Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

The suit left his head uncovered. He looked older now. His skin appeared to have been sucked on to his skull by some vacuum-forming process, so that it hugged every crevice. She could map the veins beneath his skin with surgical precision. He looked delicate, like something she could crush in her hands.

She sat down, taking the place she had been offered. The other people around the table were all wearing the same kind of suit, with only minor variations in detail. But they were not all alike. Some of them were missing whole chunks of themselves. They had cavities in their bodies which the suits had invaded, cramming them with the same intricacy of organic machinery and bright-green tubing that she could see inside the Captain’s suit. One woman was missing an arm. In its place, under the spit-layer of the suit, was a glass moulding of an arm filled with a tentative structure of bone and meat and nerve fibre. Another one, a man this time, had a glass face, living tissue pressed against its inner surface. Another looked more or less normal at first glance, except that the body had two heads: a woman’s emerging at more or less the right place and a second one—a young man’s—attached above her right shoulder.

“Don’t mind them,” the Captain said.

Antoinette realised she must have been staring. “I wasn’t…”

John Brannigan smiled. “They’re soldiers. Forward deployment elements in the Coalition for Neural Purity.”

If that had ever meant anything to Antoinette, it was history she had forgotten a long time ago. “And you?” she asked.

“I was one, for a while. While it suited my immediate needs. We were on Mars, fighting the Conjoiners, but I can’t say my heart was entirely in it.”

Antoinette leaned forwards. The table, at least, was completely real. “John, there’s something we really need to talk about.”

“Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport. I’ve only just started shoot-ing the breeze with my soldier buddies.”

“All these people are dead, John. They died—oh, conservative estimate?—three or four hundred years ago. So snap out of the nostalgia trip, will you? You need to get a fucking good grip on the immediate here and now.”

He winked at her and bobbed his head towards one of the people along the table. “Do you see Kolenkow there? The one with two heads?”

“Difficult to miss,” Antoinette said, sighing.

“The one on her shoulder’s her brother. They signed up together. He took a hit, got zeroed by a spider mansweeper. Immediate decap. They’re brewing a new body for him back in Deimos. They can hook your head up to a machine in the meantime, but it’s always better if you’re plumbed into a proper body.”

“I’ll bet. Captain…”

“So Kolenkow’s carrying her brother’s head until the body’s ready. They might even go into battle like that. I’ve seen it happen. Isn’t much that scares the hell out of spiders, but two-headed soldiers might do the trick, I reckon.”

“Captain. John. Listen to me. You need to focus on the present. We have a situation here on Ararat, all right? I know you know about it—we’ve talked about it already.”

“Oh, that stuff,” he said. He sounded like a child being reminded of homework on the first day of a holiday.

Antoinette thumped the table so hard that the wood bruised her fist. “I know you don’t want to deal with this, John, but we have to talk about it all the same. You cannot leave just when you feel like it. You may save a few thousand people, but many, many more are going to die in the process.”

The company changed. She was still sitting at a table surrounded by soldiers—she even recognised some of the faces—but now they all looked as if they had been through a few more years of war. Bad war, too. The Captain had a clunking prosthetic arm where there had been a good arm before. The suits were no longer made of insect spit, but were now sliding assemblages of lubricated plates. They were hyper-reflective, like scabs of frozen mercury.

“Fucking Demarchists,” the Captain said. “Let us keep all that fancy biotech shit until the moment we really needed it. We were really kicking the spiders. Then they pulled the licenses, said we were violating terms of fair use. All that neat squirmy stuff just fucking melted overnight. Bioweps, suits—gone. Now look what we’ve got to work with.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Antoinette said. “Captain, listen to me. The Pattern Jugglers are moving the ship to safety. You have to give them time.”

“They’ve had time,” he said. It was a heartening moment of lucidity, a connection to the present.

“Not enough,” she said.

The steel fist of his new arm clenched. “You don’t understand. We have to leave Ararat. There are windows opening above us.”

The back of her neck tingled. “Windows, John?”

“I sense them. I sense a lot of things. I’m a ship , for fuck’s sake.”

Suddenly they were all alone. It was just the Captain and Antoinette. In the bright lustre of his reflective armour she saw a bird traverse the sky.

“You’re a ship. Good. So stop whining and start acting like one, beginning with a sense of responsibility to your crew. That includes me. What are these windows?”

He waited a while before answering. Had she just got through to him, or sent him scurrying ever deeper into labyrinths of regression?

“Opportunities for escape,” he said eventually. “Clear channels. They keep opening, and then closing.”

“You could be mistaken. It would be really, really bad if you were mistaken.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“We’ve been waiting, hoping, for a sign,” Antoinette said. “Some message from Remontoire. But there hasn’t been one.”

“Maybe he can’t get a message through. Maybe he’s been trying, and this is the best you’re going to get.”

“Give us a few more hours,” she said. “That’s all we’re asking for. Just enough time to move the ship to a safe distance. Please, John.”

“Tell me about the girl. Tell me about Aura.”

Antoinette frowned. She remembered mentioning the girl, but she did not think she had ever told the Captain her name. “Aura’s fine,” she said, guardedly. “Why?”

“What does she have to say on the matter?”

“She thinks we should trust the Pattern Jugglers,” Antoinette said.

“And beyond that?”

“She keeps talking about a place—somewhere called Hela. Something to do with a man named Quaiche.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. It may not even mean anything. It’s not even Aura speaking to us directly—it’s all coming via her mother. I don’t think Scorpio takes it that seriously. Frankly, I’m not sure I do either. They really, really want to think that Aura is something valuable because of what she cost them. But what if she isn’t? What if she’s just a kid? What if she knows a little, but nowhere near as much as everyone wants her to?”

“What does Malinin think?”

This surprised her. “Why Malinin?”

“They talk about him. I hear them. I heard about Aura the same way. All those thousands of people inside me, all their whispers, all their secrets. They need a new leader. It could be Malinin; it could be Aura.”

“There hasn’t even been an official announcement about the existence of Aura,” Antoinette said.

“You seriously believe that makes any difference? They know, all of them. You can’t keep a secret like that, Antoinette.”

“They have a leader already,” she said.

“They want someone new and bright and a little frightening. Someone who hears voices, someone they’ll allow to lead them in a time of uncertainties. Scorpio isn’t that leader.” The Captain paused, caressed his false hand with the scarred fingers of the other. “The windows are still opening and closing. I sense a growing urgency. If Remontoire is behind this, he may not be able to offer us many more opportunities for escape. Soon, very soon, I shall have to make my move.”