Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“We’ll make it up. We always do.”

“Drastic measures may be called for if the delay becomes unacceptably large. I want Motive Power to be ready for whatever I ask of them—even the unthinkable.” The couch tilted again, its reflection breaking up and reforming in the slowly moving mirrors. They were set up to guide light from Haldora into Quaiche’s field of view: wherever he sat, he saw the world with his own eyes. “The unthinkable, Grelier,” he added. “You know what I mean by that, don’t you?”

“I think so,” Grelier said. And then thought of blood, and also of bridges. He also thought of the girl he was bringing to the cathedral and wondered if perhaps—just perhaps—he had set in motion something it would no longer be possible to stop.

But he won’t do it , he thought. He’s insane, no one doubts that, but he isn’t that insane. Not so insane that he’d take the Lady Morwenna across the bridge, over Absolution Gap .

The internal map of the Nostalgia for Infinity was a long scroll of scuffed, yellowing paper, anchored at one end by Blood’s knife and at the other by the heavy silver helmet Palfrey had found in the junk. The scroll was covered with a dense crawl of pencil and ink lines. In places it had been erased and redrawn so many times that the paper had the thin translucence of animal skin.

“Is this the best we’ve got?” Blood asked.

“It’s better than nothing,” Antoinette said. “We’re doing our best with very limited resources.”

“All right.” The pig had heard that a hundred times in the last week. “So what does it tell us?”

“It tells us that we have a problem. Did you interview Palfrey?”

“No. Scorp took care of that.”

Antoinette fingered the mass of jewellery packed into her earlobes. “I had a little chat with him as well. I wanted to see how the land was lying. Turns out practically everyone in bilge management is convinced that the Captain is changing his haunt patterns.”

“And?”

“Now that we’ve got the last dozen or so apparitions plotted, I’m beginning to think they’re right.”

The pig squinted at the map, his eyes poorly equipped for discerning the smoke-grey pencil marks in the low light of the conference room. Maps had never really been his thing, even during his days under Scorpio in Chasm City. There, it had hardly mattered. Blood’s motto had always been that if you needed a map to find your way around a neighbourhood, you were already in trouble.

But this map was important. It depicted the Nostalgia for Infinity , the very sea-spire in which they were sitting. The ship was a tapering cone of intricate vertical and horizontal lines, an obelisk engraved with crawling, interlocked hieroglyphics. The lines showed floor levels, interconnecting shafts and major interior partitions. The ship’s huge internal storage bays were unmarked cavities in the diagram.

The ship was four kilometres tall, so there was no space on the map for detail at the human scale. Individual rooms were usually not marked at all unless they had some strategic importance. Mostly, mapping it was a pointless exercise. The ship’s slow processes of interior reorganisation—utterly outside the control of its human occupants—had rendered all such efforts nearly useless within a handful of years.

There were other complications. The high levels of the ship were well charted. Crews were always moving around in these areas, and the constant presence of human activity seemed to have dissuaded the ship from changing itself too much. But the deep levels, and especially those that lay below sea level, were nowhere near as well visited. Teams only went down there when they had to, and when they did they usually found that the interior failed utterly to conform to their expectations. And the transformed parts of the ship—warped according to queasy, biological archetypes—were by their very nature difficult to map with any accuracy. Blood had been down into some of the most severely distorted zones of the deep ship levels. The experience had been akin to the exploration of some nightmarish cave system.

It was not only the interior of the ship that remained uncertain. Before descending from orbit, the lighthugger had prepared itself for landing by flattening its stern. In the chaos of that descent, very few detailed observations of the changes had been possible. And since the lower kilometre of the ship—including the twin nacelles of the Conjoiner drives—was now almost permanently submerged, there had been little opportunity to improve matters in the meantime. Divers had explored only the upper hundred metres of the submerged parts, but even their reports had revealed little that was not already known. Sensors could probe deeper, but the cloudy shapes that they returned showed only that the basic form of the ship was more or less intact. The crucial question of whether or not the drives would ever work again could not be answered. Through his own nervous system of data connections the Captain presumably knew the degree of spaceworthiness of ship. But the Captain wasn’t talking.

Until, perhaps, now.

Antoinette had marked with annotated red stars all recent and reliable apparitions of John Brannigan. Blood peered at the dates and comments, the handwritten remarks which gave details of the type of apparition and the associated witness or witnesses. He dabbed at the map with his knife, scraping the blade gently against it, scything arcs and feints against the pencil marks.

“He’s moving up,” Blood observed.

Antoinette nodded. A lock of hair had come loose, hanging across her face. “That’s what I thought, too. Judging by this, I’d say Palfrey and his friends have a point.”

“What about the dates? See any patterns there?”

“Only that things looked pretty normal until a month or so ago.”

“And now?”

“Draw your own conclusions,” she said. “Me, I think the map speaks for itself. The hauntings have changed. The Captain’s suddenly become restless. He’s increased the range and boldness of his haunts, showing up in parts of the ship where we’ve never seen him before. If I included the reports I didn’t think were entirely trustworthy, you’d see red marks all the way up to the administration levels.”

“But you don’t believe those, do you?”

Antoinette pushed back the stray strands of hair. “No, right now I don’t. But a week ago I wouldn’t have believed half of the others, either. Now all it’d take is one good witness above level six hundred.”

“And then what?”

“All bets would be off. We’d have to accept that the Captain’s woken up.”

In Blood’s view this was already a given. “It can’t be down to Khouri, can it? If the Captain had started behaving differ-ently today, then I could believe it. But if this is real, it started weeks ago. She wasn’t here then.”

“But they’d arrived in-system by then,” Antoinette pointed out. “The battle was already here. How do we know the Captain wasn’t sensitive to that? He’s a ship . His senses reach out for light-hours in all directions. Being anchored to a planet doesn’t change that.”

“We don’t know that Khouri was telling the truth,” Blood said.

Antoinette used her red marker to add another star, one that corresponded to Palfrey’s report. “I’d say we do now,” she said.

“All right. One other thing. If the Cap’s woken up…”

She looked at him, waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Yes?”

“Do you think it means he wants something?”

Antoinette picked up the helmet, causing the map to roll back on itself with a snapping sound. “Guess one of us is going to have to ask him,” she replied.