Alastair Reynolds: Absolution Gap

The suit was a punishment device, its existence no more than a cruel rumour. Until this moment.

The queen put people in the suit. It kept them alive and fed them sensory information. It protected them from the sleeting radiation of interstellar flight when they were entombed, for years at a time, in the ice of the ship’s ablative shield.

The lucky ones were dead when they pulled them out of the suit.

Quaiche tried to stop the tremble in his voice. “If you look at things one way, we didn’t really… we didn’t really do too badly… all things considered. There was no material damage to the ship. No crew fatalities or major injuries. No contamination incidents. No unforeseen expenditures…” He fell silent, looking hopefully at Jasmina.

“That’s the best you can come up with? You were supposed to make us rich, Quaiche. You were supposed to turn our fortunes around in these difficult times, greasing the wheels of trade with your innate charm and grasp of planetary psychologies and landscapes. You were supposed to be our golden goose.”

He shifted uneasily.

“Yet in five systems all you found was junk.”

“You chose the systems, not me. It isn’t my fault if there wasn’t anything worth finding.”

Slowly and worryingly the queen shook her head. “No, Quaiche. Not that easy, I’m afraid. You see, a month ago we intercepted something. It was a transmission, a two-way trade dialogue between a human colony on Chaloupek and the lighthugger Faint Memory of Hokusai . Ring any bells?”

“Not really…”

But it did.

“The Hokusai was entering Gliese 664 just as we departed that system. It was the second system you swept for us. Your report was…” The queen hoisted the skull to the side of her head, listening to its chattering jaw. “Let’s see… ‘nothing of value found on Opincus or the other three terrestrial worlds; only minor items of discarded technology recovered on moons five to eight of the Haurient giant… nothing in the inner asteroid fields, D-type swarms, Trojan points or major K-belt concentrations.’”

Quaiche could see where this was heading. “And the Faint Memory of Hokusai ?”

“The trade dialogue was absolutely fascinating. By all accounts, the Hokusai located a cache of buried trade items around one century old. Pre-war, pre-plague. Very valuable stuff: not merely technological artefacts, but also art and culture, much of it unique. I hear they made enough on that to buy themselves an entirely new layer of ablative hull cladding.” She looked at him expectantly. “Any comments, thoughts, on that?”

“My report was honest,” Quaiche said. “They must have got lucky, that’s all. Look, just give me another chance. Are we approaching another system?”

The queen smiled. “We’re always approaching another system. This time it’s a place called 107 Piscium, but frankly from this distance it doesn’t look much more promising than the last five. What’s to say you’re going to be any use this time?”

“Let me take the Dominatrix ,” he said, knitting his hands together involuntarily. “Let me take her down into that system.”

The queen was silent for many seconds. Quaiche heard only his own breathing, punctuated now and then by the abrupt, attenuated sizzle of a dying insect or rat. Something moved languidly beyond the green glass of a hemispherical dome set into one of the chamber’s twelve walls. He sensed that he was being observed by something other than the eyeless figure in the chair. Without having been told, he understood then that the thing beyond the glass was the real queen, and that the ruined body in the seat was only a puppet that she currently inhabited. They were all true, then, all the rumours he had ever heard: the queen’s solipsism; her addiction to extreme pain as a reality-anchoring device; the vast reserve of cloned bodies she was said to keep for just that purpose.

“Have you finished, Quaiche? Have you made your case?”

He sighed. “I suppose I have.”

“Very well, then.”

She must have issued some secret command, because at that moment the door to the chamber opened again. Quaiche spun around as the blast of cold fresh air touched the nape of his neck. The surgeon-general and the two Ultras who had helped him during Quaiche’s revival entered the room.

“I’m done with him,” the queen said.

“And your intention?” Grelier asked.

Jasmina sucked at a fingernail. “I haven’t changed my mind. Put him in the scrimshaw suit.”

Scorpio knew better than to interrupt Clavain when the old man was thinking something over. How long had it been since he had told him about the object falling from space, if that was indeed where it had come from? Five minutes, easily. In all that time, Clavain had sat there as gravely as a statue, his expression fixed, his eyes locked on the horizon.

Finally, just when Scorpio was beginning to doubt his old friend’s sanity, Clavain spoke. “When did it happen?” he asked. “When did this ‘thing’—whatever it is—arrive?”

“Probably in the last week,” Scorpio said. “We only found it a couple of days ago.”

There was another troubling pause, though it was only a minute or so long this time. Water slapped against rock and gurgled in little eddies in and out of shallow pools by the shoreline.

“And what exactly is it?”

“We can’t be absolutely certain. It’s a capsule of some kind. A human artefact. Our best guess is that it’s an escape pod, something with re-entry capabilities. We think it splashed down in the ocean and bobbed to the surface.”

Clavain nodded, as if the news was of only minor interest. “And you’re certain it wasn’t left behind by Galiana?”

He said the woman’s name with ease, but Scorpio could only guess at the pain it caused him. Especially now, looking out to sea.

Scorpio had some inkling of what the ocean meant to Clavain: both loss and the cruellest kind of hope. In an unguarded moment, not long before his voluntary exile from island affairs, Clavain had said, “They’re all gone now. There’s nothing more the sea can do to me.”

“They’re still there,” Scorpio had replied. “They aren’t lost. If anything, they’re safer than they ever were.”

As if Clavain could not have seen that for himself.

“No,” Scorpio said, snapping his attention back to the present, “I don’t think Galiana left it.”

“I thought it might hold a message from her,” Clavain said. “But I’m wrong, aren’t I? There won’t be any messages. Not that way. Not from Galiana, not from Felka.”

“I’m sorry,” Scorpio said.

“There’s no need to be. It’s the way of things.”

What Scorpio knew of Clavain’s past was drawn as much from hearsay as from things the old man had told him directly. Memories had always been fickle, but in the present era they were as mutable as clay. There were aspects of his own past even Clavain could not now be sure of.

Yet there were some things that were certain. Clavain had once loved a woman named Galiana; their relationship had begun many centuries ago and had spanned many of those same centuries. It was clear that they had birthed—or created—a kind of daughter, Felka; that she had been both terribly damaged and terribly powerful; and that she had been loved and feared in equal measure.

Whenever Clavain spoke of those times, it was with a happiness tempered by the knowledge of what was to follow.

Galiana had been a scientist, fascinated by the augmentation of the human mind. But her curiosity had not stopped there. What she ultimately wanted was an intimate connection with reality, at its root level. Her neural experiments had only ever been a necessary part of this process. To Galiana, it had been natural that the next step should be physical exploration, pushing out into the cosmos. She wanted to go deeper, far beyond the ragged edge of mapped space, to see what was actually out there. So far the only indications of alien intelligence anyone had found had been ruins and fossils, but who was to say what might be found further into the galaxy? Human settlements at that time spanned a bubble two dozen light-years across, but Galiana intended to travel more than a hundred light-years before returning.