Absolution Gap (57 page)

“How would you take it if you had to murder your best friend in cold blood? And slowly, with an audience?”

“I don’t think I’d take it too well. But then I’m not Scorpio.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s led us competently while Clavain was away, Vasko, and I know that you think well of him, but that doesn’t make him an angel. You already said that the pig and Clavain went all the way back to Chasm City.”

Vasko watched lights slide across the zenith, trailing annular rings like the pattern he sometimes saw when he pressed his fingertips against his own closed eyelids. “Yes,” he said, grudgingly.

“Well, what do you think Scorpio was doing in Chasm City in the first place? It wasn’t feeding the needy and the poor. He was a criminal, a murderer.”

“He broke the law in a time when the law was brutal and inhuman,” Vasko said. “That’s not quite the same thing, is it?”

“So there was a war on. I’ve studied the same history books as you have. Yes, the emergency rule verged on the Draconian, but does that excuse murder? We’re not just talking about self-preservation or self-interest here. Scorpio killed for sport.”

“He was enslaved and tortured by humans,” Vasko said. “And humans made him what he is: a genetic dead end.”

“So that lets him off the hook?”

“I don’t quite see where you’re going with this, Urton.”

“All I’m saying is, Scorpio isn’t the thin-skinned individual you like to think. Yes, I’m sure he’s upset by what he did to Clavain . . .”

“What he was
made
to do,” Vasko corrected.

“Whatever. The point is the same: he’ll get over it, just like he got over every other atrocity he perpetrated.” She lifted the peak of her cap, scrutinising him, her eyes flicking from point to point as if alert for any betraying facial tics. “You believe that, don’t you?”

“Right now I’m not sure.”

“You have to believe it, Vasko.” He noticed that she had stopped calling him Malinin. “Because the alternative is to doubt his fitness for leadership. You wouldn’t go that far, would you?”

“No, of course not. I’ve got total faith in his leadership. Ask anyone here tonight and you’ll get the same answer. And guess what? We’re all right.”

“Of course we are.”

“What about you, Urton? Do you doubt him?”

“Not in the slightest,” she said. “Frankly, I doubt that he’ll have lost much sleep at all over anything that happened today.”

“That sounds incredibly callous.”

“I want it to be callous. I want
him
to be callous. That’s the point. It’s exactly what we want—what we need—in a leader now. Don’t you agree?”

“I don’t know,” he said, feeling a huge weariness begin to slide over him. “All I know is that I didn’t come out here tonight to talk about what happened today. I came out here to clear my head and try to forget some of it.”

“So did I,” Urton said. Her voice had softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rake over what happened. I suppose talking about it is my way of coping with it. It was pretty harrowing for all of us.”

“Yes, it was. Are you done now?” He felt his temper rising, a scarlet tide lapping against the defences of civility. “For most of yesterday and today you looked as if you couldn’t stand to be in the same hemisphere as me, let alone the same room. Why the sudden change of heart?”

“Because I regret the way I acted,” she said.

“If you don’t mind my saying, it’s a little late in the day for second thoughts.”

“It’s the way I cope, Vasko. Cut me some slack, all right? There was nothing personal about it.”

“Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”

“We were going into a dangerous situation. We were all trained for it. We all knew each other, and we all knew we could count on each other. And then you show up at the last minute, someone I don’t know, yet whom I’m suddenly expected to trust with my life. I can name a dozen SA officers who could have taken your position in that boat, any one of whom I’d have felt happier about covering my back.”

Vasko saw that she was leading him towards the shore, where the crowd thinned out. The dark shapes of boats blocked the gloom between land and water. Some were moored ready for departure, some were aground.

“Scorpio chose to include me in the mission,” Vasko said. “Once that decision was taken, you should have had the guts to live with it. Or didn’t you trust his judgement?”

“One day you’ll be in my shoes, Vasko, and you won’t like it any more than I did. Come and give me a lecture about trusting judgement then, and see how convincing it sounds.” Urton paused, watching the sky as a thin scarlet line transacted it from horizon to horizon. She had evaded his question. “This is all coming out wrong. I didn’t pick you out of the crowd to start another fight. I wanted to say I was sorry. I also wanted you to understand why I’d acted the way I did.”

He kept the lid on his anger. “All right.”

“And I admit I was wrong.”

“You weren’t to know what was about to happen,” he said.

She shrugged and sighed. “No, I don’t suppose I was. No matter what they say, he walked the walk, didn’t he? When it came to putting his life on the line, he went and did it.”

They had reached the line of boats. Most of those still left on land were wrecks: their hulls had gaping holes in them near the waterline, where they had been consumed by seaborne organisms. Sooner or later they would have been hauled away to the smelting plant, to be remade into new craft. The metal-workers were fastidious about reusing every possible scrap of recyclable metal. But the amount recovered would never have been equal to that in the original boats.

“Look,” Urton said, pointing across the bay.

Vasko nodded. “I know. They’ve already encircled the base of the ship.”

“That’s not what I mean. Look a bit higher, Hawkeye. Can you see them?”

“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Yes. My God. They’ll never make it.”

They were tiny sparks of light around the base of the ship, slightly higher than the bobbing ring of boats Vasko had already noticed. He estimated that they could not have climbed more than a few dozen metres above the sea. There were thousands of metres of the ship above them.

“How are they climbing?” Vasko said.

“Hand over hand, I guess. You’ve seen what that thing looks like close-up, haven’t you? It’s like a crumbling cliff wall, full of handholds and ledges. It’s probably not that difficult.”

“But the nearest way in must be hundreds of metres above the sea, maybe more. When the planes come and go they always land near the top.” Again he said, “They’ll never make it. They’re insane.”

“They’re not insane,” Urton said. “They’re just scared. Really, really scared. The question is, should we be joining them?”

Vasko said nothing. He was watching one of the tiny sparks of light fall back towards the sea.

They stood and watched the spectacle for many minutes. Nobody else appeared to fall, but the other climbers continued their relentless slow ascent undaunted by the failure that many of them had doubtless witnessed. Around the sheer footslopes, where the boats must have been rocking and crashing against the hull, new climbers were beginning their ascent. Boats were returning from the ship, scudding slowly back across the bay, but progress was slow and tension was rising amongst those waiting on the shoreline. The Security Arm officials were increasingly outnumbered by the angry and frightened people who were waiting for passage to the ship. Vasko saw one of the SA men speaking urgently into his wrist communicator, obviously calling for assistance. He had almost finished talking when someone shoved him to the ground.

“We should do something,” Vasko said.

“We’re off duty, and two of us aren’t enough to make a difference. They’ll have to think of something different. It’s not as if they’re going to be able to contain this for much longer. I don’t think I want to be here any more.” She meant the shoreline. “I checked the reports before I came out. Things aren’t so bad east of the High Conch. I’m hungry and I could use a drink. Do you want to join me?”

“I don’t have much of an appetite,” Vasko said. He had actually been starting to feel hungry again until he saw the person fall into the sea. “But a drink wouldn’t go amiss. Are you sure there’ll be somewhere still open?”

“I know a few places we can try,” Urton said.

“You know the area better than me, in that case.”

“Your problem is you don’t get out enough,” she said. She pulled up the collar of her coat, then crunched down her hat. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before things turn nasty.”

 

She turned out to be right about the zone of the settlement east of the Conch. Many Arm members lodged there, so the area had always had a tradition of loyalty to the administration. Now there was a sullen, reproachful calm about the place. The streets were no busier than they usually were at this time of night, and although many premises were closed, the bar Urton had in mind was still open.

Urton led him through the main room to an alcove containing two chairs and a table poached from Central Amenities. Above the alcove a screen was tuned to the administration news service, but at the moment all it was showing was a picture of Clavain’s face. The picture had been taken only a few years earlier, but it might as well have been centuries ago. The man Vasko had known in the last couple of days had looked twice as old, twice as eroded by time and circumstance. Beneath Clavain’s face was a pair of calendar dates about five hundred years apart.

“I’ll fetch us some beers,” Urton said, not giving him a chance to argue. She had removed her coat and hat, piling them on the chair opposite his.

Vasko watched her recede into the gloom of the bar. He supposed she was a regular here. On their way to the alcove he had seen several faces he thought he half-recognised from SA training. Some of them had been smoking seaweed—the particular variety which when dried and prepared in a certain way induced mild narcotic effects. Vasko remembered the stuff from his training. It was illegal, but easier to get hold of than the black market cigarettes which were said to originate from some dwindling cache in the belly of the
Nostalgia for Infinity
.

By the time Urton returned, Vasko had removed his coat. She put the beers down in front of him. Cautiously Vasko tasted his. The stuff in the glass had an unpleasant urinal tint. Produced from another variety of seaweed, it was only beer in the very loosest sense of the word.

“I talked to Draygo,” she said, “the man who runs this place. He says the Security Arm officers on duty just went and punched holes in all the boats on the shore. No one else is being allowed to leave, and as soon as a boat returns, they impound it and arrest anyone on board.”

Vasko sipped at his beer. “Nice to see they haven’t resorted to heavy-handed tactics, then.”

“You can’t really blame them. They say three people have already drowned just crossing the bay. Another two have fallen off the ship while climbing.”

“I suppose you’re right, but it seems to me that the people should have a right to do what they like, even if it kills him.”

“They’re worried about mass panic. Sooner or later someone is bound to try swimming it, and then you might have hundreds of people following after. How many do you think would make it?”

“Let them,” Vasko said. “So what if they drown? So what if they contaminate the Jugglers? Does anyone honestly think it makes a shred of difference now?”

“We’ve maintained social order on Ararat for more than twenty years,” Urton said. “We can’t let it go to hell in a hand-cart in one night. Those people using the boats are taking irreplaceable colony property without authorisation. It’s unfair on the citizens who don’t want to flee to the ship.”

“But we’re not giving them an alternative. They’ve been told Clavain’s dead, but no one’s told them what those lights in the sky are all about. Is it any wonder they’re scared?”

“You think telling them about the war would make things any better?”

Vasko wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, where the seaweed beer had left a white rime. “I don’t know, but I’m fed up with everyone being lied to just because the administration thinks it’s in our best interests not to know all the facts. The same thing happened with Clavain when he disappeared. Scorpio and the others decided we couldn’t deal with the fact that Clavain was suicidal, so they made up some story about him going around the world. Now they don’t think the people can deal with knowing
how
he died, or what it was all for in the first place, so they’re not telling anyone anything.”

“You think Scorpio should be taking a firmer lead?”

“I respect Scorpio,” Vasko said, “but where is he now, when we need him?”

“You’re not the only one wondering that,” Urton said.

Something caught Vasko’s eye. The picture on the screen had changed. Clavain’s face was gone, replaced for a moment by the administration logo. Urton turned around in her seat, still drinking her beer.

“Something’s happening,” she said.

The logo flickered and vanished. They were looking at Scorpio, surrounded by the curved rose-pink interior of the High Conch. The pig wore his usual unofficial uniform of padded black leather, the squat dome of his head a largely neckless outgrowth of his massive barrelled torso.

“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?” Vasko asked.

“Draygo told me he’d heard that there was an announcement scheduled for around this time. But I don’t know what it’ll be about and I didn’t know Scorpio was going to show his face.”

The pig was speaking. Vasko was about to find a way to make the screen louder when Scorpio’s voice rang out loudly throughout the maze of alcoves, piped through on some general-address system.

“Your attention, please,” he said. “You all know who I am. I speak now as the acting leader of this colony. With regret, I must again report that Nevil Clavain was killed today while on a mission of maximum importance for the strategic security of Ararat. Having participated in the same operation, I can assure you that without Clavain’s bravery and self-sacrifice the current situation would be enormously more grave than is the case. As things stand, and despite Clavain’s death, the mission was successful. It is my intention to inform you of what was accomplished in that operation in due course. But first I must speak about the current disturbances in all sectors of First Camp, and the actions that the Security Arm is taking to restore social order. Please listen carefully, because all our lives depend on it. There will be no more unauthorised crossings to the
Nostalgia for Infinity
. Finite colony resources cannot be risked in this manner. All unofficial attempts to reach the ship will therefore be punished by immediate execution.”