Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

To the untrained eye they meant precisely nothing. At first they reminded her a little of something, and she had to think for a while before it came to her. The spaced vertical dashes—clustered and clumped, but sliding closer and closer together as her eye panned from left to right—brought to mind a diagram of the chemical absorption lines in a star’s spectrum, bunching closer and closer towards a smeared continuum of states. But these lines represented individual vanishings, and the smeared continuum lay in the future. But what exactly did it signify? Would the vanishings become the norm, with Haldora stuttering in and out of reality like a defective light fitting? Or would the planet just vanish, popping out of existence for evermore?

She examined the paper again. There was a second sequence of marks above the other. They agreed closely, except at one point where the lower sequence had an additional vertical mark where none was present above it.

Twenty-odd years ago, Pietr had said.

Twenty-odd years ago, Haldora had winked out of existence for one and one-fifth of a second. A long cosmic blink. Not just a moment of divine inattention, but a fully-fledged deific snooze.

And during that absence, something had happened that the churches did not like. Something that might even have been worth the life of a harmless old man.

She looked at the paper again, and for the first time it occurred to Rashmika to wonder why Pietr had given it to her, and what she was meant to do with it.

The elevator had been descending for several minutes when Antoinette felt a lurch as it shifted from its usual track. She cried out at first, thinking the elevator was about to crash, but the ride continued smoothly for a dozen seconds before she felt another series of jolts and swerves as the car switched routes again. There was no guessing where she was, only that she was deep inside the ship. Perhaps she was even below the water-line, in the last few hundred metres of the submerged hull. Any maps she might have brought along with her—not that she had, of course—would have been totally useless by now. It was not only that these dank levels were difficult to access from the upper decks, but that they were prone to convulsive and confusing changes of local architecture. For a long time it had been assumed that the elevator lines remained stable when all else changed, but Antoinette knew that this was not the case, and that it would be futile to attempt to navigate by apparently familiar reference points. If she’d brought an inertial compass and a gravitometer she might have been able to pinpoint her position to within a few dozen metres in three-dimensional space… but she hadn’t, and so she had no choice but to trust the Captain.

The elevator arrived at its destination. The door opened and the last dregs of fluid spilled out. She tapped her shoes dry, feeling the unpleasant wetness of her trouser hems against the skin of her calves. She was really not dressed for a meeting with the Captain. What would he think?

She looked out and had to suppress an involuntary gasp of surprise and delight. For all that she knew every moment was precious, it was impossible not to be moved by the view she was seeing. Deep in the ship as she was, she had been expecting another typically gloomy, damp enclosure. She had been assuming that the Captain would manifest via the manipulation of local junk or one of the distorting wall surfaces. Or something else, but qualitatively similar.

But the Captain had brought her somewhere else entirely. It was a huge chamber, a place that at first glance appeared not to have any limits at all. There was an endless sky above her, shaded a rich, heraldic blue. In all directions she saw only stepped tiers of trees reaching away into blue-green infinity. There was a lovely fragrant breeze and a cackle of animal life from the high branches of the nearest trees. Below her, accessed by a meandering rustic wooden staircase, was a marvellous little glade. There was a pool off to one side being fed by a hissing waterfall. The water in the pool, except where it was stirred into creamy whiteness under the waterfall, was the exquisite black of space. Rather than suggesting taintedness, the blackness of the water made it look wonderfully cool and inviting. A little way in from the water’s edge, resting on the perfectly tended lawn, was a wooden table. On either side of the table, forming benches, were long logs.

She had taken an involuntary step from the elevator. Behind her, the door closed. Antoinette saw no alternative but to make her way down the ambling stairs to the floor of the glade, where the grass shimmered with all the shades of green and yellow she had ever imagined.

She had heard about this place. Clavain had spoken about it once, she recalled. A glade within the Nostalgia for Infinity . Once, its location had been well mapped, but after the great ship had been emptied in the days following its landing on Ararat, no one had ever been able to find the glade again. Parties had scoured the areas of the ship where it was supposed to be, but they had found nothing.

The glade was enormous. It was astonishing that you could lose a place this large, but the Nostalgia for Infinity was vast. And if the ship itself didn’t want something to be found… well, the Captain certainly had the means to hide whatever he wanted. Access corridors and elevator lines could be rerouted. The entire place—the entire chamber, glade and all—could even have been moved around in the ship, the way one heard about old bullets“ making slow, meandering journeys through people, years after they had been shot.

Antoinette didn’t think she would ever find out exactly where this was. The Captain had brought her here on his own strict terms, and maybe she would never be allowed to see it again.

“Antoinette.” The voice was a hiss, a modulation of the waterfall’s sibilance.

“Yes?”

“You’ve forgotten something again, haven’t you?”

Did he mean the torch? No, of course not. She smiled. Despite herself, she hadn’t been quite as forgetful as she had feared.

She slipped on the goggles. Through them she saw the same glade. The colours, if anything, were even brighter. Birds were in the air, moving daubs of red and yellow against the blue backdrop of the sky. Birds! It was great to see birds again, even if she knew they were being manufactured by the goggles.

Antoinette looked around and realised with a jolt that she had company. There were people sitting at the table, on the logs placed either side of it.

Strange people. Really strange people.

“Come on over,” one of them said, inviting her to take the one vacant place. The man beckoning her was John Brannigan; she was certain of that immediately. But yet again he was manifesting in a slightly different form.

She thought back to the first two apparitions. Both had evoked Mars, she thought. In the first, he had been wearing a spacesuit so elderly that she had half-expected it to have an opening where you fed in coal. The second time the suit had been slightly more up to date: not modern, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least a generation beyond the first. John Brannigan had looked older then as well—by a good decade or two, she had judged. And now she was looking at an even older counterpart of him, wearing a suit that again skipped fashions forwards another half-century or so.

It was barely a suit at all, really, more a kind of cocoon of something resembling silver-grey insect spit that had been neatly lathered around him. Through the transparent material of the suit she glimpsed a vague tightly packed complexity of organic-looking mechanisms: kidney-shaped bulges and purple lunglike masses; things that pulsed and throbbed. She saw lurid-green fluids scurrying through miles of zigzagging intestinal piping. Beneath all this the Captain was naked, the vile mechanics of catheters and waste-management systems laid out for her inspection. The Captain appeared oblivious. She was looking at a man from a very remote century; one that—on balance—seemed more distant and strange than the earlier periods she had glimpsed in the first two apparitions.