Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

That was the point about the Pattern Jugglers. They were alien. It , the Juggler biomass, was alien. It would not succumb to human analysis, to neatly circumscribed cause and effect. It was as quixotic and unpredictable as a drunkard. You could guess how it might behave given certain parameters, but once in a while you might be terribly, terribly wrong.

Marl knew this. She had never pretended otherwise. She knew that any swim brought risks.

She had been lucky so far.

She thought of Shizuko, waiting in the psychiatric section for one of Marl’s visits—except she wasn’t really waiting in the usual sense of the word. Shizuko might have been aware that Marl was due to arrive, and she might have varied her activities accordingly. But when Marl showed up, Shizuko merely looked at her with the distracted passing interest of someone who has seen a crack in a wall that they did not remember, or a fleeting suggestion of meaningful shape in a cloud. The flicker of interest was waning almost as soon as Marl had noticed it. Sometimes Shizuko would laugh, but it was an idiot’s laugh, like the chime of small, stupid bells.

Shizuko would then return to her scratching, her fingers always bleeding under the nails, ignoring the crayons and chalks offered to her as substitutes. Marl had stopped visiting some months ago. Once she had acknowledged and accepted that she now meant nothing to Shizuko, there had been an easing. Counterpointing it, however, had also been a dispiriting sense of betrayal and weakness.

She thought now of Vasko. She thought of his easy certainties, his conviction that the only thing that stood between the swimmers and the sea was fear.

She hated him for that.

Marl took a step into the water. A dozen or so metres out, a raft of green matter twirled in response, sensing that she had entered its realm. Marl took in a deep breath. She was impossibly scared. The itch across her face had become a burn. It made her want to swoon into the water.

“I’m here,” she said. And she stepped towards the mass of Juggler organisms, submerging up to her thighs, up to her waist, then deeper. Ahead, the biomass formed shapes with quickening intensity, the breeze of its transformations blowing over her. Alien anatomies shuffled through endless permuta-tions. It was a pageant of monsters. The water too deep now to walk through, she kicked off from the bed of rocks and began to swim towards the show.

Vasko looked at the others present. “Quaiche? That doesn’t mean anything more to me than the first word.”

“They meant nothing to me either,” Scorpio said. “I wasn’t even sure of the spelling of the first word. But now I’m certain. The second word locks it. The meaning is unambiguous.”

“So are you going to enlighten us?” Liu asked.

Scorpio gestured to Orca Cruz.

“Scorp’s right,” she said. “Hela means nothing significant in isolation. Query the databases we brought with us from Resurgam or Yellowstone and you’ll find thousands of possible explanations. Same if you try variant spellings. But put in Quaiche and Hela and it’s a different kettle of fish. There’s really only one explanation, bizarre as it seems.”

“I’m dying to hear it,” Liu said. Next to him, Vasko nodded in agreement. Antoinette said nothing and conveyed no visible interest, but her curiosity was obviously just as strong.

“Hela is a world,” Cruz said. “Not much of one, just a medium-sized moon orbiting a gas giant named Haldora. Still not ringing any bells?”

No one said anything.

“What about Quaiche?” Vasko asked. “Another moon?”

Cruz shook her head. “No. Quaiche is actually a man, the individual who assigned the names to Hela and Haldora. There’s no entry for Quaiche or his worlds in the usual nomenclature database, but we shouldn’t be too surprised about that—it’s been more than sixty years since it was updated by direct contact with other ships. But ever since we’ve been on Ararat, we’ve been picking up the occasional stray signal from other Ultra elements. A lot, recently—they’re using long-range wide-beam transmissions far more than they ever did in the past, and occasionally one of those signals sweeps over us by accident.”

“Why the change in tactics?” Vasko asked.

“Something’s got them scared,” Cruz said. “They’re becoming nervous, unwilling to do face-to-face trade. Some Ultras must have met something they didn’t like, and now they’re spreading the word, switching to long-range trading of data rather than material commodities.”

“No prizes for guessing what’s spooked them,” Vasko said.

“It works to our advantage, though,” Cruz said. “They may not be authoritative transmissions, and half of those we do intercept are riddled with errors and viruses, but over the years we’ve been able to keep our databases more up to date than we could ever have hoped given our lack of contact with external elements.”

“So what do we know about Quaiche’s system, then?” Vasko asked.

“Not as much as we’d like,” Cruz said. “There were no conflicts with prior assignments, which means that the system Quaiche was investigating must have been very poorly explored prior to his arrival.”

“So whatever Aura is referring to happened—what—fifty, sixty years ago?” Vasko asked.

“Easily,” Cruz said.

Vasko stroked his chin. It was clean-shaven, smooth as sandpapered wood. “Then it can’t mean much to us, can it?”

“Something happened to Quaiche,” Scorpio said. “Accounts vary. Seems he was doing scutwork for Ultras, getting his hands dirty exploring planetary environments they weren’t happy around. He witnessed something, something to do with Haldora.” Scorpio looked at them all, one by one, daring anyone—especially Vasko—to interrupt or quibble. “He saw it vanish. He saw the planet just cease to exist for a fraction of a second. And because of that he started up a kind of religion on Hela, Haldora’s moon.”

‘That’s it?“ Antoinette asked. ”That’s the message Aura came all this way to give us? The address of a religious lunatic?“

‘There’s more,“ Scorpio said.

“I sincerely hope there is,” she replied.

“He saw it happen more than once. So, apparently, did others.”

“Why am I not surprised?” she said.

“Wait,” Vasko said, holding up a hand. “I want to hear the rest. Go on, Scorp.”

The pig looked at him with an utter absence of expression. “Like I need your permission?”

“That’s not how I meant it to sound. I just…” Vasko looked around, perhaps wondering whom he might solicit for support. “I just think we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss anything we learn from Aura, no matter how little sense it seems to make.”

“No one’s dismissing anything,” Scorpio said.

“Please tell us what you learned,” Antoinette interrupted, sensing that things were about to get out of hand.

“Not much happened for decades,” Scorpio continued. “Quaiche’s miracle drew a few people to Hela. Some of them signed up for the religion, some of them became disillusioned and set up shop as miners. There are alien artefacts on Hela—nearly useless junk, but they export enough to sustain a few settlements. Ultras buy the junk off them and sell it on to curio collectors. Someone probably makes a bit of money out of it, but you can guess that it isn’t the poor idiots who dig the stuff out of the ground.”

“There are alien artefacts on a bunch of worlds,” Antoinette said. “I’m guessing this lot went the same way as the Amarantin and a dozen or so other civilisations, right?”

“The databases didn’t have much on the indigenous culture,” Scorpio said. “The people who run Hela don’t exactly encourage free-thinking scientific curiosity. But yes, reading between the lines, it looks as though they met the wolves.”