Alastair Reynolds: Absolution Gap

“Not them,” Rashmika agreed. “Not in a million years. They’d never have left behind anything that marvellous.”

“It’s not too late,” Vasko said.

Scorpio turned to him, catching the distorted reflection of his own face in the man’s helmet. “Not too late for what, son?”

“To go back inside. Fifteen minutes. Say, thirteen or fourteen, to be on the safe side. I could get to the garret in time.”

“And haul that suit down the stairs?” Khouri asked. “It won’t fit in the elevator.”

“I could smash the window of the garret. With two of us, we ought to be able to push the suit over the side.”

“I thought the idea was to save it,” Scorpio said.

“It’s a lot less of a drop from the garret to the ice than from the bridge to the bottom of the Gap,” Rashmika said. “It would probably survive, with some damage.”

“Twelve minutes, if you want to play safe,” Khouri said.

“I could still do it,” Vasko said. “What about you, Scorp? Could you make it, if we had to?”

“I probably could, if I didn’t have anything planned for the rest of my life.”

“I’ll take that as a no, then.”

“We made a decision, Vasko. Where I come from, we tend to stick with them.”

Vasko craned his neck to take in the highest extremities of the Lady Morwenna. Scorpio found himself doing the same thing, even though it made him dizzy to look up. Against the fixed stars over Hela, the cathedral hardly seemed to be moving at all. But it was not the fixed stars that were the problem: it was the twenty bright new ones strung in a ragged necklace around the planet. They couldn’t stay up there for ever, Scorpio thought. The Captain had done the right thing by protecting his sleepers from the uncertainties of the holdfast, even if it had been a kind of suicide. But sooner or later someone was going to have to do something about those eighteen thousand sleeping souls.

Not my problem , Scorpio thought. Someone else could take care of that one. “I didn’t think I’d make it this far,” he said under his breath.

“Scorp?” Khouri asked.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Just wondering what the hell a fifty-year-old pig is doing this far from home.”

“Making a difference,” Khouri said. “Like we always knew you would.”

“She’s right,” Rashmika agreed. “Thank you, Scorpio. You didn’t have to do what you did. I’ll never forget it.”

And I’ll never forget the screams of my friend as I dug into him with that scalpel , Scorpio thought. But what choice had he had? Clavain had never blamed him; had, in fact, done everything in his power to absolve him of any feelings of guilt. The man was about to die horribly, and the only thing that really mattered to him was sparing his friend any emotional distress. Why couldn’t Scorpio honour Clavain’s memory by letting go of the hatred? He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t the pig’s fault. It hadn’t been Clavain’s, either. And the one person whose fault it definitely hadn’t been was Aura.

“Scorp?” she asked.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” he said.

Khouri put an arm around his shoulder. “I’m glad you made it as well, Scorp. Thank you for coming back, for all of us.”

“A pig’s got to do… ” he said.

They stood in silence, watching the cathedral narrow the distance between itself and the edge of the bridge. For more than a century it had kept moving, never once losing the endless race with Haldora. One-third of a metre per second, for every second of every day, every day of every year. And now that same clocklike inevitability was sending it to its destruction.

“Scorp,” Rashmika said, breaking the spell, “even if we destroy the scrimshaw suit, what do we do about the machinery in Haldora? It’s still there. It’s still just as capable of letting them through.”

“If we had one more cache weapon… ” Khouri said.

“If wishes were horses,” Scorpio answered. He stomped his feet to keep warm: either there was something wrong with the suit, or there was something wrong with him. “Look, we’ll find a way to destroy it, or at least throw a spanner into it. Or else they’ll show us.”

“They?” she asked.

“The ones we haven’t met yet. But they’re out there, you can count on that. They’ve been watching and waiting, taking notes.”

“What if we’re wrong?” Khouri asked. “What if they’re waiting to see if we’re clever enough to contact the shadows? What if that’s the right thing to do?”

“Then we’ll have added a new enemy to the list,” Scorpio said. “And hey, if that happens…”

“What?”

“It’s not the end of the world. Trust me on this: I’ve been collecting enemies since I drew my first breath.”

For another minute no one said anything. The Lady Mor-wenna continued its crunching advance towards oblivion. The twin fire trails of the Nostalgia for Infinity continued to bisect the sky, like the first tentative sketch towards a new constellation.

“So what you’re saying is,” Vasko said, “we should just do what we think is right, even if they don’t like it?”

“More or less. Of course, it may be the right thing as well. All depends on what happened to the scuttlers, really.”

“They certainly pissed someone off,” Khouri said.

“Amen to that,” Scorpio replied, laughing. “My kind of species. We’d have got on famously.”

He couldn’t help himself. Here I am , he thought: critically injured, most likely more than half-dead, having in the last day lost both my ship and some of my best friends. I’ve just killed my way through a cathedral, murdering anyone who had the insolence to stand in my way. I’m about to watch the utter destruction of something that might—just might — be the most important discovery in human history, the only thing capable of standing between us and the Inhibitors. And I’m standing here laughing, as if the only thing at stake is a good night out .

Typical pig , he concluded: no sense of perspective . Sometimes, occasionally, it was the one thing in the universe he was most grateful for.

Too much perspective could be bad for you.

“Scorp?” Khouri said. “Do you mind if I ask you something, before we get separated again?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask, and find out.”

“Why did you save that shuttle, the one from the Wild Pallas ? What stopped you firing on it, even when you saw the Inhibitor machines? You saved those people.”

Did she know? he wondered. He had missed so much during the nine extra years for which he had been frozen. It was possible that she had found out, confirmed that which he had only suspected.

He remembered something that Antoinette Bax had said to him just before they had parted. She had wondered if they would ever meet again. It was a big universe, he had said: big enough for a few coincidences. Maybe for some people, Antoinette had replied, but not for the likes of Scorpio and her. And she had been right, too. He knew that they were never go-ing to meet each other again. Scorpio had smiled to himself: he knew exactly what she meant. He didn’t believe in miracles either. But where exactly did you draw the line? But he knew now, with absolute confidence, that she had also been wrong. It didn’t happen for the likes of Scorpio and Antoinette. But for other people? Sometimes things like that just happened .

He knew. He had seen the names of all the evacuees on the shuttle they had rescued from the Yellowstone system. And one name in particular had stood out. The man had even made an impression on him, when he had seen the shuttle being unloaded. He remembered his quiet dignity, the need for someone to share what he felt, but not to take that load from him. The man had—like all the other passengers—probably been frozen ever since.