Polity 4 - The Technician (25 page)

Uffstetten,
a pale, thin-faced and bald man, possessed double-pupil eyes, twinned augs and
internal visual interlinks. His ears had been replaced with squat cylindrical
multidrums and he was also processing direct mental feeds. She knew that his
screen image must be partially adjusted, for he appeared to be talking to her
only, whilst in reality he was conducting numerous conversations, reading
numerous texts and studying numerous images. He was a haiman, his augmentations
perfectly designed for his job as Earthnet News Editor.

Shree
allowed her own face to appear to him, doubtless as one icon of many on some
mental screen, just a little explanatory text appearing when he focused his
attention on it. ‘Ah, Shree Enkara – our local Masada correspondent,’ he said
after a thirty-second delay. ‘What do you have for me?’

‘Jeremiah
Tombs,’ she stated.

A beat,
then, ‘I have four correspondents as close as I can get them – there’s an AI
intervention on this. So what’s your angle?’

‘Tombs
is being protected by Leif Grant, Commander Leif Grant, who was my commander
during the rebellion, in fact my lover during the rebellion. I think, because
of that, I can get close enough for direct recording and interaction.’

‘Human
interest?’

‘Not
just Human interest,’ said Shree. ‘We’re all aware that there’s something odd
about the situation. Why has Tombs been allowed to remain insane for twenty
years? It all relates to how he received his injuries during the rebellion –
the hooder called the Technician. This also has planetary status implications
in that it very likely relates to the Atheter.’

‘You
make the approach and I’ll back you from here.’ Uffstetten also did something
else, for a new icon appeared in her visual field. Checking it she found a
funding link through her aug to her bank account here on Masada. Not that she
needed the money, but it all added to her veracity. ‘If you’re blocked, then
the usual fee structure applies for something on the whole situation with your
personal connection. Agreed?’

‘If I’m
not blocked?’

‘Full
coverage of your expenses plus eighty New Carth shillings an hour, doubled if
the hour is aired.’

‘Make
that one hundred shillings and we have a deal.’

After a
short pause Uffstetten said, ‘We have a deal,’ and his image blinked out.

Shree
sighed out a long breath. Those kinds of pay rates might be enough to tempt
someone away from the fight for freedom, but not her. She would take their
money and send it where it would be of use. And she would complete her mission,
which meant she might not be able to spend it herself anyway.

Shree
reached out and picked up her glass, sipped contemplatively whilst attempting
to aug back in to the various cams she had positioned about Greenport. She had
watched Miloh and Tinsch make their preparations, then seen Miloh fail before
her cams at both locations went offline. Still nothing. Something had got to
them fast, punching through Tinsch’s quite plausible approach of blocking
Tombs’s minders by using hardfields. Certainly Commander Grant was the visible
protection of Tombs, but he had powerful invisible protection in the vicinity
too.

Shree
now tried a direct communication, mentally dialling up the address of Tinsch’s
aug. For a moment nothing, then connection.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Tinsch whispered to her,
before his communication drifted into a distant sobbing. She cut the link
quickly, and just sat there with cold fingers tracing her spine.

Then,
suddenly, a cam view called to her attention by a recognition program: Tombs
stumbling out towards the site of the old worker huts, the place now used as a
spaceport. Coincidentally, she also received a general notification of an
imminent landing at the spaceport – something big was coming down. Shree stood
up and headed for the door.

Grant gazed in morbid fascination at what had been done to the four here.
Conscious again, the woman stared in horror at the console that had now become
an extension of her wrists. The Overlander man who had been bleeding his life
out only minutes ago was tugging at his ankles. Someone would have to lever out
the slab and carry him like a living statue on a plinth to the hospital. The
knifeman would be going to the same place with a chunk of wall attached to his
back. And Christ knows what that thing had done to
David Tinsch: the man was still crying and begging for forgiveness. And it had
been so terrifyingly fast.

When
Amistad had told Grant that this Penny Royal, an apparently reformed black AI,
would be watching over Tombs, he had done a little research. Penny Royal had
haunted the Graveyard, that wasteland of worlds lying along the border between
the Polity and the Prador Kingdom. It had done things there for which there
should never be forgiveness, using its capability of separating a Human into
whatever size of living component it chose, and then putting that human back
together in whatever order it chose, to horrifying effect – the result often
being something that simply could not be described as Human.

‘Why?’
he asked the air, but no reply was forthcoming.

He
sensed now that it had gone, shadowing that yelling madman now rounding the end
of the street and heading off towards the side exit from Greenport central
town.

Grant
sprinted off after Tombs. His own role in all this had been carefully directed,
supposedly, yet it all seemed like the kind of horrible game Penny Royal had
played during its time in the Graveyard. What possible purpose could be served
by what it had done to those four back there?

Tombs
came back into sight, now heading through the exit, straight out towards what
had once been the main worker compound, its rafts now serving as a landing
field. Grant slowed to a jog, trying to catch sight of Penny Royal, but seeing
nothing. He had only caught glimpses of it before, so had no real idea about
its actual form, those glimpses hinting to him that he might not want to know.
It had communicated, but the brevity of those communications rendered them
almost nonsensical and he’d had to contact Amistad for translation. Amistad
laid out the whole drama to be acted out here, but failed to explain what Penny
Royal meant by ‘cerebral pressure juncture’, ‘Gleason limit’ and ‘green-stick
point upon acting out’. Tombs was being pushed towards sanity and full recovery
of his memory, pressure being loaded upon him, but to Grant it seemed that the
man was just getting crazier.

As Grant
exited Central Town, a shadow slid across the ground towards him, covered him
for a moment then slid away again. He glanced up in time to see a spaceship in
a U-shape formation, ports dotting its surface like mica crystals in rock,
numerous sensor arrays, signal drums and other instruments protruding from its
surface like components on an ancient circuit board. The thing was massive: it
would encompass the entire landing field, and as far as Grant knew, nothing so
large had ever landed here before. The field had been used by occasional
private traders, most of the big Polity stuff coming down on the rebuilt
landing field up by Zealos. The timing of this vessel’s arrival was almost
certainly no coincidence.

Continuing
out, Grant noted that Tombs had halted in the middle of the landing field to
gaze up at the descending ship. The man fell to his knees – something of a
habit of his. Grant picked up his pace, realizing that he needed to get out
near Tombs if he didn’t want to find himself underneath a few million tonnes of
curving hull. Strange forces seemed to be tugging at his body, and dry
flute-grass stems swirled through the air to create a wailing symphony. The
ship’s antigravity also seemed to be interfering with Penny Royal’s
chameleonware and something formed of sharp honed shadows poised like a wave
ready to fall on Tombs.

‘Lies!’
the proctor bellowed. ‘All lies!’

He now
held up the dagger he had grabbed, as if hoping to stab the descending
spaceship out of the sky. But still it descended.

When
twenty metres away from the erstwhile proctor, Grant slowed his pace, aware now
that he was within the compass of the ship, and that beside himself, Tombs and
the black AI, someone else had come out here. He drew his disc gun and held it
down at his side as the woman approached, something recognizable about her
flowing walk.

‘Lies!’
Tombs shrieked, as finally the ship’s lower hull made contact with the ground.
The thing touched light as a feather, but when its gravmotors shut down the
interlinked foamstone rafts all sank abruptly, half a metre of rhizome-tangled
mud thumping up between them like the walls of a maze.

Numerous
ramps now folded down, first spilling holocams like silver bubbles into the
Masadan air. Next came the people, and what people they were. It seemed the
full, weird mind-numbing diversity of the Polity had arrived at this one spot.
There were adapts: catadapts, amphidapts, ophidapts, saurodapts, avidapts –
human chimera in forms limited only by imagination. Golem walked here too, some
in the shape of adapts, some like normal Humans, some skinless chrome skeletons
and some metalskins in brass aping a legendary figure. Other robots of all
kinds strode amidst this crowd, pets and auto-luggage yapped around ankles,
tails, claws and elephantine feet. Coldworlders and hotworlders wore strange
esoteric suits. Many wore masks, many did not, still others occupied aquaria
striding along on iron spider legs.

‘Lies,’
Tombs whispered.

Grant,
now standing just a couple of paces away from the man, could hear him, despite
the nearby uproar.

‘Reality
is a heavy load to bear sometimes,’ said a voice.

He
glanced round. ‘Shree Enkara,’ he said, puzzled to see her here now.

She
wasn’t looking at him but gazing at Tombs, her eyes widening in surprise, then
her expression twisting with horrified fascination. Grant whirled back and just
for a moment could not believe the scene before him. Tombs had pinched out a
handful of his own cheek, had cut down behind his ear to his jaw bone and,
making a horrible keening sound, began sawing the blade forwards.

Grant
hurled himself towards the man but it was as if he had thrown himself at a
jagged rock face. As he bounced he momentarily glimpsed black spines and a
single stalked red eye, before he hit the ground heavily on his back. Tombs
continued to cut, that keening becoming a shrieking which turned wet and bubbly
as he exposed his back teeth to the air. Things then went slightly hazy for a
moment and Grant found his head resting in a warm lap.

‘They
can’t see or hear us,’ said Shree.

It was
true, the crowd departing the spaceship were just moving past as if he, Shree,
Penny Royal and the screaming bloody thing that was Tombs occupied some blister
in reality. Grant wished for that haziness again – some small escape into
unconsciousness – but it never came, and he saw the whole horrifying thing to
its conclusion: Tombs returned almost to the state in which Grant had first
found him, but kneeling with knife in one hand and his sacrifice to his god in
the other.

When resurrection and actual corporeal
immortality are real facts of life, the threats and promises of old-style
organized religions become laughable. When education is taken out of the hands
of the doctrinaires, religion is castrated at source. With knowledge and
experience able to bypass the senses and be loaded directly to the Human mind,
the standard level of Human intelligence rises, and religion wilts under its
inspection, for religion thrives on ignorance. But when religion crawls away
from the light of reasoned inspection it sheds its damaged skin and returns
with something thicker and more durable. When science explains the universe,
and gets everything right, century after century, one would think that religion
should turn into the quaint pursuit of the intentionally deluded, or be a
matter for historians. However, the virus that is religion is a difficult one
to kill. Over the years it has mutated and adapted to changes in its
environment. It turns holy writ into allegory, turns true stories into
parables, styles angels as metaphors, admits to embarrassment at demons. It
tries to downplay its gods and concentrate on the good it perceives in itself,
like the comfort it offers to the faithful, for surely comfort can be found in
the knowledge that if you infringe on arbitrary rules written down thousands of
years ago you will burn in hell for ever.

–
From HOW IT IS by Gordon

‘Since its arrival here its mass has increased by about half,’ said
Janice Golden. ‘But still there’s no clear indication of what its purpose is,
where it comes from, or who built it.’

The
bridge of Cheops had the décor of an Egyptian tomb,
and Janice had departed her sarcophagus to sit herself in a perfect historical
reproduction of the throne of Rameses II, or rather what some deeply anal
historian had decided it might look like. However, her connection to the ship
AI remained firm, optics trailing from her bodysuit like a mummy’s unravelled
bandages to the sarcophagus.

Her
visitor surveyed his surroundings then strolled over to the scroll-edged stool
positioned before the throne and sat down. She studied him like an aged parent
inspecting a grandchild. In a way he was her descendant, or perhaps a better
definition was that he was the next stage, the next evolution of what she had
done to herself.

Janice
was interfaced with the AI of this ship – as close a connection to an
artificial intelligence as had been feasible a century ago. Optic links
transferred data between her and Cheops, but only at a speed her augmented mind
could handle, because anything more would cause a feedback effect, a brief
synergistic loop which for a few seconds would create a supernal melding of AI
and Human, but afterwards would leave her a burnt-out husk and Cheops a
crystal-minded lunatic.