Revelation Space 4 - Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds [Reynolds, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-06T11:57:27+00:00

Hela, 2727

The scrimshaw suit said, “We’ve heard the news, Quaiche.”

The sudden voice startled him, as it always did. He was alone. Grelier had just finished seeing to his eyes, swabbing an infected abscess under one retracted eyelid. The metal clamp of the eye-opener felt unusually cruel to him today, as if, while Quaiche was sleeping, the surgeon-general had covertly sharpened all its little hooks. Not while he was really sleeping, of course. Sleep was a luxury he remembered in only the vaguest terms.

“I don’t know about any news,” he said.

“You made your little announcement to the congregation downstairs. We heard it. You’re taking the cathedral across Absolution Gap.”

“And if I am, what business is it of yours?”

“It’s insanity, Quaiche. And your mental health is very much our business.”

He saw the suit in blurred peripheral vision, around the sharp central image of Haldora. The world was half in shadow, bands of cream and ochre and subtle turquoise plunging into the sharp terminator of the nightside.

“You don’t care about me,” he said. “You only care about your own survival. You’re afraid I’ll destroy you when I destroy the Lady Morwenna.”

“‘When,’ Quaiche? Frankly, that’s a little disturbing to us. We were hoping you still had some intention of actually succeeding.”

“Perhaps I do,” he conceded.

“Where nobody has done so before?”

“The Lady Morwenna isn’t any old cathedral.”

“No. It’s the heaviest and tallest on the Way. Doesn’t that give you some slight pause for thought?”

“It will make my triumph all the more spectacular.”

“Or your disaster, should you topple off the bridge or bring the entire thing crashing down. But why now, Quaiche, after all these revolutions around Hela?”

“Because I feel that the time is right,” he said. “You can’t second-guess these things. Not the work of God.”

“You truly are a lost cause,” the scrimshaw suit said. Then the cheaply synthesised voice took on an urgency it had lacked before. “Quaiche, listen to us. Do what you will with the Lady Morwenna. We won’t stop you. But first let us out of this cage.”

“You’re scared,” he said, pulling the stiff tissue of his face into a smile.

“I’ve really put the wind up you, haven’t I?”

“It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at the evidence, Quaiche. The vanishings are increasing in frequency. You know what mat means, don’t you?”

“The work of God is moving towards its culmination.”

“Or, alternatively, the concealment mechanism is failing. Take your pick. We know which interpretation we favour.”

“I know all about your heresies,” he said. “I don’t need to hear them again.”

“You still think we are demons, Quaiche?”

“You call yourselves shadows. Isn’t that a bit of a giveaway?”

“We call ourselves shadows because that is what we are, just as you are all shadows to us. It’s a statement of fact, Quaiche, not a theological standpoint.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of it.”

It was true: he had heard enough of their heresies. They were lies, engineered to undermine his faith. Time and again he had tried to purge them from his head, but always to no avail.

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