Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“Don’t you want to know my name?” the man asked.

“Not unless you want to tell me.”

“You’re curious, though?”

“I was told to expect a visitor. That’s all I need to know.”

The man smiled. “That’s a very good policy. You can call me Grelier.”

The quaestor inclined his head. There had been a Grelier involved in Hela’s affairs since the very earliest days of the settlement, after the witnessing of the first vanishing. He presumed the Grelier family had continued to play a role in the church ever since, down through the generations. “It’s a pleasure to have you aboard the caravan, Mr. Grelier.”

“I won’t be here long. Just wanted, as I said, a wee word.” He stopped feeding Peppermint, dropping the remaining seeds on the floor. Then he bent down and retrieved the white case, setting it on his lap. Peppermint started cleaning itself, making prayerlike motions. “Has anyone come aboard lately, Quaestor?”

“There are always people coming and going.”

“I mean lately, last few days.”

“Well, there’s Crozet, I suppose.”

The man nodded and flipped open the lid of his case. It was, the quaestor saw, a medical kit. It was full of syringes, racked next to each other like little pointy-headed soldiers. “Tell me about Crozet.”

“One of our regular traders. Makes his living in the Vigrid region, keeps himself to himself. Has a wife named Linxe, and a son, Culver.”

“They’re here now? I saw an icejammer winched against your machine as I came in.”

“That’s his,” the quaestor said.

“Anyone else come in on it?”

“Just the girl.”

The man raised his eyebrows. Like his hair, they were the colour of new snow under moonlight. “Girl? You said he had a son, not a daughter.”

“She was travelling with them. Not a relative, a hitchhiker. Name of…” The quaestor pretended to rack his memory. “Rashmika. Rashmika Els. Sixteen, seventeen standard years.”

“Had your eye on her, did you?”

“She made an impression. She couldn’t help but make an impression.” The quaestor’s hands felt like two balls of eels, sliding slickly against each other. “She had a certainty about her, a determination you don’t see very often, especially not in one her age. She seemed to be on a mission.”

The man reached into the case and took out a clear syringe. “What was her relationship to Crozet? Everything above-board?”

“As far as I know she was just his passenger.”

“You heard about the missing-persons report? A girl running away from her family in the Vigrid badlands? The local constabulary enquiring after a possible saboteur?”

“That was her? I didn’t put two and two together, I’m afraid.”

“Good for you that you didn’t.” He held the syringe up to the light, his face distorted through the glass. “Or you might have sent her back where she came from.”

“That wouldn’t have been good?”

“We’d rather she stayed on the caravan for now. She’s of interest to us, you see. Give me your arm.”

The quaestor rolled up his sleeve and leant across the table. Peppermint eyed him, pausing in its ablutions. The quaestor could not refuse. The command had been issued so calmly that there could be no prospect of disobedience. The syringe was clear: he had come to take blood, not give it.

The quaestor forced himself to remain calm. “Why does she have to stay on the caravan?”

“So she gets to where she has to get to.” Grelier slid the needle in. “Any complaints from your usual acquisitions department, Quaestor?”

“Complaints?”

“About Crozet. About him making a bit more out of his scuttler junk than he normally does.”

“The usual mutterings.”

“This time there might be something in them. The girl sat in on his dealings, didn’t she?”

The quaestor realised that his interrogator knew the answer to almost every question he had come to ask. He watched the syringe as it filled with his blood. “She seemed curious,” he said. “She says she’s interested in scuttler relics. Fancies herself as a bit of a scholar. I didn’t see any harm in letting her sit in. It was Crozet’s decision, not mine.”

“I bet it was. The girl has a talent, Quaestor, a God-given gift: she can detect lies. She reads microexpressions in the human face, the subliminal signals most of us barely notice. They scream at her, like great neon signs.”

“I don’t see…”

He pulled out the syringe. “The girl was reading your acquisitions negotiators, seeing how sincere they were when they said they’d reached their limit. Sending covert signals to Crozet.”

“How do you know?”

“I was expecting her to show up. I listened for the signs. They brought me here, to this caravan.”

“But she’s just a girl.”

“Joan of Arc was just a girl. Look at the bloody mess she left behind.” He put a plaster on the quaestor’s arm, then slid the syringe into a special niche in the side of the case. The blood drained out as the plunger was pushed down by a mechanical piston. The case hummed and chugged to itself.

“If you want to see her…” the quaestor began.

“No, I don’t want to see her. Not yet, at least. What I want is for you to keep her in your sight until you reach the Way. She mustn’t return with Crozet. Your job is to make sure she stays aboard the caravan.”

The quaestor pulled down his sleeve. “I’ll do my best.”

“You’ll do more than your best.” With the case still on his lap he reached over and picked Peppermint up, holding the stiff creature in the fist of one of his vacuum suit gauntlets. With the other hand he took hold of one of Peppermint’s fore-limbs and pulled it off. The creature thrashed wildly, emitting a horrid shrill whistle.

“Oh,” Grelier said. “Now look what I’ve done.”

“No,” the quaestor said, frozen in shock.

Grelier placed the tormented animal back down on the table and flicked the severed arm to the floor. “It’s just a limb. Plenty more where that came from.”

Peppermint’s tail writhed in agonised coils.

“Now let’s talk particulars,” Grelier said. He reached into a pocket of his suit and pulled out a small metal tube. The quaestor flinched, one eye still on his mutilated pet. Grelier nudged the tube across the table. “The girl is a problem,” he said. “She has the potential to be useful to the dean, although he doesn’t know it yet.”

The quaestor tried to hold his voice together. “You actually know the dean?”

“On and off.”

“You’d know if he was alive, I mean?”

“He’s alive. He just doesn’t get out of the Clocktower very often.” Grelier looked at Peppermint again. “Ask a lot of questions for a caravan master, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Open the tube.”

The quaestor did as he was told. Inside, tightly rolled, were two pieces of paper. He pulled them out gently and flattened them on the table. One was a letter. The other contained a series of cryptic markings.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with these.”

“That’s all right, I’ll tell you. The letter, you keep here. The markings, including the tube, you give to a man named Pietr.”

“I don’t know anyone called Pietr.”

“You should. He’s a pilgrim, already aboard your caravan. A wee bit on the unstable side.”

“Unstable?”

Ignoring him, Grelier tapped the case, which was still humming and gurgling to itself as it assayed the quaestor’s blood. “Most of the virus strains in circulation aren’t particularly dangerous. They induce religious feelings or visions, but they don’t directly meddle with the host’s sense of self. What Pietr has is different. We call it DEUS-X. It’s a rare mutation of the original indoctrinal virus that we’ve tried to keep the lid on. It places him at the centre of his own private cosmos. He doesn’t always realise it, but the virus is rewiring his sense of reality such that he becomes his own God. He’ll be drawn to the Way, to one or other of the orthodox churches, but he’ll always feel in conflict With conventional doctrine. He’ll bounce from one sect to another, always feeling himself on the verge of enlightenment. His choices will become more and more extreme, pushing him towards odder and odder manifestations of Haldora worship, like the Observers.”