Absolution Gap rs-4 Page 5

  Pattern Jugglers had been encountered on many worlds that conformed to the same aquatic template as Ararat. After years of study, there was still no agreement as to whether or not the aliens were intelligent in their own right. But all the same it was clear that they prized intelligence themselves, preserving it with the loving devotion of curators.

  Now and then, when a person swam in the seas of a Juggler planet, the microscopic organisms entered the swimmer’s nervous system. It was a kinder process than the neural invasion that had taken place aboard Galiana’s ship. The Juggler organisms only wanted to record, and when they had unravelled the swimmer’s neural patterns they would retreat. The mind of the swimmer would have been captured by the sea, but the swimmer was almost always free to return to land. Usually, they felt no change at all. Rarely, they would turn out to have been given a subtle gift, a tweak to their neurological architecture that permitted superhuman cognition or insight. Mostly it lasted for only a few hours, but very infrequently it appeared permanent.

  There was no way to tell if Galiana had gained any gifts after she had swum in the ocean of this world, but her mind had certainly been captured. It was there now, frozen beneath the waves, waiting to be imprinted on the consciousness of another swimmer.

  Clavain had guessed this, but he had not been the first to attempt communion with Galiana. That honour had fallen to Felka. For twenty years she had swum, immersed in the memories and glacial consciousness of her mother. In all that time Clavain had held back from swimming himself, fearing perhaps that when he encountered the imprint of Galiana he would find it in some sense wrong, untrue to his memory of what she had been. His doubts had ebbed over the years, but he had still never made the final commitment of swimming. Nonetheless, Felka—who had always craved the complexity of experience that the ocean offered—had swum regularly, and she had reported back her experiences to Clavain. Through his daughter he had again achieved some connection with Galiana, and for the time being, until he summoned the courage to swim himself, that had been enough.

  But two years ago the sea had taken Felka, and she had not returned.

  Scorpio thought about that now, choosing his next words with great care. “Nevil, I understand this is difficult for you, but you must also understand that this thing, whatever it is, could be a very serious matter for the settlement.”

  “I get that, Scorp.”

  “But you think the sea matters more. Is that it?”

  “I think none of us really has a clue what actually matters.”

  “Maybe we don’t. Me, I don’t really care about the bigger picture. It’s never been my strong point.”

  “Right now, Scorp, the bigger picture is all we have.”

  “So you think there are millions—billions—of people out there who are going to die? People we’ve never met, people we’ve never come within a light-year of in our lives?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Well, sorry, but that isn’t the way my head works. I just can’t process that kind of threat. I don’t do mass extinction. I’m a lot more locally focused than that. And right now I have a local problem.”

  “You think so?”

  “I have a hundred and seventy thousand people here that need worrying about. That’s a number I can just about get my head around. And when something drops out of the sky without warning, it keeps me from sleeping.”

  “But you didn’t actually see anything drop out of the sky, did you?” Clavain did not wait for Scorpio’s answer. “And yet we have the immediate volume of space around Ararat covered with every passive sensor in our arsenal. How did we miss a reentry capsule, let alone the ship that must have dropped it?”

  “I don’t know,” Scorpio said. He couldn’t tell if he was losing the argument, or doing well just to be engaging Clavain in discussion about something concrete, something other than lost souls and the spectre of mass extinction. “But whatever it is must have come down recently. It’s not like any of die other artefacts we’ve pulled from the ocean. They were all half-dissolved, even the ones that must have been sitting on the seabed, where the organisms aren’t so thick. This thing didn’t look as though it had been under for more than a few days.”

  Clavain turned away from the shore, and Scorpio took this as a welcome sign. The old Conjoiner moved with stiff, economical footsteps, never looking down, but navigating his way between pools and obstacles with practised ease.

  They were returning to the tent.

  “I watch the skies a lot, Scorp,” Clavain said. “At night, when there aren’t any clouds. Lately I’ve been seeing things up there. Flashes. Hints of things moving. Glimpses of something bigger, as if the curtain’s just been pulled back for an instant. I’m guessing you think that makes me mad, don’t you?”

  Scorpio didn’t know what he thought. “Alone out here, anyone would see things,” he said.

  “But it wasn’t cloudy last night,” Clavain said, “or the night before, and I watched the sky on both occasions. I didn’t see anything. Certainly no indication of any ships orbiting us.”

  “We haven’t seen anything either.”

  “How about radio transmissions? Laser squirts?”

  “Not a peep. And you’re right: it doesn’t make very much sense. But like it or not, there’s still a capsule, and it isn’t going away. I want you to come and see it for yourself.”

  Clavain shoved hair from his eyes. The lines and wrinkles in his face had become shadowed crevasses and gorges, like the contours of an improbably weathered landscape. Scorpio thought that he had aged ten or twenty years in the six months he had been on this island.

  “You said something about there being someone inside it.”

  While they had been talking, the cloud cover had begun to break up in swathes. The sky beyond had the pale, crazed blue of a jackdaw’s eye.

  “It’s still a secret,” Scorpio said. “Only a few of us know that the thing’s been found at all. That’s why I came here by boat. A shuttle would have been easier, but it wouldn’t have been low-key. If people find out we’ve brought you back they’ll think there’s a crisis coming. Besides which, it isn’t supposed to be this easy to bring you back. They still think you’re somewhere halfway around the world.”

  “You insisted on that lie?”

  “What do you think would have been more reassuring? To let the people think you’d gone on an expedition—a potentially hazardous one, admittedly—or to tell them you’d gone away to sit on an island and toy with the idea of committing suicide?”

  “They’ve been through worse. They could have taken it.”

  “It’s what they’ve been through that made me think they could do without the truth,” Scorpio said.

  “Anyway, it isn’t suicide.” He stopped and looked back out to sea. “I know she’s there, with her mother. I can feel it, Scorpio. Don’t ask me how or why, but I know she’s still here. I read about this sort of thing happening on other Juggler worlds, you know. Now and then they take swimmers, dismantle their bodies completely and incorporate them into the organic matrix of the sea. No one knows why. But swimmers who enter the oceans afterwards say that sometimes they feel the presence of the ones who vanished. It’s a much stronger impression than the usual stored memories and personalities. They say they experience something close to dialogue.”

  Scorpio held back a sigh. He had listened to exactly the same speech before he had taken Clavain out to this island six months ago. Clearly the period of isolation had done nothing to lessen Clavain’s conviction that Felka had not simply drowned.

  “So hop in and find out for yourself,” he said.

  “I would, but I’m scared.”

  “That the ocean might take you as well?”

  “No.” Clavain turned to face Scorpio. He looked less surprised than affronted. “No, of course not. That doesn’t scare me at all. What does is the idea that it might leave me behind.”

  Hela, 107 Piscium, 2727

  Rashmika Els h
ad spent much of her childhood being told not to look quite so serious. That was what they would have said if they could have seen her now: perched on her bed in the half-light, selecting the very few personal effects she could afford to carry on her mission. And she would have given them precisely the same look of affront she always mustered on those occasions. Except this time she would have known with a deeper conviction than usual that she was right and they were wrong. Because even though she was still only seventeen, she knew that she had every right to feel this serious, this frightened.

  She had filled a small bag with three or four days’ worth of clothes, even though she expected her journey to take a lot longer than that. She had added a bundle of toiletries, carefully removed from the family bathroom without her parents noticing, and some dried-up biscuits and a small wedge of goat’s cheese, just in case there was nothing to eat (or, perhaps, nothing she would actually wish to eat) aboard Crozet’s icejammer. She had packed a bottle of purified water because she had heard that the water nearer the Way sometimes contained things that made you ill. The bottle would not last her very long, but it at least made her feel as if she was thinking ahead. And then there was a small plastic-wrapped bundle containing three tiny scuttler relics that she had stolen from the digs.

  After all that, there was not much space left in the bag for anything else. It was already heavier than she had expected. She looked at the sorry little collection of items still spread on the bed before her, knowing that she only had room for one of them. What should she take?

  There was a map of Hela, peeled from her bedroom wall, with the sinuous, equator-hugging trail of the Way marked in faded red ink. It wasn’t very accurate, but she had no better map in her compad. Did it matter, though? She had no means of reaching the Way without relying on other people to get her there, and if they didn’t know the direction, her map was unlikely to make very much difference.

  She pushed the map aside.

  There was a thick blue book, its edges protected with gold metal. The book contained her handwritten notes on the scuttlers, kept assiduously over the last eight years. She had started the book at the age of nine, when—in a perfect fit of precocity—she had first decided that she wanted to be a scuttler scholar. They had laughed at her, of course—in a kindly, indulgent way, naturally—but that had only made her more determined to continue with it.

  Rashmika knew she did not have time to waste, but she could not stop herself from flicking through the book, the rough whisper of page against page harsh in the silence. In the rare moments when she saw it afresh, as if through someone else’s eyes, the book struck her as a thing of beauty. At the beginning, her handwriting was large and neat and childish. She used inks of many colours and underlined things with scrupulous care. Some of the inks had faded or blotted, and there were smears and stains where she had marked the paper, but that sense of damaged antiquity only added to the medieval allure of the artefact. She had made drawings, copying them from other sources. The first few were crude and childlike, but within a few pages her figures had the precision and confidence of Victorian naturalists’ sketches. They were painstakingly crosshatched and annotated, with the text crawling around them. There were drawings of scuttler artefacts, of course, with notes on function and origin, but there were also many pictures of the scuttlers themselves, their anatomies and postures reconstructed from the fossil evidence.

  She flicked on through the book, through years of her life. The text grew smaller, more difficult to read. The coloured inks were used increasingly sparingly until, in the last few chapters, the writing and figures were worked in almost unrelieved black. The same neatness was there, the same methodical care applied to both text and figurework, but now it appeared to be the work of a scholar rather than an enthusiastic, gifted child. The notes and drawings were no longer recycled from other sources, but were now part of an argument she herself was advancing, independent of external thinking. The difference between the start and the end of the written parts of the book was shockingly obvious to Rashmika, a reminder of the distance she had travelled. There had been many times when she had been so embarrassed by her earlier efforts that she had wanted to discard the book and start another. But paper was expensive on Hela, and the book had been a gift from Harbin.

  She fingered the unmarked pages. Her argument was not yet completed, but she could already see the trajectory it would take. She could almost see the words and figures on the pages, spectrally faint but needing only time and concentration to bring them into sharp focus. On a journey as long as the one she planned to take, there would surely be many opportunities to work on her book.

  But she couldn’t take it. The book meant too much to her, and she could not bear the thought of losing it or having it stolen. At least if she left it here it would be safe until her return. She could still take notes while she was away, after all, refining her argument, ensuring that the edifice came together with no obvious flaws or weaknesses. The book would be all the stronger for it.

  Rashmika clasped it shut, pushed it aside.

  That left two things. One was her compad, the other a scuffed and dirty toy. The compad did not even belong to her, really; it was the family’s, and she only had it on extended loan while no one else needed it. But as no one had asked for it for months, it was unlikely to be missed during her absence. In its memory were many items relevant to her study of the scuttlers, sourced from other electronic archives. There were images and movies she had made herself, down in the digs. There were spoken testimonies from miners who had found things that did not quite accord with the standard theory of the scuttler extinction, but whose reports had been suppressed by the clerical authorities. There were texts from older scholars. There were maps and linguistics resources, and much that would guide her when she reached the Way.

  She picked up the toy. It was a soft, pink thing, ragged and faintly pungent. She had had it since she was eight or nine, had picked it herself from the stall of an itinerant toymaker. She supposed it must have been bright and clean then, but she had no memory of the toy ever being anything other than well loved, grubby with affection. Looking at it now with the rational detachment of a seventeen-year-old, she had no idea what kind of creature the toy had ever been meant to represent. All she knew was that from the moment she saw it on the stall she had decided it was a pig. It didn’t matter that no one on Hela had ever seen a living pig.

  “You can’t come with me either,” she whispered.

  She picked up the toy and placed it atop the book, squeezing it down until it sat like a sentry. It wasn’t that she did not want it to come with her. She knew it was just a toy, but she also knew that there would be days ahead when she would feel terribly homesick, anxious for any connection to the safe environment of the village. But the compad was more useful, and this was not a time for sentiment. She pushed the dark slab into the bag, drew tight the bag’s vacuum seal and quietly left her room.

  Rashmika had been fourteen when the caravans had last come within range of her village. She had been studying then and had not been allowed to go out to see the meeting. The time before that, she had been nine: she had seen the caravans then, but only briefly and only from a distance. What she now remembered of that spectacle was inevitably coloured by what had happened to her brother. She had replayed those events so many times that it was quite impossible to separate reliable memory from imagined detail.

  Eight years ago, she thought: a tenth of a human life, by the grim new reckoning. A tenth of a life was not to be underestimated, even if eight years would once have been a twentieth or a thirtieth of what one could expect. But at the same time it felt vastly more than that. It was half of her own life, after all. The wait until she could next see the caravans had felt epochal. She really had been a little girl the last time she had seen them: a little girl from the Vigrid badlands with a reputation, however strange, for always telling the truth.

  But now her chance had come again. It was near the hundredth day of the
hundred and twenty-second circumnavigation that one of the caravans had taken an unexpected detour east of Hauk Crossing. The procession had veered north into the Gaudi Flats before linking up with a second caravan that happened to be heading south towards Glum Junction. This did not happen very often: it was the first time in nearly three revolutions that the caravans had come within a day’s travel of the villages on the southern slopes of the Yigrid badlands. There was, naturally, a great deal of excitement. There were parties and feasts, jubilation committees and invitations to secret drinking dens. There were romances and affairs, dangerous flirtations and secret liaisons. Nine months from now there would arrive a clutch of wailing new caravan babies.

  Compared with the general austerity of life on Hela and the particular hardships of the badlands, it was a period of measured, tentative hope. It was one of those rare times when—albeit within tightly prescribed parameters—personal circumstances could change. The more sober-minded villagers did not allow themselves to show any visible signs of excitement, but privately they could not resist wondering if this was their turn for a change of fortune. They made elaborate excuses to allow themselves to travel out to the rendezvous point: excuses that had nothing to do with personal gain, but everything to do with the communal prosperity of the villages. And so, over a period of nearly three weeks, the villages sent out little caravans of their own, crossing the treacherous scabbed ground to rendezvous with the larger processions.

  Rashmika had planned to leave her home at dawn, while her parents were still sleeping. She had not lied to them about her departure, but only because it had never been necessary. What the adults and the other villagers did not understand was that she was as capable of lying as any of them. More than that, she could lie with great conviction. The only reason why she had spent most of her childhood not lying was because until very recently she had failed to see the point in it.