Absolution Gap (spoilers!)

Warning: this page has many spoilers for Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds. If you haven't read them you probably don't want to read this page yet.

By the end of Absolution Gap, the war between the humans an Inhibitors has run its course, and new dangers have arisen. How does it all fit together?

The Evidence

• Humans. A star-faring race, and a target for Inhibitor destruction. Responsible for defeating the Inhibtors and (possibly) accidentally unleashing the greenfly.
• Conjoiners. A high-tech human faction.
  • They have received messages from the future via Exordium:
    • The first taught them how to build starship drives (RA29).
    • The second warned them that the Inhibitors could detect the drives (RA13) so they stopped building them.
    • Instead they started researching stealth versions, again using Exordium information (RA29). They learned the theory of the intertia-suppression technology from Exordium, and acquired alien technology to implement it from a captured Grub in Chasm City, but in turn were infiltrated by the Mademoiselle (through Skade).
    • Hints of the Nostalgia For Infinity on Ararat (RA28 and RA epilogue), implying that someone who was on Ararat sent the Exordium messages.
    • How to build the cache weapons aka "hell-class weapons" (Remontoire in AG31).
    • Possibly the most important conclusion, though, is that post-Inhibitor-war humans can transmit messages backwards in time.
  • They made the hell-class weapons ("cache weapons").
  • With assistance from Hades/Aura they build advanced weapons and for a while fight the Inhibitors as equals.
• Inhibitors (aka "wolves" or "eaters").
  • Survivors of the Dawn War 10⁹ years previously, initially "organic, spined, warm-blooded land-dwellers with bicameral minds" (RA17), later a "hybrid machine-chimeric species" (RS12) and ultimately the purely mechanical inheritors of that species (RA17, RA9).
  • They exterminate any species that develops interstellar travel; and are becoming less effective over time (RA24). Clavain speculates (RA38) that their reduced effectiveness is the cause of their extreme brutality, and that they are not supposed to be quite so destructive.
  • They are not out to kill life in general (RA37), but to keep it suppressed until after the collision 3x10⁹ years in the future with the Andromeda Galaxy, the theory being that they (the Inhibitors) can ameliorate the effects of that collision but that multiple non-cooperating species will fail to do so (RA38).
• The Melding Plague. A nanotech plague that merges flesh and machinery.
  • "They say the Melding Plague corrupts our implants, blends them into the flesh, by subverting their replicating machinery. I think it goes beyond that. I think it tries to hybridise - tries to achieve some harmony between the living and the cybernetic." (RS21.) Calvin turns out to be right.
  • The effect is also suggestive of the merged Inhibitor/Galiana (RA26). Combined with the coincidence of timing, perhaps then there is some kind of relationship between the Plague and the Inhibitors.
  • Brought to Yellowstone by the Grub Gideon (CC36).
• Greenfly. Rogue self-replicating machines that convert solar systems into shells of life-supporting rubble, regardless of the wishes of their inhabitants. Probably created by humans, and supposedly only able to proliferate due to the removal of the Inhibitor threat.
• Amarantin. Bird-like inhabitants of Resurgam attacked by the Inhibitors about 10⁶ years ago. They made the Shrouds (RS31), to escape the Inhibitors, and tricked Dan Sylveste into entering an Inhibitor trap, so they could determine whether the Inhibitors were still active. Others hid in Hades.
• Hades. Superficially neutron star near Resurgam. Actually a computer and cross-time signalling device. Runs a complete simulation of Dan Sylveste and others including surviving Amarantin. Assists humans with high technology weapons via Aura. Why don't the Inhibitors destroy it? Part of something larger "with a name" (RS) - probably the signalling system invented by the Jumper Clowns.
• Shadows. Mysterious but powerful entities represented by a simulation held on Hela by Horace Quelch.
  • They claim to be from another universe or a very distant part of this one; they communicate with the Scuttlers and Humans using gravity waves via the "divine machinery" of Haldora (AG25). But, the exact nature of the divine machinery is never investigated in detail, and Aura speculates (AG epilogue) that they are lying about their location.
  • They claim to have colonized most or all of their universe (AG35, from which most of the information about the Shadows comes).
  • They claim to be fleeing something much like the Greenfly, and have been fleeing it since their earliest space-travelling years, and to have created it themselves (compare AG35 with AG epilogue).
  • They hide the relationship between their universe and ours from Rashmika, or do not know it.
  • They claim to be able to defeat the Inhibitors, and to want only modest living space in return.
  • They claim that they are now machines, but were formerly "a lot like us once, closer than we realize" (AG46).
• Grubs. Worm-like starfaring species, hundreds of millions of years old, who attempt to evade Inhibitor attention by hiding in deep space. From CC36:
  • They have met the Nestbuilders and received gravity- and inertia- control technology from them; and use the Jumper Clown signalling system.
  • They carry the Melding Plague.
  • They and others exterminate races that attract too much Inhibitor attention.
• The Mademoiselle. Demarchist human and later a Shrouder (i.e. Amarantin) who has taken control of her. A supremely effective manipulator based in Chasm City, at various times she influences Khouri and Skade.
• Nestbuilders. Mysterious, powerful aliens who hide in interstellar space to evade the Inhibitors.
  • They strongly disapprove of the Shadows, to the point of exterminating cultures that attempt to treat with them.
  • Allies of the Grubs (CC36).
• Pattern Jugglers. Sea-dwelling memories found on many watery planets. They occasionally help humans (e.g. AG28) and were visited by the Amarantin (RS39).
• Scuttlers. Weird variable-pattern creatures found in fossil form on Hela.
  • They built the "divine machinery" of Haldora.
  • Exterminated by the Nestbuilders for attempting to bring the Shadows through.
• Jumper Clowns. Race from which the Grubs acquired instantaneous communications technology (CC36), which actually works by transmitting it back in time from a large, far-future archive. They and other ancient species really, really hate FTL travel (with good reason given the disasters documented in RA). Not seen directly.

Who Are The Shadows?

The Shadows only information available about the Shadows comes from themselevs, and should not be considered particularly reliable. Let's consider their claim to be fleeing something identical to the Greenfly first.

• It could be a remarkable coincidence. I think we can dismiss this for narrative reasons: we're supposed to draw a connection here.
• They could be lying. But they would have to know about the Greenfly to do this. Therefore either the Greenfly are in their own past or someone transmitted information about Greenfly back in time, which the Shadows picked up somehow (how?) but Galiana's Exordium experiments didn't (why not?)
• The entities they are fleeing could be the real Greenfly. Then the Shadows would have to be humans millions of years in the future.

I think the third is the most likely. The Shadows are humans, Nestbuilders, Grubs, Jumper Clowns (or even, intriguingly, the Greenfly themselves). If they are "a lot like us" then from that set they were probably humans, successful in the war against the Inhibitors but unable to defeat the Greenfly. Aura wanders in AG epilogue how the Greenfly will react to the Pattern Jugglers; the evidence from the Shadows suggests that, depressingly, they make no difference.

If the Shadows are humans then it is beyond coincidence that Haldora is in the right place for human to find it: for some reason it has to be pre-Greenfly era humans who open the gate. The Scuttlers were useful for building the divine machinery, but if they'd let the Shadows through that would have been a bonus and nothing more.

Nestbuilders And Grubs

These seem to be in loose coalition (also with the Jumper Clowns). Why do they object to the Shadows? Possibly they know what the Shadows really want, perhaps from messages from their own descendants at the time the Shadows are signalling the Scuttlers or others (and know that it would be bad in some way). Some possibilities might be:

• Perhaps the Shadows are planning a large scale sterilization of the volume infected by the Greenfly (but wouldn't that wipe out their own ancestors too if it was big enough to threaten the Nestbuilders et al?)
• Perhaps they know (or suspect) that the Shadows are planning large scale colonization when they break through (possibly including the eradication of the Greenfly). That the Shadows plan this seems a reasonable bet.
• Another possibility is that the objection to FTL travel includes an objection to time travel (and that they have deduced that the Shadows are from the future), and the nature of the Shadows and their plans is irrelevant.

It is possible that the Exordium messages were transmitted using the same technology (or even the same implementation) as underlies the Grubs' instant communications system.

The Greenfly

Why can't these be defeated by the Shadows? It's suggested that the Inhibitors suppress them, yet the humans can't deal with the Greenfly (who are apparently relatively low-tech in origin) even after pushing back the Inhibitors. The suppression suggests a possible solution - make a deal with the Inhibitors which involves them eliminating the Greenfly (they'd probably be up for it).

The Shadows report that the weapons they tried against the Greenfly were worse than nothing - perhaps by the time the Greenfly got going they simply had too much of a head start. Or this could be a lie: perhaps the Shadows prefer the Greenfly-modified universe, but have used it up and need to start somewhere else. (Their own past seems a poor choice, however.)

Or perhaps the Shadows are the Greenfly, and are attempting to go back in time in order to avert impending defeat by the humans or others. I'm not quite convinced by this suggestion but it's an interesting idea.

Hope?

However all is not lost. The Exordium discussion implies that there were several forks of the war between the humans and the Inhibitors, the first with the humans lacking even the Conjoiner drive, and the last seeing their eventual success. The same technique might be applied to the struggle against the Greenfly.

Further Information

Colin Dancer says I should read Galactic North from Interzone 415 to find out more about the Greenfly plague. More here when I've done so, perhaps...

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