Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

Then she stood, still facing them. Scorpio watched with polite indifference. Some pigs would have been stimulated by the presence of a naked human woman, just as there were some humans who were attracted to pigs. But although the points of physiological difference between a female pig and a female human were hardly extreme, it was precisely those differences that mattered to Scorpio.

Khouri steadied herself by holding on to the capsule with one hand. She stood with her knees slightly together, as if at any moment she might collapse. Yet she was able to tolerate the glare now, if only by squinting at them.

She spoke. Her voice was hoarse but firm. “Where am I?”

“You’re on Ararat,” Scorpio said.

“Where.” It was not phrased as a question.

“On Ararat will do for now.”

“Near your main settlement, I’m guessing.”

“As I said…”

“How long has it been?”

“That depends,” Scorpio said. “A couple of days since we picked up the beacon from your capsule. How long you were under the sea, we don’t know. Or how long it took you to reach the planet.”

“A couple of days?” The way she looked at him, it was as if he had said weeks or months. “What exactly took you so long?”

“You’re lucky we got to you as quickly as we did,” Blood said. “And the wakeup schedule wasn’t in our control.”

“Two days… Where’s Clavain? I want to see him. Please don’t anyone tell me you let him die before I got here.”

“You needn’t worry about that,” Clavain said mildly. “As you can see, I’m still very much alive.”

She stared at him for a few seconds with the sneering expression of someone who thought they might be the victim of a poorly executed hoax. “You?”

“Yes.” He offered his palms. “Sorry to be such a disappointment.”

She looked at him for a moment longer, then said, “I’m sorry. It’s just not… quite what I was expecting.”

“I believe I can still make myself useful.” He turned to Blood. “Fetch her a blanket, will you? We don’t want her catching her death of cold. Then I think we’d better let Doctor Valensin perform a comprehensive medical examination.”

“No time for that,” Khouri said, ripping away a few adhesive patches she had missed. “I want you to get me something that can cross water. And some weapons.” She paused, then added, “And some food and water. And some clothes.”

“You seem in a bit of a hurry,” Clavain said. “Can’t it wait until morning? It’s been twenty-three years, after all. There must be a great deal to talk about.”

“You have no fucking idea,” she said.

Blood handed Clavain a blanket. He stepped forward and offered it to Khouri. She wrapped it around herself without any real enthusiasm.

“We can do boats,” Clavain said, “and guns. But I think it might help if we had some idea just why you need them right this moment.”

“Because of my baby,” Khouri said.

Clavain nodded politely. “Your baby.”

“My daughter. Her name’s Aura. She’s here, on… what did you say this place was called?”

“Ararat,” Clavain said.

“OK, she’s here on Ararat. And I’ve come to rescue her.”

Clavain glanced at his companions. “And where would your daughter be, exactly?”

“About eight hundred kilometres away,” Khouri said. “Now get me those weps. And an incubator. And someone who knows field surgery.”

“Why field surgery?” Clavain asked.

“Because,” Khouri replied, “you’re going to have to get her out of Skade first.”

Rashmika looked up at the scuttler fossil. A symbol of conspicuous wealth, it hung from the ceiling in a large atrium area of the caravan vehicle. Even if it was a fake, or a semi-fake botched together from incompatible parts, it was still the first apparently complete scuttler she had ever seen. She wanted to find a way to climb up there and examine it properly, taking note of the abrasion patterns where the hard carapacial sections slid against each other. Rashmika had only ever read about such things, but she was certain that with an hour of careful study she would be able to tell whether it was authentic, or at the very least exclude the possibility of its being a cheap fake.

Somehow she didn’t think it was very likely to be either cheap or fake.

Mentally, she classified the scuttler body morphology. DK4V8M, she thought. Maybe a DK4V8M, if she was being confused by the play of dust and shadows around the trailing tail-shell. At least it was possible to apply the usual morphological classification scheme. The cheap fakes sometimes threw body parts together in anatomically impossible formations, but mis was definitely a plausible assemblage of components, even if they hadn’t necessarily come from the same burial site.

The scuttlers were a taxonomist’s nightmare. The first time one had been unearthed, it had appeared to be a simple case of reassembling the scattered body parts to make something that looked like a large insect or lobster. The scuttler exhibited a complexity of body sections, with many different highly spe-cialised limbs and sensory organs, but they had all snapped back together in a more or Jess logical fashion, leaving only the soft interior organs to be conjectured.

But the second scuttler hadn’t matched the first. There were a different number of body sections, a different number of limbs. The head and mouth parts looked very dissimilar. Yet—again—all the pieces snapped together to make a complete specimen, with no embarrassing bits left over.

The third hadn’t matched the first or second. Nor the fourth or fifth.

By the time the remains of a hundred scuttlers had been unearthed and reassembled, there were a hundred different versions of the scuttler body-plan.

The theorists groped for an explanation. The implication was that no two scuttlers were born alike. But two simultaneous discoveries shattered that idea overnight. The first was the unearthing of an intact clutch of infant scuttlers. Though there were some differences in body-plan, there were identical infants. Based on their frequency of occurrence, statistics argued that at least three identical adults should already have been discovered. The second discovery—which happened to explain the first—was the unearthing of a pair of adult scuttlers in the same area. They had been found in separated but connected chambers of an underground tunnel system. Their body parts were reassembled, providing another two unique morphologies. But upon closer examination something unexpected was discovered. A young researcher named Kimura had begun to take a particular interest in the patterns caused by the body sections scraping against each other. Something struck her as not quite right about the two new specimens. The scratch marks were inconsistent: a scrape on the edge of one carapace had no matching counterpart on the adjoining one.

At first, Kimura assumed the two clusters of body parts were hoaxes; there was already a small market for that kind of thing. But something made her dig a little deeper. She worried at the problem for weeks, convinced that she was missing something obvious. Then one night, after a particularly busy day examining the scratches at higher and higher magnifications, she slept on it. She dreamed feverish dreams, and when she woke she dashed back to her lab and confirmed her nagging suspicion.

There was a precise match for every scratch—but it was always to be found on the other scuttler. The scuttlers interchanged body parts with each other. That was why no two scuttlers were ever alike. They made themselves dissimilar: swapping components in ritualised ceremonies, then crawling away to their own little hollows to recuperate. As more scuttler pairs were unearthed, so the near-infinite possibilities of the arrangement became apparent. The exchange of body parts had pragmatic value, allowing scuttlers to adapt themselves for particular duties and environments. But there was also an aesthetic purpose to the ritualised swapping: a desire to be as atypical as possible. Scuttlers that had deviated far from the average body plan were socially successful creatures, for they must have participated in many exchanges. The ultimate stigma—so far as Kimura and her colleagues could tell—was for one scuttler to be identical to another. It meant that at least one of the pair was an outcast, unable to find a swap-partner.