Absolution Gap

FIFTY

They rode the elevator up to the garret, the low sun sliding colours across their faces.

Scorpio reached into his suit pocket. “Remontoire gave me this,” he said.

Rashmika took the piece of conch material, examined it with the cautious, critical eye of someone who has lived amongst fossils and bones and who knows that the slightest scratch can speak volumes—both truthful and false.

“I don’t recognise it,” she said.

He told her everything that he had learned from Remontoire, everything that Remontoire had guessed or conjectured.

“We’re not alone in this,” Scorpio said. “There’s someone else out there. We don’t even have a name for them. We only know them from the wreckage they leave behind.”

“They left this behind on Ararat?”

“And around Ararat,” he said. “And elsewhere, you can bet. Whoever they are, they must have been out there a long time. They’re clever, Aura.” He used her real name deliberately. “They’d have to be, to have lived with the Inhibitors for so long.”

“I don’t understand what they have to do with us.”

“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe everything. It depends on what happened to the scuttlers. That’s where you come in, I think.”

Her voice was flat as she said, “Everyone knows what happened to the scuttlers.”

“Which is?”

“They were destroyed by the Inhibitors.”

He watched the colours paint her face. She looked radiant and dangerous, like an avenging angel in an illuminated heretical gospel. “And what do you think?”

“I don’t think the Inhibitors had anything to do with the extinction of the scuttlers. I never have: not since I started paying attention, at least. It didn’t look like an Inhibitor cull to me. Too much was left behind. It was thorough, don’t get me wrong, but not thorough enough.” She paused, cast her face down as if embarrassed. “That was what my book was about: the one I was working on when I lived in the badlands. It was a thesis, proving my hypothesis through the accumulation of data.”

“No one would have listened to you,” he said. “But if it’s any consolation, I think you’re right. The question is: what did the shadows have to do with any of this?”

“I don’t know.”

“When we came here, we thought it was simple. The evidence pointed to one conclusion: that the scuttlers had been wiped out by the Inhibitors.”

“That’s what the scrimshaw suit told me,” Rashmika said. “The scuttlers built the mechanism to receive the signals from the shadows. But they didn’t take the final step: they didn’t allow the shadows to cross over to help them.”

“But now we have the chance not to make the same mistake,” Scorpio said.

“Yes,” Rashmika said, sounding wary of a trap. “But you don’t think we should do it, do you?”

“I think the mistake the scuttlers made was to contact the shadows,” Scorpio said.

Rashmika shook her head. “The shadows didn’t wipe out the scuttlers. That doesn’t make any sense, either. We know that they’re at least as powerful as the Inhibitors. They wouldn’t have left a trace behind here. And if they had crossed over, why would they still be pleading for the chance to do so?”

“Exactly,” Scorpio said.

Rashmika echoed him. “Exactly?”

“It wasn’t the Inhibitors that annihilated the scuttlers,” he said. “And it wasn’t the shadows, either. It was whoever—or whatever—made that shard of conch material.”

She gave it back to him, as if the thing were in some way tainted. “Do you have any proof of this, Scorp?”

“None whatsoever. But if we were to dig around on Hela—really dig—I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually turned up something like this. Just a shard would do. Of course, there’s another way to test my theory.”

She shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “But what did the scuttlers do that meant they had to be wiped out of existence?”

“They made the wrong decision,” he said.

“Which was?”

“They negotiated with the shadows. That was the test, Aura, that was what the conch-makers were waiting for. They knew that the one thing the scuttlers shouldn’t do was open the door to the shadows. You can’t beat one enemy by doing a deal with something worse. We’d better ensure that we don’t make the same mistake.”

“The conch-makers don’t sound much better than the shadows—or the Inhibitors—in that case.”

“I’m not saying we have to climb into bed with them, just that we might want to take them into consideration. They’re here, Aura, in this system. Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t watching our every move.”

The elevator ascended in silence for several more seconds. Eventually Rashmika said, “You haven’t actually come for the scrimshaw suit at all, have you?”

“I had an open mind,” Scorpio said.

“And now?”

“You’ve helped me make it up. It isn’t leaving the Lady Morwenna.”

“Then Dean Quaiche was right,” Rashmika said. “He always said the suit was full of demons.”

The elevator slowed. Scorpio placed the shard of conch material back in his belt pouch, then retrieved Clavain’s knife. “Stay here,” he said. “If I don’t come back out of that room in two minutes, take the elevator down to the surface. And then get the hell out of the cathedral.”

The four of them stood on the ice: Rashmika and her mother, Vasko and the pig. They had walked with the Lady Morwenna since leaving it, following the immense thing as it continued its journey towards the attenuated stump of the bridge thrusting out from the edge of the cliff. They were actually standing on that last part of the bridge, a good kilometre out from the cliff wall.

It seemed very unlikely that there was anyone left alive aboard the cathedral now, but Scorpio had resigned himself to never knowing that for certain. He had swept the main spaces looking for survivors, but there were almost certainly dozens of pressurised hiding places he would never have found. It was, he thought, enough that he had tried. In his present weakened state, even that had been more than^anyone could have expected.

In other respects, nothing very much about the Lady Morwenna had changed. The lower levels had been depressurised, as he had discovered when he climbed aboard using the line that the technician had dropped down from the propulsion chamber. But the great machines evidently worked as well in vacuum as in air: there had been no hesitation in the cathedral’s onward march, and the subsystems of electrical generation had not been affected. High up in the garret of the Clocktower, lights still burned. But no one moved up there, nor in any of the other windows that shone in the moving edifice.

“How far now?” Scorpio asked.

“Two hundred metres to the edge,” Vasko said, “near as I can judge.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Rashmika said. “Then the front half of her will be over thin air—assuming that the remaining part of the bridge holds her that far.”

“I think it’ll hold,” Scorpio said. “I think it would have held all the way over, to be honest.”

“That would have been something to see,” Khouri said.

“I guess we’ll never know what made the bridge,” Vasko said. Next to him, one of the huge feet was hoisted into the air by the complex machinery of the flying buttress. The foot moved forwards, then descended silently on to the ice.

Scorpio thought of the message he,had intercepted via his suit. “One of life’s mysteries,” he said. “It wasn’t the scuttlers, though. We can be sure of that.”

“Not them,” Rashmika agreed. “Not in a million years. They’d never have left behind anything that marvellous.”

“It’s not too late,” Vasko said.

Scorpio turned to him, catching the distorted reflection of his own face in the man’s helmet. “Not too late for what, son?”

“To go back inside. Fifteen minutes. Say, thirteen or fourteen, to be on the safe side. I could get to the garret in time.”

“And haul that suit down the stairs?” Khouri asked. “It won’t fit in the elevator.”

“I could smash the window of the garret. With two of us, we ought to be able to push the suit over the side.”

“I thought the idea was to save it,” Scorpio said.

“It’s a lot less of a drop from the garret to the ice than from the bridge to the bottom of the Gap,” Rashmika said. “It would probably survive, with some damage.”

“Twelve minutes, if you want to play safe,” Khouri said.

“I could still do it,” Vasko said. “What about you, Scorp? Could you make it, if we had to?”

“I probably could, if I didn’t have anything planned for the rest of my life.”

“I’ll take that as a no, then.”

“We made a decision, Vasko. Where I come from, we tend to stick with them.”

Vasko craned his neck to take in the highest extremities of the Lady Morwenna. Scorpio found himself doing the same thing, even though it made him dizzy to look up. Against the fixed stars over Hela, the cathedral hardly seemed to be moving at all. But it was not the fixed stars that were the problem: it was the twenty bright new ones strung in a ragged necklace around the planet. They couldn’t stay up there for ever, Scorpio thought. The Captain had done the right thing by protecting his sleepers from the uncertainties of the holdfast, even if it had been a kind of suicide. But sooner or later someone was going to have to do something about those eighteen thousand sleeping souls.

Not my problem, Scorpio thought. Someone else could take care of that one. “I didn’t think I’d make it this far,” he said under his breath.

“Scorp?” Khouri asked.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Just wondering what the hell a fifty-year-old pig is doing this far from home.”

“Making a difference,” Khouri said. “Like we always knew you would.”

“She’s right,” Rashmika agreed. “Thank you, Scorpio. You didn’t have to do what you did. I’ll never forget it.”

And I’ll never forget the screams of my friend as I dug into him with that scalpel, Scorpio thought. But what choice had he had? Clavain had never blamed him; had, in fact, done everything in his power to absolve him of any feelings of guilt. The man was about to die horribly, and the only thing that really mattered to him was sparing his friend any emotional distress. Why couldn’t Scorpio honour Clavain’s memory by letting go of the hatred? He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t the pig’s fault. It hadn’t been Clavain’s, either. And the one person whose fault it definitely hadn’t been was Aura.

“Scorp?” she asked.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” he said.

Khouri put an arm around his shoulder. “I’m glad you made it as well, Scorp. Thank you for coming back, for all of us.”

“A pig’s got to do… ” he said.

They stood in silence, watching the cathedral narrow the distance between itself and the edge of the bridge. For more than a century it had kept moving, never once losing the endless race with Haldora. One-third of a metre per second, for every second of every day, every day of every year. And now that same clocklike inevitability was sending it to its destruction.

“Scorp,” Rashmika said, breaking the spell, “even if we destroy the scrimshaw suit, what do we do about the machinery in Haldora? It’s still there. It’s still just as capable of letting them through.”

“If we had one more cache weapon… ” Khouri said.

“If wishes were horses,” Scorpio answered. He stomped his feet to keep warm: either there was something wrong with the suit, or there was something wrong with him. “Look, we’ll find a way to destroy it, or at least throw a spanner into it. Or else they’ll show us.”

“They?” she asked.

“The ones we haven’t met yet. But they’re out there, you can count on that. They’ve been watching and waiting, taking notes.”

“What if we’re wrong?” Khouri asked. “What if they’re waiting to see if we’re clever enough to contact the shadows? What if that’s the right thing to do?”

“Then we’ll have added a new enemy to the list,” Scorpio said. “And hey, if that happens…”

“What?”

“It’s not the end of the world. Trust me on this: I’ve been collecting enemies since I drew my first breath.”

For another minute no one said anything. The Lady Mor-wenna continued its crunching advance towards oblivion. The twin fire trails of the Nostalgia for Infinity continued to bisect the sky, like the first tentative sketch towards a new constellation.

“So what you’re saying is,” Vasko said, “we should just do what we think is right, even if they don’t like it?”

“More or less. Of course, it may be the right thing as well. All depends on what happened to the scuttlers, really.”

“They certainly pissed someone off,” Khouri said.

“Amen to that,” Scorpio replied, laughing. “My kind of species. We’d have got on famously.”

He couldn’t help himself. Here I am, he thought: critically injured, most likely more than half-dead, having in the last day lost both my ship and some of my best friends. I’ve just killed my way through a cathedral, murdering anyone who had the insolence to stand in my way. I’m about to watch the utter destruction of something that might—just might —be the most important discovery in human history, the only thing capable of standing between us and the Inhibitors. And I’m standing here laughing, as if the only thing at stake is a good night out.

Typical pig, he concluded: no sense of perspective. Sometimes, occasionally, it was the one thing in the universe he was most grateful for.

Too much perspective could be bad for you.

“Scorp?” Khouri said. “Do you mind if I ask you something, before we get separated again?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask, and find out.”

“Why did you save that shuttle, the one from the Wild Pallas? What stopped you firing on it, even when you saw the Inhibitor machines? You saved those people.”

Did she know? he wondered. He had missed so much during the nine extra years for which he had been frozen. It was possible that she had found out, confirmed that which he had only suspected.

He remembered something that Antoinette Bax had said to him just before they had parted. She had wondered if they would ever meet again. It was a big universe, he had said: big enough for a few coincidences. Maybe for some people, Antoinette had replied, but not for the likes of Scorpio and her. And she had been right, too. He knew that they were never go-ing to meet each other again. Scorpio had smiled to himself: he knew exactly what she meant. He didn’t believe in miracles either. But where exactly did you draw the line? But he knew now, with absolute confidence, that she had also been wrong. It didn’t happen for the likes of Scorpio and Antoinette. But for other people? Sometimes things like that just happened.

He knew. He had seen the names of all the evacuees on the shuttle they had rescued from the Yellowstone system. And one name in particular had stood out. The man had even made an impression on him, when he had seen the shuttle being unloaded. He remembered his quiet dignity, the need for someone to share what he felt, but not to take that load from him. The man had—like all the other passengers—probably been frozen ever since.

He would now be amongst the eighteen thousand sleepers who were orbiting Hela.

“We have to find a way to get to those people,” he told Khouri.

“I thought we were talking about—”

“We were,” he said, leaving at it that. Let her wait a little longer: she’d waited this long, after all.

For a while, no one spoke. The cathedral looked as if it would last for another thousand years. It had, in Scorpio’s opinion, no more than five minutes left.

“I could still make it up there,” Vasko said. “If I ran… if we ran, Scorp…” He trailed off.

“Let’s go,” Scorpio said.

They all looked at him, then at the cathedral. Its front was a good seventy metres from the end of the bridge; there were still another three or four minutes before it began to push out into empty space. Then what? At least another minute, surely, before the awesome mass of the Lady Morwenna began to overbalance.

“Go where, Scorp?” Khouri asked.

“I’ve had enough,” he said, decisively. “It’s been a long day and we’ve all got a long walk ahead of us. The sooner we make a start on it, the better.”

“But the cathedral—” Rashmika said.

“I’m sure it will be very impressive. You’re welcome to tell me all about it.”

He turned around and started walking back along what remained of the bridge. The sun was low behind him, pushing his own comical shadow ahead of him. It waddled before him, swaying from side to side like a poorly worked puppet. He was colder now: it was a peculiar, intimate kind of coldness, a coldness that felt as if it had his name on it. Maybe this is it, he thought: the end of the line, just as they had always warned him. He was a pig; he shouldn’t expect the world. He’d already made more of a dent in it than most.

He walked faster. Presently, three other shadows began to loom around his. They said nothing, walking together, mindful of the difficult journey ahead of them. When, after another few minutes, the ground rumbled—as if a great fist had just struck Hela in fury—none of them paused or broke their pace. They just kept walking. And when, eventually, he saw the smallest of the shadows begin to lose its footing, he watched the others rush towards it and hold it up.

After that, he didn’t remember very much.