Absolution Gap

THIRTY-ONE

Scorpio cycled through the airlock as soon as the shuttle had engaged with its docking cradle, latching itself securely into place in the reception bay. The other ship that had accompanied them—it was much smaller and sleeker—was a wedge of darkness parked alongside. All he could see was its silhouette, a flint-shaped splash of ink like one of the random blots sometimes used in a psychological examination. It just sat there, hissing, its smell sharp and antiseptic, like a medicine cabinet. It looked completely two-dimensional, as if stamped from a sheet of thin black metal.

It looked like something you could cut yourself on.

Security Arm militia had already cordoned off both craft. They recognised the shuttle, but they were wary of the other arrival. Scorpio assumed it had received the same invitation, but the guards were still taking no chances. He stood most of them down, keeping only a couple handy just in case the ship really did contain an unpleasant surprise.

He raised his sleeve and spoke into his communicator. “Antoinette? You around?”

“I’m on my way up, Scorp. Be there in a minute or so. Do you have our guest?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

He moved over to the black ship. It was not much larger than the capsule Khouri had come down in. Room in it for one or two people at the very most, he estimated. He rapped a knuckle against the black surface. It was cold to the touch. The hairs on his knuckle tingled with shock.

A dogleg of pink light split the black machine down the middle and a section of the hull slid aside, revealing a dim interior. A man was already extricating himself from the prison of an acceleration couch and fold-around controls. It was Re-montoire, just as Scorpio had suspected. He was a little older than Scorpio remembered, but still fundamentally the same: a very thin, very tall, very bald man, dressed entirely in tight black clothes that served only to emphasise his arachnoid qualities. His skull was a peculiar shape: elongated, like a teardrop.

Scorpio leaned into the cavity to help him out.

“Mr. Pink, I presume,” Remontoire said.

Scorpio hesitated a moment. The name meant something, but the association was buried decades in the past. He tugged at the strands of his memory until one came loose. He recalled the time when Remontoire and he had travelled incognito through the Rust Belt and Chasm City, pursuing Clavain when he had first defected from the Conjoiners. Mr. Pink had been the name Scorpio had travelled under. What had Remontoire called himself? Scorpio tried to remember.

“Mr. Clock,” he said at last, just at the point when the pause would have become uncomfortable.

They had hated each other’s guts back then. It had been inevitable, really. Remontoire did not like pigs (there had been something unpleasant in his past, some incident in which he had been tortured by one of them) but had been forced to employ Scorpio because of his useful local knowledge. Scorpio did not like Conjoiners (no one did, unless they were already Conjoin-ers) and he particularly did not like Remontoire. But he had been blackmailed into assisting them, promised his freedom if he did. To refuse meant being handed over to the authorities, who had a nice little pre-scripted show trial planned for him.

No; they hadn’t exactly started out as friends, but the hatred had gradually evaporated, aided by their mutual respect for Clavain. Now Scorpio was actually glad to see the man, a reaction that would have stunned and appalled his younger self.

“We’re quite a pair of relics, you and I,” Remontoire said. He stood up, stretching his limbs, turning them this way and that as if ascertaining that none of them had become dislocated.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” Scorpio said.

“Clavain?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I guessed, of course. The moment I saw you, I knew he must be dead. When did it happen?”

“A couple of days ago.”

“And how did he die?”

“Very badly. But he died for Ararat. He was a hero to the end, Rem.”

For a moment Remontoire was somewhere else, wandering through a landscape of mental reflection accessible only to Conjoiners. He closed his eyes, remained that way for perhaps ten seconds and then opened them again. They were now gleaming with bright alertness, no trace of sorrow visible.

“Well, I’ve grieved,” he said.

Scorpio knew better than to doubt Remontoire’s word; that was just how Conjoiners did things. It was a measure of Remontoire’s respect for his old friend and ally that he had even deemed a period of grieving necessary in the first place. It would have been trivial for him to edit his own mind into a state of serene acceptance. By going through the motions of grief he had paid a great, humbling tribute to Clavain. Even if it had only taken ten or twelve seconds.

“Are we safe?” Scorpio asked.

“For now. We planned your escape carefully, creating a major diversion using the remaining assets. We knew the wolves would be able to reallocate some of their resources to bring you down, but our forecasts showed that we could handle them, provided you left exactly on schedule.”

“You can beat the wolves?”

“No, not beat them, Scorpio.” Remontoire’s tone was schoolmasterly, gently reproachful. “We can overwhelm a small number of wolf machines in a specific location by using a deliberate concentration of power. We can inflict some damage, push them back, force them to regroup. But really, it’s like throwing pebbles at pack dogs. Against a large grouping, there is still little we can do. And in the longer term—so our forecasts tell us—we will lose.”

“But you’ve survived until now.”

“With the weapons and techniques Aura gave us, yes. But that well is nearly dry now. And the wolves have shown a remarkable propensity for matching us.” Remontoire’s eyes sparkled with admiration. “They are very efficient, these machines.”

Scorpio laughed. After everything that he had been through, this was the outcome Remontoire was spelling out? “Then we’re screwed, right?”

“In the long run, at least according to the current forecasts, the prognosis is not good.”

Behind Remontoire, the black ship sealed itself, becoming once again a sharp-edged chunk of shadow.

“Then why don’t we just give up now?”

“Because there is a chance—albeit a small one—that the forecasts may be badly wrong.”

“I think we need to talk,” Scorpio said.

“And I know just the place,” said Antoinette Bax, stepping into the bay. She inclined her head towards Remontoire, as if they had seen each other only minutes earlier. “Follow me, you two. I think you’re going to love this.”

Rashmika saw the cathedrals.

It was not how she had imagined it, when she had rehearsed in her head her arrival at the Way. In her mind’s eye she was always simply there, with no approach, no opportunity to see the cathedrals small and neat in the distance, perched like ornaments on the horizon. But here they were, still a dozen or more kilometres away, yet clearly visible. It was like looking at the sailing ships of olden days, the way their topgallants came over the horizon long before their hulls. She could reach out her hand, open her fist and trap any one of those cathedrals in the curve between finger and thumb. She could close one eye so that the lack of perspective made the cathedral appear like a small and lovely toy, a thing of magical jewelled delicacy.

And she could just as easily imagine closing her fist on it.

There were too many of them to count. Thirty, forty, easily. Some were bunched up into tight clusters, like galleons exchanging close-quarters cannon fire. When they were so close, it was not easy to separate the resulting confusion of towers and spires into individual structures. Some cathedrals were single-spired or single-towered; others resembled whole city parishes joined together and set adrift. There were elbowed towers and lavish minarets. There were spires—barbed, flanged and buttressed. There were stained-glass windows hundreds of metres tall. There were rose windows wide enough to fly a ship through. There were glints of rare metals, acres of fabulous alloys. There were things like barnacles climbing halfway up the skins of some of the cathedrals, things whose scale she completely misjudged until she was close enough to realise that they were actually buildings in their own right, piled higgledy-piggledy atop one another.

Again, she thought of Brueghel.

As the caravan continued its approach to the Way, a greater proportion of each cathedral gradually became visible. Yet more sailed over the horizon, far to their rear, but this was the main group, Rashmika knew: the vanguard of the procession.

Above, Haldora sat perfectly at the zenith, at the apex of the celestial dome.

She had nearly arrived.

Scorpio sat on the wooden table in the glade. He looked around, anxious to absorb every detail, but at the same time hoping not to appear too overwhelmed. It was really like no place he had ever been. The sky was a pure corneal blue, richer and deeper than anything he recalled from Ararat. The trees were amazingly intricate, shimmering with detail. They breathed. He had only ever seen pictures of trees, but the pictures had failed utterly to convey the enormous dizzying complexity of the things. It was like the first time he had seen the ocean: the gulf between expectation and reality was vast and nauseating. It wasn’t simply a question of scaling up some local, familiar thing, like a cup of water. There was a whole essence of seaness that he could never have predicted.

Frankly, the trees alarmed him. They were so huge, so alive. What if they decided they didn’t like him?

“Scorp,” Antoinette said. “Put these on, will you?”

He took the goggles, frowning at them. “Any particular reason why?”

“So you can talk to John. Those of us without machines in our heads can’t see him most of the time. Don’t worry, you won’t be the only one looking silly.”

He fixed the goggles in place. They were designed for people, not pigs, but they were not too uncomfortable when he adjusted them for the shape of his face. Nothing happened when he looked through them.

“John’ll be here in a moment,” Antoinette reassured him.

This meeting had been convened very quickly. Around the table, in addition to Antoinette and himself, sat Vasko Malinin, Ana Khouri and her daughter—still inside a portable incubator, which Khouri rested on her lap—Dr. Valensin and three low-ranking colony representatives. The three representatives were simply the most senior of the fourteen thousand or so citizens who were already aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. The usual senior members—Orca Cruz, Blood, Xavier Liu, amongst others—were still on Ararat. Remontoire took the place opposite Scorpio, leaving only one vacant position.

“This will have to be brief,” Remontoire said. “In less than an hour I must be on my way.”

“You won’t be staying for lunch?” Scorpio asked, remembering belatedly that Remontoire had no sense of humour.

The Conjoiner shook the delicately veined egg that was his head. “I’m afraid not. The Zodiacal Light and the other Con-joiner assets will remain in this system, at least until you are into clear interstellar space. We will draw the Inhibitors away from you. Some elements may follow you, but they will almost certainly not constitute the main force.” He had made a thin-boned church of his fingers. “You should be able to handle them.”

“It sounds a lot like self-sacrifice to me,” Antoinette said.

“It isn’t. I am pessimistic, but not totally without hope. There are still weapons we haven’t used and a number we haven’t even manufactured yet. Some of them may make a small difference, locally at least.” He paused and reached into an invisible pocket in his tunic. His fingers vanished into the fabric, as if executing a conjuring trick, and then emerged clutching a small slate-grey sliver, which he placed on the table and then tapped with his forefinger. “Before I forget: schematics for several militarily useful technologies. Some of these Aura or Khouri may already have mentioned. We owe them all to Aura, of course, but while she showed us the way forward and gave us clues to the basic principles, there was still much that we had to work out from scratch. These files should be compatible with standard manufactory protocols.”

“We have no manufactories,” Antoinette said. “They all stopped working years ago.”

Remontoire pursed his lips. “Then we will provide you with new ones, good against most plague variants. I’ll have them dropped off before you leave the system, along with medical supplies and reefersleep components. Feed them the files and they will make weapons and devices. If you have any queries, phrase them appropriately to Aura and she should be able to help you.”

“Thanks, Rem,” said Antoinette.

“This is a gift,” he said. “We give it freely, just as we are happy for you to take Aura. She is yours now. But there is something that you can give us in return.”

“Name it,” Antoinette told him.

But Remontoire said nothing. He looked over his shoulder at a figure crunching towards them through the grass.

“Hello, John,” Antoinette said.

Scorpio sat back stiffly on the bench as the figure approached. At first glance it barely looked like a human being at all. It walked, and it had arms and legs and a head, but that was where the resemblance ended. One half of the man’s body—one arm and one leg, and one half of the torso—was, so far as he could tell, approximately flesh and blood. But the other half was hulking and mechanical, grotesquely so, with no effort having been expended to create an illusion of symmetry. There were pistons and huge articulated hinge points, sliding metal gleaming from constant polishing and lubrication. The arm on the mechanical side hung down to knee-level, terminating in a complex multipurpose tool-delivery system. The effect was as if a piece of earth-moving equipment had collided with a man at brutal speed, fusing them together in the process.

His head, by contrast, was almost normal. But only by contrast. Red multifaceted cameras were crammed into the orbits of his eyes. Tubes emerged from his nostrils, curving back around the side of his face to connect to some unseen mechanism. An oval grille covered his mouth, stitched into the flesh of his face. His scalp was bald save for a dozen or so matted locks emerging from the crown. They were tied back, knotted into a single braid that hung down the back of his neck. He had no ears. In fact, Scorpio realised, he had no visible orifices at all. Perhaps he had been redesigned to tolerate hard vacuum without the protection of a space helmet.

His voice appeared to emerge from the grille. It was small, tinny, like a broken toy. “Hey. The gang’s all here.”

“Have a seat, John,” Antoinette said. “Do you need to be brought up to speed? Remontoire was just explaining a technical trade-off. He’s giving us some cool new toys.”

“In return for something else, I gather.”

“No,” Remontoire said. “The technical blueprints and the other items really are a gift. But if you are willing to consider offering us a reciprocal gift, we have something in mind.”

John Brannigan assumed his seat, lowering himself into place with a hiss and chuff of contracting pistons. “You want the remaining cache weapons,” he said.

Remontoire dignified the remark with a nod. “You guess our desires well.”

“Why do you want them?” John Brannigan asked.

“Our forecasts show that we will need them if we are to ere-ate a useful diversion. There is, necessarily, an element of uncertainty. Not all the weapons have known properties. But we can make some useful guesses.”

“We will be running from the machines as well,” Scorpio said. “Who’s to say we won’t need the weapons ourselves?”

“No one,” Remontoire replied. As always he was unflappable, like an adult suggesting parlour games for children. “You may very well need them. But you will be running from the wolves, not already engaged with them. If you are sensible, you will avoid further encounters for as long as possible.”

“You said we might still have wolves on our tail,” Antoinette reminded him. “What do we do about them? Ask them nicely to go away?”

Remontoire again tapped the data recording he had placed on the table. “This will show you how to construct a hypo-metric weapon system. Our forecasts indicate that three of these devices will be sufficient to disperse a small wolf pursuit element.”

“And if your forecasts turn out to be wrong?” Scorpio asked.

“You will have other resources.”

“Not good enough,” the pig said. “Those cache weapons were the whole reason we went all the way out to the Resurgam system in the first place. They’re what got us into this steaming pile of shit. And now you’re saying we should just give them up?”

“I am still your ally,” Remontoire said. “I am merely proposing that the weapons be reassigned to their point of maximum usefulness.”

“I don’t get this,” Antoinette said, nodding at the data sliver. “You have the means to make stuff we can’t even dream of yet, and you still want those mouldy old cache weapons?”

“We cannot underestimate the cache weapons,” Remontoire said. “They were a gift from the future. Until they have been exhaustively tested, we cannot assume that they are inferior to anything Aura has given us. You must agree with this reasoning as well.”

“Guy’s got a point, I suppose,” Antoinette said.

John Brannigan’s projected form moved with a hiss of locomotive systems. It must have been Scorpio’s imagination, but he thought he smelt lubricant. The Captain spoke again in his tinny voice. “He may well have a point, but Aura’s capabilities are equally untested. We have at least deployed a number of cache weapons and found them functional. I cannot sanction handing the rest of them over.”

“Then we’ll have to arrive at a compromise position,” Remontoire said.

The Captain looked at him, his grille-mouthed face expressionless. “I’m all ears,” he said.

“Our forecasts show a reduced but still statistically significant chance of success with only a subset of the available cache weapons.”

“So you get some of ‘em, but not all of ’em, right?” Antoinette asked.

Remontoire dipped his head once. “Yes, but don’t assume that this position is arrived at lightly. With a reduced range of cache weapons at our disposal, it may not be possible to prevent a larger pursuit element coming after you.”

“Yeah,” Antoinette said, “but then we’ll have more to throw at them, right?”

“Correct,” Remontoire said, “but don’t underestimate the risk of failure.”

“We’ll take that risk,” Scorpio said.

“Wait,” Khouri said. She trembled, one hand steadying the incubator on her lap, the other gripping the wooden table with her fingernails. “Wait. I… Aura…” Her eyes became all whites, the muscles in her neck pulling taut. “No,” she said. “No. Definitely no.”

“No what?” Scorpio asked.

“No. No no no. Do what Remontoire says. Give all the weapons. Will make a difference. Trust him.” Her fingernails gouged raw white trails into the wood.

Vasko leant forwards and spoke for the first time during the meeting. “Aura might be right,” he said.

“I am right,” Khouri said.

“We should listen to her,” Vasko said. “She seems pretty clear on this.”

“How would she know?” Scorpio said. “She knows some stuff, I’ll buy that. But no one said anything about her seeing the future.”

The seniors nodded as one.

“I’m with Scorp on this one,” Antoinette said. “We can’t give Rem all those weapons. We’ve got to keep some back for ourselves. What if we can’t get the manufactories to work? What if the stuff they make doesn’t work either?”

“They will work,” Remontoire said, still utterly calm and relaxed, even though vast destinies hung in the balance.

Scorpio shook his head. “Not good enough. We’ll give you some of the cache weapons, but not all of them.”

“Fine,” said Remontoire, “as long as we’re agreed.”

“Scorpio…” Vasko said.

The pig had had enough. This was his colony, his ship, his crisis. He reached up and ripped away the goggles, breaking them in the process. “It’s decided,” he snapped.

Remontoire spread his fingers wide. “We’ll make the arrangements, then. Cargo tugs will be sent to assist in the transfer of the weapons. Another shuttle will arrive with the new manufactories and some prefabricated items. Conjoiners will arrive to help with the installation of the hypometric weapons and the other new technologies. Is it necessary to airlift any remaining personnel from the surface?”

“Yes,” Antoinette said.

“A major evacuation is out of the question,” Remontoire said. “We can open safe passage to and from the surface on one, possibly two further occasions—enough for a couple of shuttle flights, but no more than that.”

“That’ll do,” Antoinette said.

“What about the rest of them?” asked one of the seniors.

“They had their chance,” Scorpio said.

Remontoire smiled primly, as if someone had committed a faux pas in polite company. “They aren’t necessarily in immediate peril,” he said. “If the inhibitors wished to destroy Ararat’s biosphere, they could have done so already.”

“But they’ll be prisoners down there,” Antoinette said. “The wolves won’t ever let them leave.”

“But they will still be alive,” Remontoire said. “And we may stand a chance of reducing the wolf presence around Ararat. Without access to the full complement of cache weapons, however, that cannot be guaranteed.”

“Could you guarantee it if you had all the weapons?” Scorpio asked.

After a moment’s consideration Remontoire shook his head. “No,” he said. “No guarantees, not even then.”

Scorpio looked around at the assembled delegates, realising for the first time that he was the only pig amongst them. Where the Captain had been sitting only a vacant space now remained, a focus towards which everyone else’s attention was being subtly attracted. The Captain was still there, Scorpio thought. He was still there, still listening. He even thought he could still smell the lubricant.

“Then I’m not going to lose any sleep over it,” Scorpio said.

Antoinette came to see Scorpio after the meeting. He had taken the elevator back upship, to assist with the ongoing efforts to process the evacuees. There were people everywhere, huddled into filthy, dank, winding corridors as far as the eye could see.

He walked along one of these corridors, absorbing the frightened faces, fielding questions when he was able to, but saying nothing about the wider plans for the ship and its passengers. He told them only that they would be taken care of, that some of them would be frozen, but that every effort would be taken to make the process as painless and safe as possible. He believed it, too, for a while. But then it dawned on him, after navigating one corridor, that he had seen only a few hundred evacuees out of the thousands supposedly aboard.

He met Antoinette in a junction, where Security Arm militia were directing people to functioning elevators that would take them to different processing centres much further down the ship.

“It’s going to be all right, Scorp,” she said.

“Am I that easy to read?”

“You look worried, as if you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

“Funny, but that’s more or less how I feel.”

“You’ll hack it. Do you remember how it was with Clavain, when we were in the Mademoiselle’s Chateau?”

“That was a while back.”

“Well, I remember even if you don’t. He looked just the way you look now, Scorp, as if his whole life had been a sequence of errors, culminating in that one moment of absolute failure. He nearly lost it then. But he didn’t. He kept it together. And it worked out. In the end, that sequence of errors turned out to be exactly the right set of choices.”

He smiled. “Thanks for the pep talk, Antoinette.”

“I just thought you should know. Things are getting complicated, Scorp, and I know you sometimes don’t think that’s exactly your ideal milieu, if you get my drift. But you’re wrong. Your kind of leadership is just what we need now: blunt and to the point. You’re not a politician, Scorp. Thank God for that. Clavain would have agreed, you know.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. I’m just asking you not to have a crisis on us. Not now.”

“I’ll try not to.”

She sighed and punched him playfully on the arm. “I just wanted you to know that before I leave.”

“Leave?”

“I’ve made my mind up: I’m going back down to Ararat on one of Remontoire’s shuttles. Xavier’s down there.”

“That’ll be risky,” he warned. “Why not just let Remontoire bring Xavier back up here? He’s already agreed to bring Orca back from Ararat. I hate to be blunt—sorry—but at least that way we’d only lose one of you if the wolves take out the shuttle.”

“Because I’m not coming back,” she said. “I’m going down to Ararat and I’m staying there.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. “But you made it out,” he said.

“No, Scorp, I came up with the Infinity because I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. But my responsibilities are down there, with the thousands we’ll be leaving behind. Oh, they don’t really need me, I suppose, but they definitely need Xavier. He’s about the only one who knows how to fix anything when it goes wrong.“

“I’m sure you’ll make yourself useful,” Scorpio said, smiling.

“Well, if they let me fly something now and then, I guess I won’t go totally insane.”

“We could still use you up here. I could use an ally any time of the day.”

“You’ve got allies, Scorp; you just don’t know it yet.”

“You’re doing a brave thing,” he said.

“It’s not such a dreadful place,” she replied. “Don’t make me out to be too much of a martyr. I never really minded Ararat. I liked the sunsets. I guess I’ve even developed a taste for seaweed tea after all these years. All I’m really doing is staying at home.”

“We’ll miss you,” he said.

She looked down. He had the feeling that she could not look at his face. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now, Scorp. Maybe you’ll take this ship to Hela, like Aura says. Maybe you’ll go somewhere else. But I’ve a feeling we won’t ever meet again. It’s a big universe out there, and the chances of our paths ever crossing again…”

“It’s a big place,” he said, “but on the other hand, I guess that also makes it big enough for a few coincidences.”

“For some people, maybe, but not for the likes of you and me, Scorp.” She looked up then, staring hard into his eyes. “I was scared of you when I met you, I don’t mind admitting that now. Scared and ignorant. But I’m glad everything happened the way it did. I’m glad I got to know you for a few years.”

“It was half my life.”

“They were good years, Scorp. I won’t forget them.” Once more she looked down. He wondered if she was looking at his small, childlike shoes. Suddenly he felt self-conscious, wishing he was larger, more human, less like a pig and more like a man. “Remontoire’s going to have that shuttle ready soon,” she said. “I’d better be going. Take care of yourself, all right? You’re a good man. A good pig.”

“I try,” Scorpio said.

She hugged him, then kissed him.

Then she was gone. He never saw her again.