Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

What could she tell him? That she was scared to death by the voices that she had started hearing?

No. That wasn’t necessary at all. She had enough rational fears to draw from without invoking the shadows.

“We’re seventy-five kilometres from Absolution Gap, Surgeon-General,” she said. “In just under three days this cathedral is going to be crossing that bridge.” She mimicked his tone of voice. “Frankly, there are places I’d rather be.”

“Alarms you, does it?”

“Don’t tell me that you’re thrilled at the prospect.”

“The dean knows what he’s doing.”

“You think so?”

Green and pink light chased each other across his face. “Yes,” he said.

“You don’t believe it,” she said. “You’re as scared as I am, aren’t you? You’re a rational man, Surgeon-General. You don’t have his blood in your veins. You know this cathedral can’t be taken over the bridge.”

‘There’s a first time for everything,“ he said. Self-conscious of her attention, he was trying so hard to control his expression that a muscle in the side of his temple had started twitching.

“He has a death wish,” Rashmika said. “He knows that the vanishings are heading towards a culmination. He wants to mark the occasion with a bang. What better way than to smash the cathedral to dust and make a holy martyr of himself in the process? He’s the dean now, but who’s to say he doesn’t have his mind set on sainthood?”

“You’re forgetting something,” Grelier said. “He’s thinking beyond the crossing. He wants the long-term protection of Ultras. That isn’t the desire of a man planning suicide in three days. What other explanation is there?”

Unless she was reading him badly, Grelier believed that himself. She began to wonder just how much Grelier really knew about what Quaiche had in mind.

“I saw something odd when I was on my way here,” Rashmika said.

Grelier neatened his hair. His usually impeccably tidy white bristle-cut showed signs of distress. It was getting to him, Rashmika thought. He was as scared as everyone else, but he could not let it show.

“Saw something?” he echoed.

“Towards the end of the caravan trip,” she said, “after we’d crossed the bridge and were on our way to meet the cathedrals, we passed a huge fleet of machines moving north—excavating equipment, the sort they use to open out the largest scuttler seams. Whatever it was, it was on its way somewhere.”

Grelier’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing strange in that. They’d have been on their way to fix a problem with the Permanent Way before the cathedrals got there.”

“They were moving in the wrong direction for that,” Rashmika said. “And whatever they were doing, the quaestor didn’t want to talk about them. It was as if he’d been given orders to pretend they didn’t exist.”

“This has nothing to do with the dean.”

“But something on that scale could hardly take place without him knowing about it, surely,” Rashmika said. “In fact, he probably authorised it. What do you think it is? A new scuttler excavation he doesn’t want anyone to know about? Something they’ve found that can’t be left to the usual settlement miners?”

“I have no idea.” The twitch in the side of his temple had set up camp. “I have no idea and I don’t care. My responsibility is to Bloodwork and the dean’s health. That’s all. I have enough on my plate without worrying about interecumenical conspiracies.” The carriage shuddered to a halt, Grelier shrugging with evident relief. “Well, we’re here, Miss Els. And now, if you don’t mind, it’s my turn to ask the questions.”

“You said it would only take a wee moment.”

He smiled. “Well, that may well have been a wee fib .”

He sat her down in Bloodwork and showed her the results of her blood analysis, which had been correlated against some other sample he had not deigned to identify.

“I was interested in your gift,” Grelier said, resting his chin on the head of his cane, looking at her with heavy-lidded, heavily bagged eyes. “Wanted to know if there was a genetic component. Fair enough, eh? I’m a man of science, after all.”

“If you say so,” Rashmika replied.

“Problem was, I hit a block even before I could start looking for any peculiarities.” Affectionately, Grelier tapped his medical kit. It was resting on a bench. “Blood’s my thing,” he said. “Always has been, always will be. Genetics, cloning, you name it—but it all boils down to good old blood in the end. I dream about the stuff. Torrential, haemorrhaging rivers of it. I’m not what you’d call a squeamish man.”

“I’d never have guessed.”

“The thing is, I take a professional pride in understanding blood. Everyone who comes near me gets sampled sooner or later. The archives of the Lady Morwenna contain a compre-hensive picture of the genetic make-up of this world, as it has evolved over the last century. You’d be surprised at how distinctive it is, Rashmika. We haven’t been settled in piecemeal fashion, over many hundreds of years. Almost everyone who now lives on Hela is descended from the colonists of a handful of ships, right back to the Gnostic Ascension , all from single points of origin, and all of those worlds have very distinct genetic profiles. The newcomers—the pilgrims, the evacuees, the chancers—make very little difference at all to the gene pool. And of course even their blood is sampled and labelled at their point of entry.” He took a vial from the case and shook it, inspecting the frothy raspberry-red liquid within. “All of which means that—unless you happen to have just arrived on Hela—I can predict what your blood will look like, to a high degree of precision. Even more accurately if I know where you live, so that I can factor in interbreeding. The Vigrid region’s one of my specialities, actually. I’ve studied it a lot.” He tapped the vial against the side of the display showing the unidentified blood sample. “Take this fellow, for instance. Classic Vigrid. Couldn’t be mistaken for the blood of someone from any other place on Hela. He’s so typical it’s almost frightening.”

Rashmika swallowed before speaking. “That blood is from Harbin, isn’t it?” she asked.

“That’s what the archives tell me.”

“Where is he? What happened to him?”

“This man?” Grelier made a show of reading fine print at the bottom of his display. “Dead, it looks like. Killed during clearance work. Why? You weren’t going to pretend he was your brother, were you?”

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.”