps she might have brought along with her—not that she had, of course—would have been totally useless by now. It was not only that these dank levels were difficult to access from the upper decks, but that they were prone to convulsive and confusing changes of local architecture. For a long time it had been assumed that the elevator lines remained stable when all else changed, but Antoinette knew that this was not the case, and that it would be futile to attempt to navigate by apparently familiar reference points. If she’d brought an inertial compass and a gravitometer she might have been able to pinpoint her position to within a few dozen metres in three-dimensional space… but she hadn’t, and so she had no choice but to trust the Captain.

The elevator arrived at its destination. The door opened and the last dregs of fluid spilled out. She tapped her shoes dry, feeling the unpleasant wetness of her trouser hems against the skin of her calves. She was really not dressed for a meeting with the Captain. What would he think?

She looked out and had to suppress an involuntary gasp of surprise and delight. For all that she knew every moment was precious, it was impossible not to be moved by the view she was seeing. Deep in the ship as she was, she had been expecting another typically gloomy, damp enclosure. She had been assuming that the Captain would manifest via the manipulation of local junk or one of the distorting wall surfaces. Or something else, but qualitatively similar.

But the Captain had brought her somewhere else entirely. It was a huge chamber, a place that at first glance appeared not to have any limits at all. There was an endless sky above her, shaded a rich, heraldic blue. In all directions she saw only stepped tiers of trees reaching away into blue-green infinity. There was a lovely fragrant breeze and a cackle of animal life from the high branches of the nearest trees. Below her, accessed by a meandering rustic wooden staircase, was a marvellous little glade. There was a pool off to one side being fed by a hissing waterfall. The water in the pool, except where it was stirred into creamy whiteness under the waterfall, was the exquisite black of space. Rather than suggesting taintedness, the blackness of the water made it look wonderfully cool and inviting. A little way in from the water’s edge, resting on the perfectly tended lawn, was a wooden table. On either side of the table, forming benches, were long logs.

She had taken an involuntary step from the elevator. Behind her, the door closed. Antoinette saw no alternative but to make her way down the ambling stairs to the floor of the glade, where the grass shimmered with all the shades of green and yellow she had ever imagined.

She had heard about this place. Clavain had spoken about it once, she recalled. A glade within the Nostalgia for Infinity. Once, its location had been well mapped, but after the great ship had been emptied in the days following its landing on Ararat, no one had ever been able to find the glade again. Parties had scoured the areas of the ship where it was supposed to be, but they had found nothing.

The glade was enormous. It was astonishing that you could lose a place this large, but the Nostalgia for Infinity was vast. And if the ship itself didn’t want something to be found… well, the Captain certainly had the means to hide whatever he wanted. Access corridors and elevator lines could be rerouted. The entire place—the entire chamber, glade and all—could even have been moved around in the ship, the way one heard about old bullets“ making slow, meandering journeys through people, years after they had been shot.

Antoinette didn’t think she would ever find out exactly where this was. The Captain had brought her here on his own strict terms, and maybe she would never be allowed to see it again.

“Antoinette.” The voice was a hiss, a modulation of the waterfall’s sibilance.

“Yes?”

“You’ve forgotten something again, haven’t you?”

Did he mean the torch? No, of course not. She smiled. Despite herself, she hadn’t been quite as forgetful as she had feared.

She slipped on the goggles. Through them she saw the same glade. The colours, if anything, were even brighter. Birds were in the air, moving daubs of red and yellow against the blue backdrop of the sky. Birds! It was great to see birds again, even if she knew they were being manufactured by the goggles.

Antoinette looked around and realised with a jolt that she had company. There were people sitting at the table, on the logs placed either side of it.

Strange people. Really strange people.

“Come on over,” one of them said, inviting her to take the one vacant place. The man beckoning her was John Brannigan; she was certain of that immediately. But yet again he was manifesting in a slightly different form.

She thought back to the first two apparitions. Both had evoked Mars, she thought. In the first, he had been wearing a spacesuit so elderly that she had half-expected it to have an opening where you fed in coal. The second time the suit had been slightly more up to date: not modern, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least a generation beyond the first. John Brannigan had looked older then as well—by a good decade or two, she had judged. And now she was looking at an even older counterpart of him, wearing a suit that again skipped fashions forwards another half-century or so.

It was barely a suit at all, really, more a kind of cocoon of something resembling silver-grey insect spit that had been neatly lathered around him. Through the transparent material of the suit she glimpsed a vague tightly packed complexity of organic-looking mechanisms: kidney-shaped bulges and purple lunglike masses; things that pulsed and throbbed. She saw lurid-green fluids scurrying through miles of zigzagging intestinal piping. Beneath all this the Captain was naked, the vile mechanics of catheters and waste-management systems laid out for her inspection. The Captain appeared oblivious. She was looking at a man from a very remote century; one that—on balance—seemed more distant and strange than the earlier periods she had glimpsed in the first two apparitions.

The suit left his head uncovered. He looked older now. His skin appeared to have been sucked on to his skull by some vacuum-forming process, so that it hugged every crevice. She could map the veins beneath his skin with surgical precision. He looked delicate, like something she could crush in her hands.

She sat down, taking the place she had been offered. The other people around the table were all wearing the same kind of suit, with only minor variations in detail. But they were not all alike. Some of them were missing whole chunks of themselves. They had cavities in their bodies which the suits had invaded, cramming them with the same intricacy of organic machinery and bright-green tubing that she could see inside the Captain’s suit. One woman was missing an arm. In its place, under the spit-layer of the suit, was a glass moulding of an arm filled with a tentative structure of bone and meat and nerve fibre. Another one, a man this time, had a glass face, living tissue pressed against its inner surface. Another looked more or less normal at first glance, except that the body had two heads: a woman’s emerging at more or less the right place and a second one—a young man’s—attached above her right shoulder.

“Don’t mind them,” the Captain said.

Antoinette realised she must have been staring. “I wasn’t…”

John Brannigan smiled. “They’re soldiers. Forward deployment elements in the Coalition for Neural Purity.”

If that had ever meant anything to Antoinette, it was history she had forgotten a long time ago. “And you?” she asked.

“I was one, for a while. While it suited my immediate needs. We were on Mars, fighting the Conjoiners, but I can’t say my heart was entirely in it.”

Antoinette leaned forwards. The table, at least, was completely real. “John, there’s something we really need to talk about.”

“Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport. I’ve only just started shoot-ing the breeze with my soldier buddies.”

“All these people are dead, John. They died—oh, conservative estimate?—three or four hundred years ago. So snap out of the nostalgia trip, will you? You need to get a fucking good grip on the immediate here and now.”

He winked at her and bobbed his head towards one of the people along the table. “Do you see Kolenkow there? The one with two heads?”

“Difficult to miss,” Antoinette said, sighing.

“The one on her shoulder’s her brother. They signed up together. He took a hit, got zeroed by a spider mansweeper. Immediate decap. They’re brewing a new body for him back in Deimos. They can hook your head up to a machine in the meantime, but it’s always better if you’re plumbed into a proper body.”

“I’ll bet. Captain…”

“So Kolenkow’s carrying her brother’s head until the body’s ready. They might even go into battle like that. I’ve seen it happen. Isn’t much that scares the hell out of spiders, but two-headed soldiers might do the trick, I reckon.”

“Captain. John. Listen to me. You need to focus on the present. We have a situation here on Ararat, all right? I know you know about it—we’ve talked about it already.”

“Oh, that stuff,” he said. He sounded like a child being reminded of homework on the first day of a holiday.

Antoinette thumped the table so hard that the wood bruised her fist. “I know you don’t want to deal with this, John, but we have to talk about it all the same. You cannot leave just when you feel like it. You may save a few thousand people, but many, many more are going to die in the process.”

The company changed. She was still sitting at a table surrounded by soldiers—she even recognised some of the faces—but now they all looked as if they had been through a few more years of war. Bad war, too. The Captain had a clunking prosthetic arm where there had been a good arm before. The suits were no longer made of insect spit, but were now sliding assemblages of lubricated plates. They were hyper-reflective, like scabs of frozen mercury.

“Fucking Demarchists,” the Captain said. “Let us keep all that fancy biotech shit until the moment we really needed it. We were really kicking the spiders. Then they pulled the licenses, said we were violating terms of fair use. All that neat squirmy stuff just fucking melted overnight. Bioweps, suits—gone. Now look what we’ve got to work with.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Antoinette said. “Captain, listen to me. The Pattern Jugglers are moving the ship to safety. You have to give them time.”

“They’ve had time,” he said. It was a heartening moment of lucidity, a connection to the present.

“Not enough,” she said.

The steel fist of his new arm clenched. “You don’t understand. We have to leave Ararat. There are windows opening above us.”

The back of her neck tingled. “Windows, John?”

“I sense them. I sense a lot of things. I’m a ship, for fuck’s sake.”

Suddenly they were all alone. It was just the Captain and Antoinette. In the bright lustre of his reflective armour she saw a bird traverse the sky.

“You’re a ship. Good. So stop whining and start acting like one, beginning with a sense of responsibility to your crew. That includes me. What are these windows?”

He waited a while before answering. Had she just got through to him, or sent him scurrying ever deeper into labyrinths of regression?

“Opportunities for escape,” he said eventually. “Clear channels. They keep opening, and then closing.”

“You could be mistaken. It would be really, really bad if you were mistaken.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“We’ve been waiting, hoping, for a sign,” Antoinette said. “Some message from Remontoire. But there hasn’t been one.”

“Maybe he can’t get a message through. Maybe he’s been trying, and this is the best you’re going to get.”

“Give us a few more hours,” she said. “That’s all we’re asking for. Just enough time to move the ship to a safe distance. Please, John.”

“Tell me about the girl. Tell me about Aura.”

Antoinette frowned. She remembered mentioning the girl, but she did not think she had ever told the Captain her name. “Aura’s fine,” she said, guardedly. “Why?”

“What does she have to say on the matter?”

“She thinks we should trust the Pattern Jugglers,” Antoinette said.

“And beyond that?”

“She keeps talking about a place—somewhere called Hela. Something to do with a man named Quaiche.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. It may not even mean anything. It’s not even Aura speaking to us directly—it’s all coming via her mother. I don’t think Scorpio takes it that seriously. Frankly, I’m not sure I do either. They really, really want to think that Aura is something valuable because of what she cost them. But what if she isn’t? What if she’s just a kid? What if she knows a little, but nowhere near as much as everyone wants her to?”

“What does Malinin think?”

This surprised her. “Why Malinin?”

“They talk about him. I hear them. I heard about Aura the same way. All those thousands of people inside me, all their whispers, all their secrets. They need a new leader. It could be Malinin; it could be Aura.”

“There hasn’t even been an official announcement about the existence of Aura,” Antoinette said.

“You seriously believe that makes any difference? They know, all of them. You can’t keep a secret like that, Antoinette.”

“They have a leader already,” she said.

“They want someone new and bright and a little frightening. Someone who hears voices, someone they’ll allow to lead them in a time of uncertainties. Scorpio isn’t that leader.” The Captain paused, caressed his false hand with the scarred fingers of the other. “The windows are still opening and closing. I sense a growing urgency. If Remontoire is behind this, he may not be able to offer us many more opportunities for escape. Soon, very soon, I shall have to make my move.”

She knew she had wasted her time. She had thought at first that in showing her this place he was inviting her to a new level of intimacy, but his position had not changed at all. She had stated her case, and all he had done was listen.

“I shouldn’t have bothered,” she said.

“Antoinette, listen to me now. I like you more than you realise. You have always treated me with kindness and compassion. Because of that I care for you, and I care for your survival.”

She looked into his eyes. “So what, John?”

“You can leave. There is still time. But not much.”

“Thanks,” she said. “But—if it’s all right with you—I think I’ll stay for the ride.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Yeah,” she said, looking around. “This is about the only decent ship in town.”

Scorpio moved through the shuttle. He had turned almost all the fuselage surfaces transparent, save for a strip which marked the floor and a portion where Valensin waited with Khouri and her child. With all nonessential illumination turned down, he saw the outside world almost as if he were floating in the evening air.

With nightfall it had become obvious that the space battle was now very close to Ararat. The clouds had broken up, perhaps because of the excessive energies now being dumped into Ararat’s upper atmosphere. Reports of objects splashing down were coming in too rapidly to be processed. Gashes of fire streaked from horizon to horizon every few minutes as uniden-tified objects—spacecraft, missiles, or perhaps things for which the colonists had no name—knifed deep into Ararat’s airspace. Sometimes there were volleys of them; sometimes things moved in eerie lock-step formation. The trajectories were subject to violent, impossible-looking hairpins and reversals. It was clear that the major protagonists of the battle were deploying inertia-suppressing machinery with a recklessness that chilled Scorpio. Aura had already told them as much, through the mouthpiece of her mother. Clearly the appropriated alien technology was a little more controllable than it had been when Clavain and Skade had tested each other’s nerves with it on the long pursuit from Yellowstone to Resurgam space. But there were still people who told horror stories of the times when the technology had gone wrong. Pushed to its unstable limits, the inertia-suppressing machinery did vile things to both the flesh and the mind. If they were using it as a routine military tool—just another toy in the sandpit—then he dreaded to think what was now considered dangerous and cutting edge.

He thought about Antoinette for a moment, hoping that she was getting somewhere with the Captain. He was not greatly optimistic that she would succeed in changing the Captain’s mind once it was made up. But it still wasn’t absolutely clear whether or not he intended to take the ship up. Perhaps the revving-up of the Conjoiner drive engines was just his way of making sure they were in good working order, should they be needed at some point in the future. It didn’t have to mean that the ship was going to leave in the next few hours.

That kind of desperate, yearning optimism was foreign to Scorpio even now, and would have been quite alien during his Chasm City years. He was a pessimist at heart. Perhaps that was why he had never been very good at forward planning, at thinking more than a few days ahead. If you tended to believe on an innate level that things were always going to go from bad to worse, what was the point of even trying to intervene? All that was left was to make the best of the immediate situation.

But here he was hoping—in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary—that the ship was going to stay on Ararat. Something had to be wrong for him to start thinking that way. Something had to be playing on his mind. He didn’t have far to look for it, either.

Only a few hours earlier he had broken twenty-three years of self-imposed discipline. In Clavain’s presence, he had made every effort to live up to die old man’s standards. For years he had hated baseline humans for what they had done to him during his years of indentured slave service. And if that was not enough to spur his animosity, he only had to think of the thing that he was: this swaying, comedic mongrel of human and pig, this compromise that had all the flaws of both and none of the advantages of either. He knew the litany of his disadvantages. He couldn’t walk as well as a human. He couldn’t hold things the way they could. He couldn’t see or hear as well as they did. There were colours he would never know. He couldn’t think as fluidly as they did and he lacked a well-developed capacity for abstract visualisation. When he listened to music all he heard was complex sequential sounds, lacking any emotional component. His predicted lifespan, optimistically, was about two-thirds that of a human who had received no longevity therapy or germline modifications. And—so some humans said, when they didn’t think they were in earshot of pigs—his kind didn’t even taste the way nature intended.

That hurt. That really fucking hurt.

But he had dared to think that he had put all that resentment behind him. Or if not behind him, then at least in a small, sealed mental compartment which he only ever opened in times of crisis.

And even then he kept the resentment under control, used it to give him strength and resolve. The positive side was that it had forced him to try to be better than they expected. It had made him delve inside himself for qualities of leadership and compassion he had never suspected he possessed. He would show them what a pig was capable of. He would show them that a pig could be as statesmanlike as Clavain; as forward-thinking and judicial; as cruel and as kind as circumstances merited.

And for twenty-three years it had worked, too. The resentment had made him better. But in all that time, he now realised, he had still been in Clavain’s shadow. Even when Clavain had gone to his island, the man had not really abdicated power.

Except that now Clavain was gone, and only a few dozen hours into this new regime, only a few dozen hours after stum-bling into the hard scrutiny of real leadership, Scorpio had failed. He had lashed out against Hallatt, against a man who in that instant of rage had personified the entire corpus of baseline humanity. He knew it was Blood who had thrown the knife, but his own hand had been on it just as surely. Blood had merely been an extension of Scorpio’s intent.

He knew he had never really liked Hallatt. Nothing about that had changed. The man was compromised by his involvement in the totalitarian government on Resurgam. Nothing could be proved, but it was more than likely that Hallatt had at least been aware of the beatings and interrogation sessions, the state-sanctioned executions. And yet the evacuees from Resurgam had to be represented in some form. Hallatt had also done a lot of good during the final days of the exodus. People that Scorpio judged to be reasonable and trustworthy had been prepared to testify on his behalf. He was tainted, but he wasn’t incriminated. And—when one looked at the data closely—there was something unfortunate in the personal history of just about everyone who had come from Resurgam. Where did one draw the line? One hundred and sixty thousand evacuees had come to Ararat from the old world, and very few of them had lacked some association with the government. In a state like that, the machinery of government touched more lives than it left alone. You couldn’t eat, sleep or breathe without being in some small way complicit in the functioning of the machine.

So he didn’t like Hallatt. But Hallatt wasn’t a monster or a fugitive. And because of that—in that instant of incandescent rage—he had struck out against a fundamentally decent man that he just happened not to like. Hallatt had pushed him to the edge with his understandable scepticism about the matter of Aura, and Scorpio had allowed that provocation to touch him where it hurt. He had struck at Hallatt, but it could have been anyone. Even, had the provocation been severe enough, someone that he actually liked, like Antoinette, Xavier Liu or one of the other human seniors.

What almost made it worse was the way the rest of the party had reacted. When the rage had died, when the enormity of what he had done had begun to sink in, he had expected mutiny. He had at least expected some open questioning of his fitness for leadership.

But there had been nothing. It was almost as if they had all just turned a blind eye, regretting what he had done but accepting that this flash of madness was part of the package. He was a pig, and with pigs you had to tolerate that kind of thing.

He was sure that was what they were all thinking. Even, perhaps, Blood.

Hallatt had survived. The knife had touched no major organs. Scorpio didn’t know whether to put this down to spectacular accuracy on Blood’s behalf, or spectacular inaccuracy instead.

He didn’t want to know.

As it turned out, no one else really liked Hallatt either. The man’s days as a colony senior were over, his avowed distrust of Khouri not helping his case. But since the Resurgam representatives were cycled around anyway, Hallatt’s enforced standing-down was not the dramatic thing it might have been. The circumstances of his resignation would be kept secret, but something would inevitably filter out. There would be rumours of violence, and Scorpio’s name would surely feature somewhere in the telling.

Let it happen. He could live with that easily enough. There had been violent episodes in the past, and the rumours of those had become suitably exaggerated as they did the rounds. They had done him no real harm in the long run.

But those violent episodes had been justified. There had been no hatred behind them, no attempt to redress the sins visited upon Scorpio and his kind by their human elders. They had been necessary gestures. But what he had done to Hallatt had been personal, nothing whatsoever to do with the security of the planet.

He had failed himself, and in that sense he had also failed Ararat.

“Scorp? Are you all right?”

It was Khouri, sitting in the darkened portion of the shuttle. Valensin’s servitors were still monitoring Aura’s incubator, but Khouri was keeping her own vigil. Once or twice he had heard her talking softly to the child, even singing to her. It seemed odd to him, given that they were already bonded on a neural level.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You look preoccupied. Is it what happened in the iceberg?”

Her remark surprised him. Most of the time, his expressions were completely opaque to outsiders. “Well, there’s the small business of the war we’re caught up in, and the fact that I’m not sure any of us are going to make it into next week, but other than that…”

“We’re all bothered by the war,” she said, “but with you there’s something else. I didn’t see it before we went to find Aura”

He had the shuttle form a chair for him, something at pig-height, and sat down next to her. He noticed that Valensin was snoozing, his head bobbing up at periodic intervals as he tried to stay awake. They were all exhausted, all functioning at the limits of endurance.

“I’m surprised that you want to talk to me,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because of what you asked of me, and what I refused to give you.” In case his point was not obvious to her, he gestured at Aura. “I thought you’d hate me for that. You’d have had every right.”

“I didn’t like it, no.”

“Well, then.” He offered her his palms, accepting his fate.

“But it wasn’t you, Scorp. You didn’t stop me taking her back inside me. It was the situation, the mess we’re in. You simply acted in the only way that made sense to you. I’m not over it, but don’t cut yourself up about it, all right? This is war. Feelings get hurt. I can cope. I still have my daughter.”

“She’s beautiful,” Scorpio said. He didn’t believe it, but it seemed the right sort of thing to say under the circumstances.

“Really?” she asked.

He looked at the wrinkled, pink-red child. “Really.”

“I was worried you’d hate her, Scorp, because of what she cost.”

“Clavain wouldn’t have hated her,” he said. “That’s good enough for me.”

“Thanks, Scorp.”

They sat in silence for a minute or so. Above, through the transparent hull, the light show continued. Something—some weapon or device in near-Ararat space—was scribing lines across the sky. There were arcs and angles and straight lines, and each mark took a few seconds to fade into the purple-black background. There was something nagging him about those lines, Scorpio,thought, some sense that there was a meaning implicit in them, if only he had the quickness of mind to tease it out.

“There’s something else,” he said, quietly.

“Concerning Aura?”

“No. Concerning me, actually. You weren’t there, but I hurt a man today.” Scorpio looked down at his small, childlike shoes. He had misjudged the height of the seat slightly, so that his toes did not quite reach the floor.

“I’m sure you had your reasons,” Khouri said.

‘That’s the problem: I didn’t. I hurt him out of blind rage. Something inside me snapped, something I’d kidded myself that I had under control for the last twenty-three years.“

“We all have days like that,” she said.

“I try not to. For twenty-three years, all I’ve ever tried to do is get through the day without making that kind of mistake. And today I failed. Today I threw it all away, in one moment of weakness.”

She said nothing. He took that as permission to continue.

“I used to hate humans. I thought I had good enough reasons.” Scorpio reached up and undid the fastenings on his leather tunic, exposing his right shoulder. Three decades Of ageing—not to mention the slow accretion of later, fresher wounds—had made the scar less obvious now. But still it made Khouri avert her eyes for an instant, before she looked back unflinchingly.

“They did that to you?”

“No. I did it to myself, using a laser.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was burning away something else.” He traced the coastline of the scar, obedient to every inlet and peninsula of raised flesh. “There was a tattoo there, a green scorpion. It was a mark of ownership. I didn’t realise that at first. I thought it was a badge of honour, something to be proud of.”

“I’m sorry, Scorp.”

“I hated them for that, and for what I was. But I paid them back, Ana. God knows, I paid them back.”

He began to do up the tunic again. Khouri leaned over and helped with the fastenings. They were large, designed for clumsy fingers.

“You had every right,” she said.

“I thought I was over it. I thought I’d got it out of my system.”

She shook her head. “That won’t ever happen, Scorp. Take it from me, you won’t ever lose that rage. What happened to me can’t compare with what they did to you—I’m not saying that. But I do know what it’s like to hate something you can’t ever destroy, something that’s always out of reach. They took my husband from me, Scorp. Faceless army clerks screwed up and ripped him away from me.”

“Dead?” he asked.

“No. Just out of reach, at the wrong fucking end of a thirty-year starship crossing. Same thing, really. Except worse, I suppose.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “That’s as bad as anything they did to me.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It isn’t for me to make those comparisons. But all I know is this: I’ve tried to forgive and forget. I’ve accepted that Fazil and I will never see each other again. I’ve even accepted that Fazil’s probably long dead, wherever he really ended up. I have a daughter by another man. I suppose that counts as moving on.”

He knew that the father of her child was dead as well, but that was not obvious in the tone of her voice when she mentioned him.

“Not moving on, Ana. Just staying alive.”

“I knew you’d understand, Scorp. But you also understand what I’m saying about forgiving and forgetting, don’t you?”

“That it ain’t gonna happen,” he said.

“Never in a million years. If one of those people came into this room—one of those fools who screwed up my life with one moment of inattention—I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself. What I’m saying is, the rage doesn’t go away. It gets smaller, but it also gets brighter. We just pack it deep down and kindle it, like a little fire we’re never going to let die. It’s what keeps us going, Scorp.”

“I still failed.”

“No, you didn’t. You did damn well to keep it bottled up for twenty-three years. So you lost it today.” Suddenly she was angry. “So what? So fucking what! You went through something in that iceberg that I wouldn’t wish on any one of those clerks, Scorp. I know what Clavain meant to you. You went through hell on Earth. The wonder of it isn’t that you’ve lost it once, but that you’ve managed to keep your shit together at all. Honestly, Scorp.“ Her anger shifted to insistence. ”You’ve got to go easy on yourself, man. What happened out there? It wasn’t a walk in the park. You earned the right to throw a few punches, OK?“

“It was a bit more than a punch.”

“Is the guy going to pull through?”

“Yes,” he said, grudgingly.

Khouri shrugged. ‘Then chill out. What these people need now is a leader. What they don’t need is someone moping around with a guilty conscience.“

He stood up. “Thank you, Ana. Thank you.”

“Did I help, or did I just screw things up even more?”

“You helped.”

The seat melted back into the wall.

“Good. Because, you know, I’m not the most eloquent of people. I’m just a grunt at heart, Scorp. A long way from home, with some weird stuff in my head, and a daughter I’m not sure I’ll ever understand. But really, I’m still just a grunt.”

“It’s never been my policy to underestimate grunts,” he said. Now, inevitably, it was his turn to feel ineloquent. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. I hope one day…” He looked around, noticing that Vasko was moving down the opaque line of the floor towards Aura’s niche. “Well, I don’t know. Just that you find something to make that rage a little smaller and brighter. Maybe when it gets small and bright enough it will just pop away.”

“Would that be a good thing?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled. “Me neither. But I guess you and I are the ones who’ll find out.”

“Scorpio?” Vasko said.

“Yes?”

“You should see this. You, too, Ana.”

They woke Valensin. Vasko ushered them to a different part of the shuttle, then made some modifications to the hull to increase the visibility of the night sky, calling bulkheads into existence and enhancing the brightness of the transmitted light to compensate for the reflected glare from the shuttle’s wings. He did so with an ease that suggested he had been working with such systems for half his life, rather than the few days that was actually the case.

Above, Scorpio saw only the same appearing and fading scratches of light that he had noticed earlier. The nagging feeling that they meant something still troubled him, but the scratches made no more sense to him now than they had before.

“I’m not seeing it, Vasko.”

“I’ll have the hull add a latency, so that the marks take longer to fade out.”

Scorpio frowned. “Can you do that?”

“It’s easy.” Vasko patted the cold, smooth surface of the inner fuselage. “There’s almost nothing these old machines won’t do, if you know the right way to ask.”

“So do it,” Scorpio said.

All four of them looked up. Even Valensin was fully awake now, his eyes slits behind his spectacles.

Above, the scratches of light took longer to fade. Before, only two or three had ever been visible at the same time. Now dozens lingered, bright as the images scorched on to the retina by the setting sun.

And now they most definitely meant something.

“My God,” Khouri said.