Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“What is it?” Grelier asked.

“The bridge,” Quaiche answered. “It doesn’t seem to be there any more.”

Grelier leant closer to the couch. “There must be some mistake.”

“There doesn’t seem to be one, Surgeon-General. The inductance cable—the line we use for emergency navigation—is quite clearly severed.”

“So someone cut the cable.”

“I’ll have surface imagery in a moment. Then we’ll know.”

They all turned to the screen that had been showing the descent of the Nostalgia for Infinity . The image flickered with ghostly colours, then stabilised around a familiar view captured by a static camera that must have been mounted on the wall of Ginnungagap Rift itself.

The dean was right: there was no longer any bridge. All that remained were the extremities of the span: those curlicued fancies of scrolled sugar and icing flung out from either cliff as if to suggest the rest of the bridge by a process of elegant mathematical extrapolation. But most of the span was simply not there. Nor was there any hint of wreckage down on the floor. In her mind’s eye, Rashmika had thought of the bridge collapsing time and again, ever since she had known she would have to cross it. But always she had seen it coming down in an avalanche of splintering shards, forming a jewelled, glinting scree that was in itself a thing of wonder: an enchanted glass forest you could lose yourself in.

“What happened?” the dean asked.

Rashmika turned to him. “Does it matter? It’s gone: you can see for yourself. Crossing it isn’t an issue now. There’s no reason not to stop the cathedral.”

“Weren’t you listening, girl?” he asked. “The cathedral doesn’t stop. The cathedral cannot stop.”

Khouri stood up, followed by Vasko. “We can’t stay aboard any longer. You’ll come with us, Aura.”

Rashmika shook her head. She was still not used to being called by that name. “I’m not leaving without the thing I came for.”

“She is right,” said a new voice, thin and metallic.

No one said anything. It was not the intrusion of a new voice that alarmed them, but its obvious point of origin. As one, they all turned to look at the scrimshaw suit. Outwardly, nothing about it had changed: it was exactly the same brooding silver-grey form, crawling with manic detail and the blistered seams of crude welding.

“She is right,” the suit continued. “We must leave now, Quaiche. You have your ship, the thing you wanted so badly. You have your means of stopping Hela. Now let us go. We are of no consequence to any of your plans.”

“You never spoke except when I was alone before,” Quaiche said.

“We spoke to the girl, when you wouldn’t listen. She was easier: we could see straight into her head. Couldn’t we, Rashmika?”

Bravely, she said, “I’d rather you called me Aura now.”

“Aura it is, then. It changes nothing, does it? You came all this way to find us. Now you have. And there’s nothing to prevent the dean from giving us to you.”

Grelier shook his head, as if he alone were the victim of an extended joke. “The suit is talking. The suit is talking and you’re all just standing around as if this happens every day.”

“For some of us,” Quaiche said, “it does.”

“These are the shadows?” Grelier asked.

“An envoy of the shadows,” the suit said. “The distinction need not detain us. Now, please, we must be removed from the Lady Morwenna immediately.”

“You’ll stay here,” Quaiche said.

“No,” Rashmika said. “Dean—give us the suit. It doesn’t matter to you, but it means everything to us. The shadows are going to help us survive the Inhibitors. But that suit is our only direct line of communication with them.”

“If they mean that much to you, send another probe into Haldora.”

“We don’t know that it will work twice. Whatever happened to you may have been a fluke. We can’t gamble everything on the off chance that it might happen again.”

“Listen to her,” the suit said urgently. “She is right: we are your only guaranteed contact with the shadows. You must safeguard us, if you wish our assistance.”

“And the price of this assistance?” Quaiche asked.

“Nothing compared to the price of extinction. We wish only to be allowed to cross over from our side of the bulk. Is that so much to ask? Is that so great a cost to pay?”

Rashmika faced the others, feeling as if she had been appointed as witness for the shadows. “They can cross over provided that the matter-synthesiser is allowed to function. It’s a machine at the heart of the Haldora receiver. It will make them bodies, and their minds will slip across the bulk and inhabit them.”

“Machines, again,” Vasko said. “We run from one group, and now we negotiate with another.”

“If that’s what it takes,” Rashmika said. “And they’re only machines because they had no choice, after everything they’d lived through.” She remembered, in hypnagogic flashes, the vision she had been granted of life in the shadow universe: of entire galaxies stained green with the marauding blight; suns like emerald lanterns. “They were a lot like us once,” she added. “Closer than we realise.”

“They’re demons,” Quaiche said. “Not people at all. Not even machines.”

“Demons?” Grelier asked tolerantly.

“Sent to test my faith, of course. To undermine my belief in the miracle. To pollute my mind with fantasies of other universes. To make me doubt that the vanishings are the word of God. To cause me to stumble, in the hour of my greatest testing. It’s no coincidence, you know: as my plans for Hela grew towards culmination, so the demons increased their taunting of me.”

“They were scared you’d destroy them,” Rashmika said. “The mistake they made was to deal with you as a rational individual. If only they had pretended to be demons or angels they might have got somewhere.” She leant over him, until she could smell his breath: old and vinegary, like a disused wine cellar. “They may be demons to you, Dean, I won’t deny it. But don’t deny them to us.”

‘They are demons,“ he said. ”And that’s why I can’t let you have them. I should have had the courage to destroy them years ago.“

“Please,” Rashmika said.

Something else chimed on his couch. Quaiche pursed his lips, closed his eyes in ecstasy or dread.

“It’s done,” he said. “The ship’s in the holdfast. I have what I wanted.”

The viewscreen showed them everything. The Nostalgia for Infinity lay lengthwise in the pen Quaiche had prepared for it, like some captured sea creature of monstrous, mythic proportions. The clasps and supports of the cradle clutched the hull in a hundred places, expertly conforming to its irregularities and architectural flourishes. The damage that the ship had wrought upon itself during its descent—the shedding of the hull around the midsection and the disgorging of so many internal parts—was obvious now, and for a moment Quaiche wondered if his prize would be too weakened to serve his needs. But the doubt vanished immediately: the ship had withstood the stresses of the approach to the holdfast and the final, brutal mating procedure as it came to a crunching stop in the cradle. The harness machinery had been engineered to dampen the impact of that moving mass, but the instant of collision had still sent all the stress indicators into the red. Yet the harness had held—enough of it, anyway—and so had the ship. The lighthugger had not broken her back, her engines had not been ripped away from their outriggers. It had survived the hardest part of its journey, and nothing else that he asked of it would put quite the same load on it as the capture. It was everything that he had anticipated.