Absolution Gap (77 page)

The vehicle bounced over ruts of ice for many minutes, the main gathering of cathedrals falling into the distance.

“We’re going to the Lady Morwenna, aren’t we?” Rashmika asked, not really expecting an answer.

None arrived. The man merely tightened the grip on his cane, tilting his head just so, the reflected lighting making a perfect blank mask of his visor. Rashmika felt sick by the time they hit smoother ground and drew alongside the cathedral. It was not only the motion of the caravan sub-unit that made her feel ill, but also a nauseating sense of entrapment. She had wanted to come to the Lady Morwenna. She had not wanted the Lady Morwenna to draw her into it, against her will.

The vehicle pulled alongside the slowly moving mountain of the cathedral. Whereas the Catherine of Iron crawled around Hela on caterpillar tracks, the Lady Morwenna actually walked, shuffling along on twenty vast trapedozoidal feet. There were two parallel rows of ten of them, each row two hundred metres long. The entire mass of the main structure, towering far above, was connected to the feet by the huge telescoping columns of the cathedral’s flying buttresses. They were not really buttresses at all, but rather the legs of the feet: complex, brutishly mechanical things, sinewy with pistons and articulation points, veined by thick segmented cables and power lines. They were driven by moving shafts thrusting through the walls of the main structure like the horizontal oars of a slave-powered galleon. In turn, each foot was elevated three or four metres from the surface of the Way, allowed to move forwards slightly, and then lowered back down to the ground. The result was that the entire structure slid smoothly along at a rate of one-third of a metre per second.

It was, she knew, very old. It had grown from a tiny seed sown in the earliest days of Hela’s human settlement. Everywhere Rashmika looked she saw indications of damage and repair, redesign and expansion. It was less like a building than a city, one that had been subjected to grandiose civic projects and urban improvement schemes, each throwing out the blueprint of the old. In amongst the machinery, coexisting with it, was a crawling population of sculptural forms: gargoyles and gryphons, dragons and demons, visages of carved masonry or welded metal. Some of these were animated, drawing their motion from the moving mechanisms of the legs, so that the jaws of the carved figures gaped wide and snapped closed with each step taken by the cathedral.

She looked higher, straining to see the vehicle’s windows. The great hall of the cathedral reached far above the point where the articulated buttresses curved in to join it. Enormous stained-glass windows towered above her, pointing towards the face of Haldora. There were outflung prominences of masonry and metal capped by squatting gryphons or other heraldic creatures. And then there was the Clocktower itself, shaming even the hall, a tapering, teetering finger of iron thrusting higher than any structure Rashmika had ever seen. She could see the history of the cathedral in the tower, the strata of growth periods laid bare, showing how the vast structure had expanded to its present size. There were follies and abandoned schemes; out-jutting elbows that went nowhere. There were strange levellings-off where it looked as if the spire had been tapering towards a conclusion, before deciding to continue upwards for another hundred metres. And somewhere near the very top—difficult to see from this angle—was a cupola in which burned the unmistakable yellow lights of habitation.

The caravan vehicle swerved closer to the line of slowly stomping feet. There was a clang, and then they floated free of the ground, winched off the surface just as Crozet’s icejammer had been by the caravan.

The man in the vacuum suit began undoing his helmet clasp. He did it with a kind of manic patience, as if the act itself was a necessary penitence.

The helmet came off. The man riffled one gloved hand through the white shock of his hair, making it stand straight up from his scalp. The top was mathematically flat. He looked at her, his face long and flat-featured, making her think of a bulldog. She was certain, then, that she had seen the man somewhere before, but for now that was all she remembered.

“Welcome to the Lady Morwenna, Miss Els,” he said.

“I don’t know who you are, or why I’m here.”

“I’m Surgeon-General Grelier,” he said. “And you’re here because we want you to be here.”

Whatever that meant, he was telling the truth.

“Now come with me,” he said. “There is someone you need to see. Then we can discuss terms of employment.”

“Employment?”

“It’s work you came for, isn’t it?”

She nodded meekly. “Yes.”

“Then we may have something right up your alley.”

Scorpio had hoped for some rest. But the days immediately following Antoinette’s departure were as tiring as any that had preceded them. He stayed awake nearly all the time, watching the arrival and departure of shuttles and tugs, supervising the processing of new evacuees and the comings and goings of Remontoire’s technical personnel.

He felt stretched beyond breaking point, never certain that he was more than one or two breaths from collapsing. And yet he kept functioning, sustained by Antoinette’s words and his own stubborn refusal to show the slightest glimmer of weakness around the humans. It was becoming difficult. More and more it seemed to him that they had an energy that he lacked; that they were never as close to exhaustion or complete breakdown as he was. It had been different in his younger days. He had been the unstoppable powerhouse then, stronger not only than the humans who made up part of his coterie but also many of the pigs. He had been foolish to imagine that this would be the pattern for the whole of his life, that he would always have that edge. He had never quite noticed the moment when parity occurred; it might have happened months or years in the past, but now he was quite sure that the humans had pulled ahead of him. In the short term he still had a furious, impulsive strength that they lacked, but what use was thuggish immediacy now? What mattered were slow-burning, calculated strength, endurance and presence of mind. The humans were quicker-minded than he was, much less prone to making mistakes. Did they realise that? he wondered. Perhaps not immediately, for he was working hard to compensate for this intrinsic weaknesses. But sooner or later the effort would take its toll and then they would start to notice his failings. Many of them—the allies Antoinette had spoken of—would do their best to ignore his increasing inadequacy, making excuses for his failings. But again, that process could only continue for so long. Inevitably there would come a time when his enemies would pick up on that creeping weakness and use it against him. He wondered if he would have the courage to step down first, before it became so obvious. He didn’t know. It was too hard to think about that, because it cut too close to the essence of what he was, and what he could never be. Antoinette had not meant to be cruel when she had talked of their time on Ararat as being “good years.” She had meant it sincerely, and twenty-three years was no small chunk out of anyone’s life. But Antoinette was a human. True enough, she did not have access to all the life-extension procedures that had been commonplace a couple of hundred years earlier. Nobody did nowadays. But Antoinette still had advantages that Scorpio lacked. The genes she had inherited had been modified many hundreds of years earlier, weeding out many of the commoner causes of death. She could expect to live about twice as long as she would have had her ancestors never undergone those changes. A one-hundred-and-fifty-year lifespan was not unthinkable for her. Given exceptional luck, she might even see two hundred. Long enough, perhaps, to witness and maybe even benefit from a resurgence in the other kinds of life-extending medicine, the kinds that had been in short supply since the Melding Plague. Granted, the present crisis didn’t make that likely, but it was still a remote possibility, still something she could hope for.

Scorpio was fifty now. He would be lucky to see sixty. He had never heard of a pig living longer than seventy-five years, and the oldest pig he had ever met had been seventy-one years old. That pig had died one year later, as a constellation of time-bomb illnesses had ripped him apart over a period of a few months.

Even if, by some stroke of luck, he found a medical facility that still had access to the old rejuvenation and life-extension treatments, they would be useless to him, too finely tuned to human biochemistry. He had heard about pigs who had tried such things, and their efforts had invariably been unsuccessful. More often than not they had died prematurely, as the procedures triggered fatal iatrogenic side effects.

It wasn’t an option. The only option, really, was to
die
, in about ten to fifteen years’ time. Twenty if he was astonishingly lucky. Less time, even then, than he had already spent on Ararat.

“It was half my life,” he had told her. But he didn’t think she had understood exactly what that meant. Not just half the life he had lived to date, but a decent fraction of the life he could ever hope to live. The first twenty years of his life barely counted, anyway. He hadn’t really been born until he turned the laser on his shoulder and burned the green scorpion into scar tissue. The humans were making plans for decades to come. He was thinking in terms of years, and even then counting on nothing.

The question was, did he have the courage to acknowledge this? If he stepped down now and made it clear that it was because of his genetic inheritance—because of the encroachment of premature death that was part and parcel of the pig package—no one would criticise him. They would understand, and he would have their sympathy. But what if he was wrong to relinquish power now, just because he felt the shadow on him? The shadow was still faint. He thought it likely that only he had seen it clearly. Surely it was a kind of cowardice to give up now, when he still had five or ten more years of useful service in him. Surely he owed Ararat—or Ararat’s refugees—more than that. He was many things—violent, stubborn, loyal—but he had never been a coward.

He thought, then, of Aura. It came to him with crystal clarity: she would be followed. She was a child who spoke of things beyond her reach. She had, in a way, already saved thousands of lives by preventing Scorpio from attacking the Jugglers as they tried to haul the
Infinity
to a safe distance from First Camp. She had known what the right thing to do was.

She was just a small thing now, encased in the transparent crib of the incubator, but she was growing. In ten years, what would she be like? It hurt him to have to think so far ahead. He did it anyway. He saw a flash of her then, a girl who looked older than her years, the expression on her face hovering somewhere between serene certainty and the stiff mask of a zealot, untroubled by the smallest flicker of doubt. She would be beautiful, in human terms, and she would have followers. He saw her wearing Skade’s armour—the armour as it had been when they had found Skade in the crashed ship, tuned to white, its chameleoflage permanently jammed on that one setting.

She might be right, he thought. She might know exactly what had to be done to make a difference against the Inhibitors. Given what she had already cost them, he desperately hoped that this would be the case. But what if she was wrong? What if she was a weapon, implanted in their midst? What if her one function was to lead them all to extinction, by the most efficient means?

He didn’t really think that likely, though. If he had, he would have killed her already, and then perhaps himself. But the chance was still there. She might even be innocent, but still
wrong
. In some respects that was an even more dangerous possibility.

Vasko Malinin had already sided with her. So, Scorpio thought, had a number of the seniors. Others were uncommitted, but might turn either way in the coming days. Against this, against what would surely be the magnetic charisma of the girl, there had to be a balance, something stolid and unimaginative, not much given to crusades or the worship of zealots. He couldn’t step down. It might wear him out even sooner, but—somehow or other—he had to be there. Not as Aura’s antagonist, necessarily, but as her brake. And if it came to a confrontation with Aura or one of her supporters (he could see them now, rallying behind the white-armoured girl) then it would only vindicate his decision to stay.

The one thing Scorpio knew about himself was that when he made a decision it stayed made. In that respect, he thought, he had much in common with Clavain. Clavain had been a better forward-thinker than Scorpio, but at the end—when he had met his death in the iceberg—all his life had amounted to was a series of dogged stands.

There were, Scorpio concluded, worse ways to live.

“You’re quite happy with this?” Remontoire asked Scorpio.

They were sitting alone in a spider-legged inspection saloon, a pressurised cabin clutching the sheer clifflike face of the accelerating starship. From an aperture below them—a docking gate framed by bony structures that resembled fused spinal vertebrae—the cache weapons were being unloaded. It would have been a delicate operation at the best of times, but with the
Nostalgia for Infinity
continuing to accelerate away from Ararat, following the trajectory Remontoire and his projections had specified, it was one that required the utmost attention to detail.

“I’m happy,” Scorpio said. “I thought you’d be the one with objections, Rem. You wanted all of these things. I’m not letting you have them all. Doesn’t that piss you off?”

“Piss me off, Scorp?” There was a faint, knowing smile on his companion’s face. Remontoire had prepared a flask of tea and was now pouring it into minuscule glass tumblers. “Why should it? The risk is shared equally. Your own chance of survival—according to our forecasts, at least—is now significantly reduced. I regret this state of affairs, certainly, but I can appreciate your unwillingness to hand over all the weapons. That would require an unprecedented leap of faith.”