Absolution Gap (93 page)

She felt nothing yet. It was like driving off a cliff. There was an instant when her trajectory carried on normally, as if the world had not been pulled from under her.

“You know he was my brother,” she said. “You saw us together. You were there when they interviewed Harbin.”

“I was there when they interviewed
someone,
” Grelier said. “But I don’t think he could have been your brother.”

“That’s not true.”

“In the strict genetic sense, I’m afraid it must be.” He nodded at the display, inviting her to draw her own conclusion. “You’re no more related to him than you are to me. He was not your brother, Rashmika. You were never his sister.”

“Then one of us was adopted,” she said.

“Well, funny you should say that, because it crossed my mind as well. And it struck me that perhaps the only way to get to the bottom of this whole mess was to pop up there myself and have a bit of a nose around. So I’m off to the badlands. Won’t keep me away from the cathedral for more than a day. Any messages you’d like me to pass on, while I’m up there?”

“Don’t hurt them,” she said. “Whatever you do, don’t hurt them.”

“No one said anything about hurting anyone. But you know how it is with those communities up there. Very secular. Very closed. Very suspicious of interference from the churches.”

“You hurt my parents,” she said, “and I’ll hurt you back.”

Grelier placed the vial back in the case, snapped shut its lid. “No, you won’t, because you need me on your side. The dean’s a dangerous man, and he cares very much about his negotiations. If he thought for one moment that you weren’t what you said you were, that you might in any way have compromised his discussions with the Ultras . . . well, I wouldn’t want to predict what he might do.” He paused, sighed, as if they had simply got off on the wrong foot and all he needed to do was spool back to the start of the conversation and everything would be fine. “Look, this is as much my problem as yours. I don’t think you’re everything you say you are. This blood of yours looks suspiciously foreign. It doesn’t look as though you ever had ancestors on Hela. Now, there may be an innocent explanation for this, but until I know otherwise, I have to assume the worst.”

“Which is?”

“That you’re not at all who or what you say you are.”

“And why is that a problem for you, Surgeon-General?” She was crying now, the truth of Harbin’s death hitting her as hard as she had always known it would.

“Because,” he said, snarling his answer, “I brought you here. It was my bright idea to bring you and the dean together. And now I’m wondering
what the hell
I’ve brought here. I’m also assuming I’ll be in nearly as much trouble as you if he ever finds out.”

“He won’t hurt you,” Rashmika said. “He needs you to keep him alive.”

Grelier stood up. “Well, let’s just hope that’s the case, shall we? Because a few minutes ago you were trying to convince me he had a death wish. Now dry your eyes.”

 

Rashmika rode the elevator alone, up through strata of stained-glass light. She cried, and the more she tried to stop crying the worse the tears became. She wanted to think it was because of the news she had just learned about Harbin. Crying would have been the decent, human, sisterly response. But another part of her knew that the real reason she was crying was because of what she had learned about herself, not her brother. She could feel layers of herself coming loose, peeling away like drying scabs, revealing the raw truth of what she was, what she had always been. The shadows had been right: of that she no longer had any doubt. Nor was there any reason for Grelier to have lied about her blood. He was as disturbed by the discovery as she was.

She felt sorry for Harbin. But not as sorry as she felt for Rashmika Els.

What did it mean? The shadows had spoken of machines in her head; Grelier thought it unlikely that she had even been born on Hela. But her memories said she had been born to a family in the Vigrid badlands, that she was the sister of someone named Harbin. She looked back over her past, examining it with the raptorial eye of someone inspecting a suspected forgery, attentive to every detail. She expected a flaw, a faint disjunction where something had been pasted over something else. But her recent memories flowed seamlessly into the past. Everything that she recalled had the unmistakable grain of lived experience. She didn’t just see her past in her mind’s eye: she heard it, smelt it, felt it, with the bruising, tactile immediacy of reality.

Until she looked back far enough. Nine years, the shadows had said. And then things became less certain. She had memories of her first eight years on Hela, but they felt detached: a sequence of anonymous snapshots. They could have been her memories; they could equally well have belonged to someone else.

But perhaps, Rashmika thought, that was what childhood always felt like from the perspective of adulthood: a handful of time-faded moments, as thin and translucent as stained glass.

Rashmika Els. It might not even have been her real name.

 

The dean waited in his garret with the next Ultra delegation, sunglasses covering the eye-opener. When Rashmika arrived the air had a peculiar stillness, as if no one there had spoken for several minutes. She watched the shattered components of herself prowl through the confusion of mirrors, trying to reassemble the expression on her own face, anxious that there should be no indication of the upsetting conversation she had just had with the surgeon-general.

“You’re late, Miss Els,” the dean observed.

“I was detained,” she told him, hearing the tremble in her voice. Grelier had made it clear she was to make no mention of her visit to Bloodwork, but some excuse seemed necessary.

“Have a seat, drink some tea. I was just having a chat with Mr. Malinin and Miss Khouri.”

The names, inexplicably, meant something to her. She looked at the two visitors and felt another tingle of recognition. Neither of them looked much like Ultras. They were too normal; there was nothing obviously artificial about either of them, no missing or augmented bits, no suggestion of genetic reshaping or chimeric fusion. He was a tall, slim, dark-haired man, about ten years older than her. Handsome, even, in a slightly self-regarding way. He wore a stiff red uniform and stood with his hands behind his back, as if at attention. He watched her as she sat down and poured herself some tea, taking more interest in her than any of the other Ultras had done. To them she had only ever been part of the scenery, but from Malinin she sensed curiosity. The other one—the woman called Khouri—looked at her with something of the same inquisitiveness. Khouri was a small-framed older woman, sad eyes dominating a sad face, as if too much had been taken from her and not enough given back.

Rashmika thought she had seen both of them before. The woman, in particular.

“We haven’t been introduced,” the man said, nodding towards Rashmika.

“This is Rashmika Els, my advisor,” the dean said, the tone of his voice indicating that this was all he was prepared to say on the matter. “Now, Mr. Malinin . . .”

“You still haven’t properly introduced us,” he said.

The dean reached out to adjust one of his mirrors. “This is Vasko Malinin, and this is Ana Khouri,” he said, gesturing to each of them in turn, “the human representatives of the
Nostalgia for Infinity,
an Ultra vessel recently arrived in our system.”

The man looked at her again. “No one mentioned anything about advisors sitting in on negotiations.”

“You have a particular problem with that, Mr. Malinin? If you do, I can ask her to leave.”

“No,” the Ultra said, after a moment’s consideration. “It doesn’t matter.”

The dean invited the two visitors to sit down. They took their seats opposite Rashmika, on the other side of the little table where she poured tea.

“What brought you to our system?” the dean asked, directing his question to the male Ultra.

“The usual. We have a belly full of evacuees from the inner systems. Many of them specifically wanted to be brought here, before the vanishings reach culmination. We don’t question their motives, so long as they pay. The others want to be taken further out, as far away from the wolves as possible. We, of course, have our own technical needs. But we don’t plan on staying very long.”

“Interested in scuttler relics?”

“We have a different incentive,” the man said, pressing a crease from his suit. “We’re interested in Haldora, as it happens.”

Quaiche reached up and unclipped his sunglasses. “Aren’t we all?”

“Not in the religious sense,” the Ultra replied, apparently unfazed by Quaiche lying there with his splayed-open eyelids. “But it’s not our intention to undermine anyone’s belief system. However, since this system was discovered, there’s been almost no scientific investigation into the Haldora phenomenon. Not because no one has wanted to examine it, but because the authorities here—including the Adventist church—have never permitted close-up examinations.”

“The ships in the parking swarm are free to use their sensors to study the vanishings,” Quaiche said. “Many have done so, and have circulated their findings to the wider community.”

“True,” the Ultra said, “but those long-distance observations haven’t been taken very seriously beyond this system. What’s really needed is a detailed study, using physical probes—instrument packages fired into the face of the planet, that kind of thing.”

“You might as well spit in the face of God.”

“Why? If this is a genuine miracle, it should withstand investigation. What do you have to fear?”

“God’s ire, that’s what.”

The Ultra examined his fingers. Rashmika read his tension like a book. He had lied once, when he told the dean about the ship being full of evacuees who wanted to witness the vanishings. There might be a host of mundane reasons for that. Beyond that he had told the truth, so far as she was able to judge. Rashmika glanced at the woman, who had said nothing yet, and felt another electric shock of recognition. For a moment their eyes met, and the woman held the gaze for a second longer than Rashmika found comfortable. It was Rashmika who looked away, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks.

“The vanishings are reaching culmination,” the Ultra said. “No one disputes this. But it also means that we do not have much time to study Haldora as it is now.”

“I can’t allow it.”

“It has happened once before, hasn’t it?”

The light caught the frame of his eye-opener as he turned towards the man. “What has?”

“The direct probing of Haldora,” the Ultra said. “On Hela, so far as we can gather, there are rumours of an unrecorded vanishing, one that happened about twenty years ago. A vanishing that lasted longer than the others, but which has now been stricken from the public record.”

“There are rumours about everything,” Quaiche said, sounding peevish.

“It’s said that the prolonged event was the result of an instrument package being sent into the face of Haldora at the moment of an ordinary vanishing. Somehow it delayed the return of the normal three-dimensional image of the planet. Stressed the system, perhaps. Overloaded it.”

“The system?”

“The mechanism,” the Ultra said. “Whatever it is that projects an image of the gas giant.”

“The mechanism, my friend, is God.”

“That’s one interpretation.” The Ultra sighed. “Look, I didn’t come here to irritate you, only to state our position honestly. We believe that an instrument package has already been sent into the face of Haldora, and that it was probably done with Adventist blessing.” Rashmika thought again about the scratchy markings Pietr had shown her, and what she had been told by the shadows. It was true, then: there really had been a missing vanishing, and it was in that moment that the shadows had sent their bodiless envoy—their agent of negotiation—into the scrimshaw suit. The same suit they wanted her to remove from the cathedral, before it was dashed to pieces on the floor of Ginnungagap Rift.

She forced her attention back to the Ultra, for fear of missing something crucial. “We also believe that no harm can come from a second attempt,” he said. “That’s all we want: permission to repeat the experiment.”

“The experiment that never happened,” Quaiche said.

“If so, we’ll just have to be the first.” The Ultra leaned forwards in his seat. “We’ll give you the protection you require for free. No need to offer us trade incentives. You can continue to deal with other Ultra parties as you have always done. In return, all we ask for is the permission to make a small study of Haldora.”

The Ultra leant back. He glanced at Rashmika and then looked out of one of the windows. From the garret, the line of the Way was clearly visible, stretching twenty kilometres into the distance. Very soon they would see the geological transitions that marked the approach of the Rift. The bridge could not be far below the horizon.

Fewer than three days, she thought. Then they’d be on it. But it wouldn’t be over quickly, even then. At the cathedral’s usual crawl it would take a day and a half to make the crossing.

“I do need protection,” Quaiche said, after a great silence. “And I suppose I am prepared to be flexible. You have a good ship, it seems. Heavily armed, and with a sound propulsion system. You’d be surprised how difficult it has been to find a ship that can meet my requirements. By the time they get here, most ships are on their last legs. They’re in no fit state to act as a bodyguard.”

“Our ship has some idiosyncrasies,” the Ultra said, “but yes, it is sound. I doubt that there’s a better-armed ship in the parking swarm.”

“The experiment,” Quaiche said. “It wouldn’t be anything more than the dropping of an instrument package?”

“One or two. Nothing fancy.”

“Sequenced with a vanishing?”

“Not necessarily. We can learn a great deal at any time. Of course, if a vanishing chooses to happen . . . we’ll be sure to have an automated drone stationed within response distance.”