Alastair Reynolds: Absolution Gap

“And the suit, Scorp? The thing I came all this way to find?”

“We need to have a word about that,” he said.

They rode the elevator up to the garret, the low sun sliding colours across their faces.

Scorpio reached into his suit pocket. “Remontoire gave me this,” he said.

Rashmika took the piece of conch material, examined it with the cautious, critical eye of someone who has lived amongst fossils and bones and who knows that the slightest scratch can speak volumes—both truthful and false.

“I don’t recognise it,” she said.

He told her everything that he had learned from Remontoire, everything that Remontoire had guessed or conjectured.

“We’re not alone in this,” Scorpio said. “There’s someone else out there. We don’t even have a name for them. We only know them from the wreckage they leave behind.”

“They left this behind on Ararat?”

“And around Ararat,” he said. “And elsewhere, you can bet. Whoever they are, they must have been out there a long time. They’re clever, Aura.” He used her real name deliberately. “They’d have to be, to have lived with the Inhibitors for so long.”

“I don’t understand what they have to do with us.”

“Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe everything. It depends on what happened to the scuttlers. That’s where you come in, I think.”

Her voice was flat as she said, “Everyone knows what happened to the scuttlers.”

“Which is?”

“They were destroyed by the Inhibitors.”

He watched the colours paint her face. She looked radiant and dangerous, like an avenging angel in an illuminated heretical gospel. “And what do you think?”

“I don’t think the Inhibitors had anything to do with the extinction of the scuttlers. I never have: not since I started paying attention, at least. It didn’t look like an Inhibitor cull to me. Too much was left behind. It was thorough, don’t get me wrong, but not thorough enough.” She paused, cast her face down as if embarrassed. “That was what my book was about: the one I was working on when I lived in the badlands. It was a thesis, proving my hypothesis through the accumulation of data.”

“No one would have listened to you,” he said. “But if it’s any consolation, I think you’re right. The question is: what did the shadows have to do with any of this?”

“I don’t know.”

“When we came here, we thought it was simple. The evidence pointed to one conclusion: that the scuttlers had been wiped out by the Inhibitors.”

“That’s what the scrimshaw suit told me,” Rashmika said. “The scuttlers built the mechanism to receive the signals from the shadows. But they didn’t take the final step: they didn’t allow the shadows to cross over to help them.”

“But now we have the chance not to make the same mistake,” Scorpio said.

“Yes,” Rashmika said, sounding wary of a trap. “But you don’t think we should do it, do you?”

“I think the mistake the scuttlers made was to contact the shadows,” Scorpio said.

Rashmika shook her head. “The shadows didn’t wipe out the scuttlers. That doesn’t make any sense, either. We know that they’re at least as powerful as the Inhibitors. They wouldn’t have left a trace behind here. And if they had crossed over, why would they still be pleading for the chance to do so?”

“Exactly,” Scorpio said.

Rashmika echoed him. “Exactly?”

“It wasn’t the Inhibitors that annihilated the scuttlers,” he said. “And it wasn’t the shadows, either. It was whoever—or whatever—made that shard of conch material.”

She gave it back to him, as if the thing were in some way tainted. “Do you have any proof of this, Scorp?”

“None whatsoever. But if we were to dig around on Hela—really dig—I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually turned up something like this. Just a shard would do. Of course, there’s another way to test my theory.”

She shook her head, as if trying to clear it. “But what did the scuttlers do that meant they had to be wiped out of existence?”

“They made the wrong decision,” he said.

“Which was?”

“They negotiated with the shadows. That was the test, Aura, that was what the conch-makers were waiting for. They knew that the one thing the scuttlers shouldn’t do was open the door to the shadows. You can’t beat one enemy by doing a deal with something worse. We’d better ensure that we don’t make the same mistake.”

“The conch-makers don’t sound much better than the shadows—or the Inhibitors—in that case.”

“I’m not saying we have to climb into bed with them, just that we might want to take them into consideration. They’re here, Aura, in this system. Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t watching our every move.”

The elevator ascended in silence for several more seconds. Eventually Rashmika said, “You haven’t actually come for the scrimshaw suit at all, have you?”

“I had an open mind,” Scorpio said.

“And now?”

“You’ve helped me make it up. It isn’t leaving the Lady Morwenna.”

“Then Dean Quaiche was right,” Rashmika said. “He always said the suit was full of demons.”

The elevator slowed. Scorpio placed the shard of conch material back in his belt pouch, then retrieved Clavain’s knife. “Stay here,” he said. “If I don’t come back out of that room in two minutes, take the elevator down to the surface. And then get the hell out of the cathedral.”

The four of them stood on the ice: Rashmika and her mother, Vasko and the pig. They had walked with the Lady Morwenna since leaving it, following the immense thing as it continued its journey towards the attenuated stump of the bridge thrusting out from the edge of the cliff. They were actually standing on that last part of the bridge, a good kilometre out from the cliff wall.

It seemed very unlikely that there was anyone left alive aboard the cathedral now, but Scorpio had resigned himself to never knowing that for certain. He had swept the main spaces looking for survivors, but there were almost certainly dozens of pressurised hiding places he would never have found. It was, he thought, enough that he had tried. In his present weakened state, even that had been more than^anyone could have expected.

In other respects, nothing very much about the Lady Morwenna had changed. The lower levels had been depressurised, as he had discovered when he climbed aboard using the line that the technician had dropped down from the propulsion chamber. But the great machines evidently worked as well in vacuum as in air: there had been no hesitation in the cathedral’s onward march, and the subsystems of electrical generation had not been affected. High up in the garret of the Clocktower, lights still burned. But no one moved up there, nor in any of the other windows that shone in the moving edifice.

“How far now?” Scorpio asked.

“Two hundred metres to the edge,” Vasko said, “near as I can judge.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Rashmika said. “Then the front half of her will be over thin air—assuming that the remaining part of the bridge holds her that far.”

“I think it’ll hold,” Scorpio said. “I think it would have held all the way over, to be honest.”

“That would have been something to see,” Khouri said.

“I guess we’ll never know what made the bridge,” Vasko said. Next to him, one of the huge feet was hoisted into the air by the complex machinery of the flying buttress. The foot moved forwards, then descended silently on to the ice.

Scorpio thought of the message he,had intercepted via his suit. “One of life’s mysteries,” he said. “It wasn’t the scuttlers, though. We can be sure of that.”