Alastair Reynolds: Absolution Gap

Then the subpersona had a hasty change of heart.

Perhaps it was making a mistake. The anomaly, bizarre as it had been, had cleared itself. No further reports of strangeness had emanated from any of the underlying layers. The planet was behaving in the way the subpersona had always assumed planets were supposed to.

With the benefit of a little more time, the layer decided, the event could surely be explained as a perceptual malfunction. It was just a question of going over things again, looking at all the components from the right perspective, thinking outside the box. As a subpersona, that was exactly what it was meant to do. If all it ever did was blindly forward every anomaly that it couldn’t immediately explain, then the crew might as well replace it with another dumb layer. Or, worse, upgrade it to something cleverer.

It cleared the text message from the queen’s device and immediately replaced it with the data she had been viewing just before.

It continued to gnaw away at the problem until, a minute or so later, another anomaly bumped into its in-box. This time it was a thrust imbalance, a niggling one-per-cent jitter in the starboard Conjoiner drive. Faced with a bright new urgency, it chose to put the matter of the planet on the back-burner. Even by the slow standards of shipboard communications, a minute was a long time. With every further minute that passed without the planet misbehaving, the whole vexing event would inevitably drop to a diminished level of priority.

The subpersona would not forget about it—it was incapable of forgetting about anything—but within an hour it would have a great many other things to deal with instead.

Good. It was decided, then. The way to handle it was to pretend it had never happened in the first place.

Thus it was that Queen Jasmina was informed of the sensor event anomaly for only a fraction of a second. And thus it was that no human members of the crew of the Gnostic Ascension —not Jasmina, not Grelier, not Quaiche, nor any of the other Ultras—were ever aware that, for more than half a second, the largest gas giant in the system they were approaching, the system unimaginatively called 107 Piscium, had simply ceased to exist.

Queen Jasmina heard the surgeon-general’s footsteps echoing towards her, approaching along the metal-lined companionway that connected her command chamber to the rest of the ship. As always, Grelier managed not to sound in any particular hurry. Had she tested his loyalty by fawning over Quaiche? she wondered. Perhaps. In which case it was probably time to make Grelier feel valued again.

A flicker on the read-out screens of the skull caught her attention. For a moment a line of text replaced the summaries she was paging through—something about a sensor anomaly.

Queen Jasmina shook the skull. She had always been convinced that the horrid thing was possessed, but increasingly it appeared to be going senile, too. Had she been less superstitious, she would have thrown it away, but dreadful things were rumoured to have happened to those who ignored the skull’s counsel.

A polite knock sounded at the door.

“Enter, Grelier.”

The armoured door eased itself open. Grelier emerged into the chamber, his eyes wide and showing a lot of white as they adjusted to the chamber’s gloom. Grelier was a slim, neatly dressed little man with a flat-topped shock of brilliant white hair. He had the flattened, minimalist features of a boxer. He wore a clean white medical smock and apron; his hands were always gloved. His expression never failed to amuse Jasmina: it always appeared that he was on the point of breaking into tears or laughter. It was an illusion: the surgeon-general had little familiarity with either emotional extreme.

“Busy in the body factory, Grelier?”

“A wee bit, ma’am.”

“I’m anticipating a period of high demand ahead. Production mustn’t slacken.”

“Little danger of that, ma’am.”

“Just as long as you’re aware of it.” She sighed. “Well, niceties over with. To business.”

Grelier nodded. “I see you’ve already made a start.”

While awaiting his arrival, she had strapped her body into the throne, leather cuffs around her ankles and thighs, a thick band around her belly, her right arm fixed to the chair rest, with only her left arm free to move. She held the skull in her left hand, its face turned towards her so that she could view the read-out screens bulging from its eye sockets. Prior to picking up the skull she had inserted her right arm into a skeletal machine bracketed to the side of the chair. The machine—the alleviator—was a cage of rough black ironwork equipped with screw-driven pressure pads. They were already pressing uncomfortably against her skin.

“Hurt me,” Queen Jasmina said.

Grelier’s expression veered momentarily towards a smile. He approached the throne and examined the arrangement of the alleviator. Then he commenced tightening the screws on the device, adjusting each in sequence by a precise quarter turn at a time. The pressure pads bore down on the skin of the queen’s forearm, which was supported in turn by an underlying arrangement of fixed pads. The care with which Grelier turned the screws made the queen think of someone tuning some ghastly stringed instrument.

It wasn’t pleasant. That was the point.

After a minute or so, Grelier stopped and moved behind the throne. She watched him tug a spool of tubing from the little medical kit he always kept there. He plugged one end of the tubing into an oversized bottle full of something straw-yellow and connected the other to a hypodermic. He hummed and whistled as he worked. He lifted up the bottle and attached it to a rig on the back of the throne, then pushed the hypodermic line into the queen’s upper right arm, fiddling around a little until he found the vein. Then she watched him return to the front of the throne, back into view of the body.

It was a female one this time, but there was no reason that it had to be. Although all the bodies were cultured from Jasmina’s own genetic material, Grelier was able to intervene at an early stage of development and force the body down various sexual pathways. Usually it was boys and girls. Now and then, for a treat, he made weird neuters and intersex variants. They were all sterile, but that was only because it would have been a waste of time to equip them with functioning reproductive systems. It was enough bother installing the neural coupling implants so that she could drive the bodies in the first place.

Suddenly she felt the agony lose its focus. “I don’t want anaesthetic, Grelier.”

“Pain without intermittent relief is like music without silence,” he said. “You must trust my judgement in this matter, as you have always done in the past.”

“I do trust you, Grelier,” she said, grudgingly.

“Sincerely, ma’am?”

“Yes. Sincerely. You’ve always been my favourite. You do appreciate that, don’t you?”

“I have a job to do, ma’am. I simply do it to the limit of my abilities.”

The queen put the skull down in her lap. With her free hand she ruffled the white brush of his hair.

“I’d be lost without you, you know. Especially now.”

“Nonsense, ma’am. Your expertise threatens any day to eclipse my own.”

It was more than automatic flattery: though Grelier had made the study of pain his life’s work, Jasmina was catching up quickly. She knew volumes about the physiology of pain. She knew about nociception; she knew the difference between epi-critic and protopathic pain; she knew about presynaptic blocking and the neospinal pathway. She knew her prostaglandin promoters from her GABA agonists.

But the queen also knew pain from an angle Grelier never would. His tastes lay entirely in its infliction. He did not know it from the inside, from the privileged point of view of the recipient. No matter how acute his theoretical understanding of the subject, she would always have that edge over him.