Alastair Reynolds: Absolution Gap

It isn’t the end of everything. Worlds are being evacuated as the greenfly machines sweep through their systems. But after the catastrophic mismanagement of the first few evacuations, things move more smoothly now. The authorities are ahead of the wave. They know all the tricks of crowd-control.

She looks out into darkness again. The greenfly machines move slowly: there are still colonies out there that won’t fall victim to them for hundreds, even thousands of years. There is still time to live and love. Rejuvenation, even for an old demi-Conjoiner, has its allure. They say there are settled worlds in the Pleiades now. From there, the wave of green-stained suns must seem pretty remote, pretty unthreatening.

But by the time she gets to the Pleiades, she will be another four hundred years downstream from her birth.

She thinks, as she often does, about the messages from the shadows. They had also spoken of being harried by machines that turned stars green. She wonders, not for the first time, if that could really be a coincidence. Under the ruling paradigm of brane theory, the message must have come from the present, rather than the distant future or the distant past. But what if the theory was wrong? What if all of it—the shadow branes, the bulk, the gravitational signalling—was just a convenient fiction to dress up an even stranger truth?

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think she ever will know.

She isn’t sure she wants to.

She turns from the sky, directing her attention to the ocean. It was here that they died, back when this place was called Ararat. No one calls it that now: no one even remembers that Ararat was ever its name. But she remembers.

She remembers seeing that moon being shattered as the Inhibitors deflected the energy of the cache-weapon while the Nostalgia for Infinity made its escape.

Inhibitors. Cache-weapon. Nostalgia for Infinity : they are like the incantations of a childhood game, forgotten for years. They sound faintly ridiculous, yet also freighted with a terrible significance.

She hadn’t really seen the moon being shattered, if truth be told. It was her mother who had seen it. But her memories made no great distinction between the one and the other. She had been a witness, even if she had seen things through another’s eyes.

She thinks of Antoinette, Xavier, Blood and the others: all the people who by choice or compulsion—had remained on Ararat while the starship made its escape. None of them could have survived the phase of bombardment when the pieces of the ruined moon began to hit the ocean. They would have drowned, as tsunamis washed away their fragile little surface communities.

Unless, she thinks, they chose to drown before then. What if the sea welcomed them? The Pattern Jugglers had already co-operated in the departure of the ship. Was it such a leap of imagination to think of them saving the remaining islanders?

People had been living here for four hundred years, swimmers amongst them. Sometimes, the records said, they spoke of encountering ghost impressions: other, older minds. Were the islanders amongst them, preserved in the living memory of the sea after all these years?

The glowing smudges in the water now surround the jetty. She had made a decision even before she descended the transit stalk: she will swim, and she will open her mind to the ocean. And she will tell the ocean everything that she knows: everything that is going to happen to this place when the terraformers arrive. No one knows what will happen when the greenfly machines touch the alien organism of a Juggler sea, which one will assimilate the other. It is an experiment that has not yet been performed. Perhaps the ocean will absorb the machines harmlessly, as it has absorbed so much else. Perhaps there will be a kind of stalemate. Or perhaps this world, like dozens before it, will be ripped apart and remade, in a fury of reorganisation.

She does not know what that will mean for the minds now in the ocean. On some level, she is certain, they already know what is about to happen. They cannot have failed to pick up the nuances of panic as the human population made its escape plans. But she thinks it unlikely that anyone has swum with the specific purpose of telling the world what is to come. It might not make any difference. On the other hand, quite literally, it might make all the difference in the world.

It is, she supposes, a matter of courtesy. Everything that happens here, everything that will happen, is her responsibility.

She issues another command to the butterflies. The white armour dissipates, the mechanical insects fluttering in a cloud above her head. They linger, not straying too far, but leaving her naked on the jetty.

She risks a glance back towards her protector. She can just see his silhouette against the milky background of the sky, his childlike form leaning against a walking stick. He is looking away, his head bobbing impatiently. He wants to leave very much, but she doesn’t blame him for that.

She sits on the edge of the jetty. The water roils around her in anticipation. Things move within it: shapes and phantasms. She will swim for a little while, and open her mind. She does not know how long it will take, but she will not leave until she is ready. If her protector has already departed—she does not think this is very likely, but it must still be considered—then she will have to make other plans.

She slips into the sea, into the glowing green memory of Ararat.