Absolution Gap (26 page)

She realised, after some reflection, that she had been wrong in her initial judgement of the relationship between the quaestor and Crozet. While there did not appear to be much love lost between them, it was obvious now that both parties had been of some use to each other in the past. The mutual rudeness had been a charade, concealing an icy core of mutual respect. The quaestor was fishing for titbits, aware that Crozet might still have something he could use. Crozet, meanwhile, needed to leave with mechanical spares or other barterable goods.

Rashmika had only intended to sit in on a few of the negotiation sessions, but she quickly realised that she could, in a small way, be of practical use to Crozet. To facilitate this she sat at one end of the table, a sheet of paper and a pen before her. She was not allowed to bring the compad into the room, in case it contained voice-stress-analysis software or some other prohibited system.

Rashmika noted down observations about the items Crozet was selling, writing and sketching with the neatness she had always taken pride in. Her interest was genuine, but her presence also served another purpose.

In the first negotiation session, there had been two buyers. Later, there was sometimes a third or fourth, and the quaestor or one of his deputies would always attend as an observer. Each session would begin with one of the buyers asking Crozet what he had to offer them.

“We aren’t looking for scuttler relics,” they said the first time. “We’re simply not interested. What we want are artefacts of indigenous human origin. Things left on Hela in the last hundred years, not million-year-old rubbish. There’s a declining market for useless alien junk, what with all the rich solar systems being evacuated. Who wants to
add
to their collection, when they’re busy selling their assets to buy a single freezer slot?”

“What sort of human artefacts?”

“Useful ones. These are dark times: people don’t want art and ephemera, not unless they think it’s going to bring them luck. Mainly what they want are weapons and survival systems, things they think might give them an edge when whatever they’re running from catches up with them. Contraband Conjoiner weapons. Demarchist armour. Anything with plague-tolerance, that’s always an easy sell.”

“As a rule,” Crozet said, “I don’t do weapons.”

“Then you need to adapt to a changing market,” one of the men replied with a smirk.

“The churches moving into the arms trade? Isn’t that a tiny bit inconsistent with scripture?”

“If people want protection, who are we to deny them?”

Crozet shrugged. “Well, I’m all out of guns and ammo. If anyone’s still digging up human weapons on Hela, it isn’t me.”

“You must have something else.”

“Not a hell of a lot.” He made as if to leave at that point, as he did in every subsequent session. “Best be on my way, I think—wouldn’t want to be wasting anyone’s time, would I?”

“You’ve absolutely nothing else?”

“Nothing that you’d be interested in. Of course, I have some scuttler relics, but like you said . . .” Crozet’s voice accurately parodied the dismissive tones of the buyer. “No market for alien junk these days.”

The buyers sighed and exchanged glances; the quaestor leaned in and whispered something to them.

“You may as well show us what you have,” one of the buyers said, reluctantly, “but don’t raise your hopes. More than likely we won’t be interested. In fact, you can more or less guarantee it.”

But this was a game and Crozet knew he had to abide by its rules, no matter how pointless or childish they were. He reached under his chair and emerged with something wrapped in protective film, like a small mummified animal.

The buyers’ faces wrinkled in distaste.

He placed the package on the table and unwrapped it solemnly, taking a maddening time to remove all the layers. All the while he maintained a spiel about the extreme rarity of the object, how it had been excavated under exceptional circumstances, weaving a dubious human-interest story into the vague chain of provenance.

“Get on with it, Crozet.”

“Just setting the scene,” he said.

Inevitably he came to the final layer of wrapping. He spread this layer wide on the table, revealing the scuttler relic cocooned within.

Rashmika had seen this one before: it was one of the objects she had used to buy her passage aboard the icejammer.

They were never very much to look at. Rashmika had seen thousands of relics unearthed from the Vigrid digs, had even been allowed to examine them before they passed into the hands of the trading families, but in all that time she had never seen anything that made her gasp in admiration or delight. For while the relics were undoubtedly artificial, they were in general fashioned from dull, tarnished metals or grubby unglazed ceramics. There was seldom any hint of surface ornamentation—no trace of paint, plating or inscription. Once in a thousand finds they uncovered something with a string of symbols on it, and there were even researchers who believed they understood what some of those symbols meant. But most scuttler relics were blank, dull, crude-looking. They resembled the dug-up leftovers of an inept bronze-age culture rather than the gleaming products of a starfaring civilisation—one that had certainly not evolved in the 107 Piscium system.

Yet for much of the last century there
had
been a market for the relics. Partly this was because none of the other extinct cultures—the Amarantin, for instance—had left behind a comparable haul of day-to-day objects. Those cultures had been so thoroughly exterminated that almost nothing had survived, and the objects that had were so valuable that they remained in the care of large scientific organisations like the Sylveste Institute. Only the scuttlers had left behind enough objects to permit private collectors to acquire artefacts of genuine alien origin. It didn’t matter that they were small and unglamorous: they were still very old, and still very alien. And they were still tainted by the tragedy of extinction.

No two relics were ever quite alike, either. Scuttler furniture, even scuttler dwellings, exhibited the same horror of similarity as their makers. What had begun with their anatomies had now spread into their material environment. They had mass production, but it was a necessary end-stage of that process that every object be worked on by a scuttler artisan, until it was unique.

The churches controlled the sale of these relics to the outside universe. But the churches themselves had always been uncomfortable with the deeper question of what the scuttlers represented, or how they slotted into the mystery of the Quaiche miracle. The churches needed to keep up the drip-feed supply of relics so that they had something to offer the Ultra traders who visited the system. But at the same time there was always the fear that the next scuttler relic to be unearthed would be the one that threw a spanner into the midst of Quaicheist doctrine.

It was now the view of almost all the churches that the Haldoran vanishings were a message from God, a countdown to some event of apocalyptic finality. But what if the scuttlers had also observed the vanishings? It was difficult enough to decipher their symbols at the best of times, and so far nothing had been found that appeared to relate directly to the Haldora phenomenon. But there were a lot of relics still under Hela’s ice, and even those that had been unearthed to date had never been subjected to rigorous scientific study. The church-sponsored archaeologists were the only ones who had any kind of overview of the entire haul of relics, and they were under intense pressure to ignore any evidence that conflicted with Quaicheist scripture. That was why Rashmika wrote them so many letters, and why their infrequent replies were always so evasive. She wanted an argument; she wanted to question the entire accepted view of the scuttlers. They wanted her to go away.

Thus it was that the buyers in the caravan affected an air of tolerant disapproval while Crozet turned on the hard sell.

“It’s a plate cleaner,” Crozet said, turning a grey, cleft-tipped, bonelike object this way and that. “They used it to scrape dead organic matter out of the gaps between their carapacial sections. We think they did it communally, the way monkeys pick ticks out of each other’s hair. Must have been very relaxing for them.”

“Filthy creatures.”

“Monkeys or scuttlers?”

“Both.”

“I wouldn’t be too harsh, mate. Scuttlers are paying your wages.”

“We’ll give you fifty ecumenical credit units for it, Crozet. No more.”

“Fifty ecus? Now you’re taking the piss.”

“It’s a revolting object serving a revolting function. Fifty ecus is . . . quite excessively generous.”

Crozet looked at Rashmika. It was only a glance, but she was ready for it when it came. The system they had arranged was very simple: if the man was telling the truth—if this really was the best offer he was prepared to make—then she would push the sheet of paper a fraction closer to the middle of the table. Otherwise, she would pull it towards her by the same tiny distance. If the man’s reaction was ambiguous, she did nothing. This did not happen very often.

Crozet always took her judgement seriously. If the offer on the table was as good as it was going to get, he did not waste his energies trying to talk them up. On the other hand, if there was some leeway, he haggled the hell out of them.

In that first negotiating session, the buyer was lying. After a rapid-fire back and forth of offer and counter-offer, they reached an agreement.

“Your tenacity does you credit,” the buyer said with visible bad grace, before writing him out a chit for seventy ecus that was only redeemable within the caravan itself.

Crozet folded it neatly and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. “Pleasure doing business, mate.”

He had other scuttler plate cleaners, as well as several things that might have served some entirely different function. Now and then he came back to the negotiation sessions with something that Linxe or Culver had to help him carry. It might be an item of furniture, or some kind of heavy-duty domestic tool. Scuttler weapons were rare, appearing to have had only ceremonial value, but they sold the best of all. Once, he sold them what appeared to be a kind of scuttler toilet seat. He only got thirty-five ecus for that: barely enough, Crozet said, for a single servo-motor.

But Rashmika tried not to feel too sorry for him. If Crozet wanted the best pickings from the digs, the kinds of relics that picked up three- or four-figure payments, then he needed to rethink his attitude towards the rest of the Vigrid communities. The truth of the matter was that he liked scabbing around on the perimeter.

It went on like that for two days. On the third, the buyers suddenly demanded that Crozet be alone during the negotiations. Rashmika had no idea if they had guessed her secret. There was, as far as she was aware, no law against being an adept judge of whether people were lying or not. Perhaps they had just taken a dislike to her, as people often did when they sensed her percipience.

Rashmika was fine with that. She had helped Crozet out, paid him back a little more in addition to the scuttler relics for the help he had given her. He had, after all, taken an extra, unforeseen risk when he found out about the constabulary pursuing her.

No: she had nothing bad on her conscience.

 

Ararat, 2675

 

Khouri protested as they took her away from the capsule into the waiting infirmary. “I don’t need an examination,” she said. “I just need a boat, some weapons, an incubator and someone good with a knife.”

“Oh, I’m good with a knife,” Clavain said.

“Please take me seriously. You trusted Ilia, didn’t you?”

“We came to an arrangement. Mutual trust never had much to do with it.”

“You respected her judgement, though?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, she trusted me. Isn’t that good enough for you? I’m not making excessive demands here, Clavain. I’m not asking for the world.”

“We’ll consider your requests in good time,” he said, “but not before we’ve had you examined.”

“There isn’t
time
,” she said, but from her tone of voice it was clear she knew she had already lost the argument.

Within the infirmary, Dr. Valensin waited with two aged medical servitors from the central machine pool. The swan-necked robots were a drab institutional green, riding on hissing air-cushion pedestals. Many specialised arms emerged from their slender chess-piece bodies. The physician would be keeping a careful eye on the machines while they did their work: left alone, their creaking circuits had a nasty habit of absent-mindedly switching into autopsy mode.

“I don’t like robots,” Khouri said, eyeing the servitors with evident disquiet.

“That’s one thing we agree on,” Clavain said, turning to Scorpio and lowering his voice. “Scorp, we’ll need to talk to the other seniors about the best course of action as soon as we have Valensin’s report. My guess is she’ll need some rest before she goes anywhere. But for now I suggest we keep as tight a lid on this as possible.”

“Do you think she’s telling the truth?” Scorpio asked. “All that stuff about Skade and her baby?”

Clavain studied the woman as Valensin helped her on to the examination couch. “I have a horrible feeling she might be.”

 

After the examination, Khouri fell into a state of deep and apparently dreamless sleep. She awakened only once, near dawn, when she summoned one of Valensin’s aides and again demanded the means to rescue her daughter. After that they administered more relaxant and she fell asleep for another four or five hours. Now and then she thrashed wildly and uttered fragments of speech. Whatever she was trying to say always sounded urgent, but the meaning never quite cohered. She was not properly awake and cognizant until the middle of the morning.

By the time Dr. Valensin deemed that Khouri was ready for visitors, the latest storm had broken. The sky above the compound was a bleak powder-blue, marbled here and there by strands of feathered cirrus. Out to sea, the
Nostalgia for Infinity
gleamed shades of grey, like something freshly chiselled from dark rock.