Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

But there was no sign of pursuit. Admittedly Crozet’s machine was fast, but on the few occasions when they surmounted a rise, giving them a chance to look back fifteen or twenty kilometres along the trail, there was nothing behind them.

Nonetheless, Rashmika remained anxious despite Crozet’s assurances that there were no faster routes by which they might be cut off further on down the trail. Now and then, to oblige her, Crozet tuned into the village radio band, but most of the time he found only static. Nothing unusual about that, for radio reception on Hela was largely at the whim of the magnetic storms roiling around Haldora. There were other modes of communication—tight-beam laser-communication between satellites and ground stations, fibreoptic land lines—but most of these channels were under church control and in any case Crozet subscribed to none of them. He had means of tapping into some of them when he needed to, but now, he said, was not the time to risk drawing someone’s attention. When Crozet did finally tune into a non-garbled transmission from Vigrid, however, and Rashmika was able to listen to the daily news service for major villages, it was not what she had been expecting. While there were reports of cave-ins, power outages and the usual ups and downs of village life, there was no mention at all of anyone going missing. At seventeen, Rashmika was still under the legal care of her parents, so they would have had every right to report her absence. Indeed, they would have been breaking the law by failing to report her missing.

Rashmika was more troubled by this than she cared to admit. On one level she wanted to slip away unnoticed, the way she had always planned it. But at the same time the more childish part of her craved some sign that her absence had been noted. She wanted to feel missed.

When she had given the matter some further thought, she decided that her parents must be waiting to see what happened in the next few hours. She had, after all, not yet been away for more than half a day. If she had gone about her usual daily business, she would still have been at the library. Perhaps they were working on the assumption that she had left home unusually early that morning. Perhaps they had managed not to notice the note she had left for them, or the fact that her surface suit was missing from the locker.

But after sixteen hours there was still no news.

Her habits were erratic enough that her parents might not have worried about her absence for ten or twelve hours, but after sixteen—even if by some miracle they had missed the other rather obvious clues—there could be no doubt in their minds about what had happened. They would know she was gone. They would have to report it to the authorities, wouldn’t they?

She wondered. The authorities in the badlands were not exactly known for their ruthless efficiency. It was conceivable that the report of her absence had simply failed to reach the right desk. Allowing for bureaucratic inertia at all levels, it might not get there until the following day. Or perhaps the authorities were well informed but had decided not to notify the news channels for some reason. It was tempting to believe that, but at the same time she could think of no reason why they would delay.

Still, maybe there would be a security block around the next corner. Crozet didn’t seem to think so. He was driving as fast and-as nonchalantly as ever. His icejammer knew these old ice trails so well that he merely seemed to be giving it vague suggestions about which direction to head in.

Towards the end of the first day’s travel, when Crozet was ready to pull in for the night, they picked up the news channel one more time. By then Rashmika had been on the road for the better part of twenty hours. There was still no sign that anyone had noticed.

She felt dejected, as if for her entire life she had fatally overestimated her importance in even the minor scheme of things in the Vigrid badlands.

Then, belatedly, another possibility occurred to her. It was so obvious that she should have thought of it immediately. It made vastly more sense than any of the unlikely contingencies she had considered so far.

Her parents, she decided, were well aware that she had left. They knew exactly when and they knew exactly why. She had been coy about her plans in the letter she had left for them, but she had no doubt that her parents would have been able to guess the broad details with reasonable accuracy. They even knew that she had continued to associate with Linxe after the scandal.

No. They knew what she was doing, and they knew it was all about her brother. They knew that she was on a mission of love, or if not love, then fury. And the reason they had told no one was because, secretly, despite all that they had said to her over the years, despite all the warnings they had given her about the risks of getting too close to the churches, they wanted her to succeed. They were, in their quiet and secret way, proud of what she had decided to do.

When she realised this, it hit home with the force of truth.

“It’s all right,” she told Crozet. “There won’t be any mention of me on the news.”

He shrugged. “What makes you so certain now?”

“I just realised something, that’s all.”

“You look like you need a good night’s sleep,” Linxe said. She had brewed hot chocolate: Rashmika sipped it appreciatively. It was a long way from the nicest cup of hot chocolate anyone had ever made for her, but right then she couldn’t think of any drink that had ever tasted better.

“I didn’t sleep much last night,” Rashmika admitted. “Too worried about making it out this morning.”

“You did grand,” Linxe said. “When you get back, everyone will be very proud of you.”

“I hope so,” Rashmika said.

“I have to ask one thing, though,” Linxe said. “You don’t have to answer. Is this just about your brother, Rashmika? Or is there more to it than that?”

The question took Rashmika aback. “Of course it’s only about my brother.”

“It’s just that you already have a bit of a reputation,” Linxe said. “We’ve all heard about the amount of time you spend in the digs, and that book you’re making. They say there isn’t anyone else in the villages as interested in the scuttlers as Rashmika Els. They say you write letters to the church-sponsored archaeologists, arguing with them.”

“I can’t help it if the scuttlers interest me,” she said.

“Yes, but what exactly is it you’ve got such a bee in your bonnet about?”

The question was phrased kindly, but Rashmika couldn’t help sounding irritated when she said, “I’m sorry?”

“I mean, what is it you think everyone else has got so terribly wrong?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“I’m as interested in hearing your side of the argument as anyone else’s.”

“Except deep down you probably don’t care who’s right, do you? As long as stuff keeps coming out of the ground, what does anyone really care about what happened to the scuttlers? All you care about is getting spare parts for your icejammer.”

“Manners, young lady,” Linxe admonished.

“I’m sorry,” Rashmika said, blushing. She sipped on the hot chocolate. “I didn’t mean it like that. But I do care about the scuttlers and I do think no one is very interested in the truth of what really happened to them. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the Amarantin.”

Linxe looked at her. “The what?”

“The Amarantin were the aliens who evolved on Resurgam. They were evolved birds.” She remembered drawing one of them for her book—not as a skeleton, but as they must have looked when they were alive. She had seen the Amarantin in her mind’s eye: the bright gleam of an avian eye, the quizzical beaked smile of a sleek alien head. Her drawing had resembled nothing in the official reconstructions in the other archaeology texts, but it had always looked more authentically alive to her than those dead impressions, as if she had seen a living Amarantin and they had only had bones to go on. It made her wonder if her drawings of living scuttlers had the same vitality.