Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

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 be-cause of his genetic inheritance—because of the encroach-ment of premature death that was part and parcel of the pig package-r-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 sur-vival—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.”

“I don’t do faith,” Scorpio said.

“In truth, the cache weapons may not make very much difference in the long run. I did not want to say this earlier, for fear of dispiriting our associates, but the fact remains that our forecasts may be too optimistic. When Ilia Volyova rode Storm Bird into the heart of the wolf concentration around Delta Pavonis, the cache weapons she deployed made precious little impact.”

“As far as we know. Maybe she did slow things down a bit.”

“Or perhaps she did not deploy the weapons in the most effective manner possible—she was ill, after all—or perhaps those were not the most dangerous weapons in the arsenal. We shall never know.”

“What about these other weapons,” Scorpio asked, “the ones that they’re making for us now?”

“The hypometric devices? They have proven useful. You saw how the wolf concentration around your shuttle and the

Nostalgia for Infinity was dispersed. I also used a hypometric weapon against the wolf aggregate that was causing you difficulties on the surface of Ararat.“

Scorpio sipped at his tea, holding the little tumbler—it was barely larger than a thimble—in the clumsy vice of his hands. He felt as if at any minute he was going to shatter the glass. “These are the weapons Aura showed you how to make?”

“Yes.”

“And you still don’t really know any of it works?”

“Let’s just say that theory is lagging some distance behind practice, shall we?”

“All right. It’s not as if I’d be able to understand it even if you knew. But one thing does occur to me. If this shit is so useful, why aren’t the wolves using it against us?”