Polity 4 - The Technician (29 page)

‘Tower
gravplates are active on the other side,’ Grant informed them. ‘And there’s
air.’

The
inner door admitted them to a fire-charred corridor, the drag of gravplates
dropping them hard onto the remains of lush carpets. Ornate sconces protruded
from the walls and burned with pink-tinged artificial flame. Each of these
seemed to be made from a decorative lacework of precious metals and stones. The
walls themselves were decorated with icons, many blackened by fire, whilst
alcoves held alabaster sculptures of previous Hierarchs – a display of wealth
suitable for this place, surely?

Grant
removed his helmet and hung it on a hook at his belt. Shree copied him and Jem
did the same only when something clicked in his neck ring and, coming loose, it
threatened to topple away. The smell hit him immediately. It was as if he had
just stepped inside a furnace that had been dead for years.

‘Mind
where you walk,’ said Grant.

Jem’s gaze
strayed down to the charred corpse stuck to the carpet just ahead, and his
throat tightened. Some of its proctor uniform remained, but this individual’s
occiput, back and the backs of the legs had been seared down to ropes of now
desiccated muscle. Next, his colder mind studied precisely what had been burned
here, how the burn damage seemed directional, and he realized the fire must
have travelled up this corridor from the end they were heading towards.

‘A lot
entirely evaporated,’ Grant explained. ‘In other areas fires burned until the
air got sucked out.’

‘The
Hierarch?’ Jem enquired.

‘Lot of
windows and other openings in his upper tower, so most of it was flash-burnt
inside. Not much to see up there, but we’ll go take a look anyway.’

At the
end of the corridor they reached a spiral stairway, every step gravplated on
the way up. Having earlier considered the cost of smuggling these plates into
the Theocracy, Jem couldn’t help but feel some disapproval at such profligacy,
yet even as he felt that, he understood why. Ever since being a child he had
been aware of a schism between planet-bound and cylinder-world theocrats. Those
down on the surface of Masada, like himself, had always been more puritan, more
stoic in their faith. But both possessed such faith, which made the gap between
the two minuscule compared to the gulf between them both and the Polity.

‘Oops,
here’s another one,’ said Shree.

There
wasn’t much left of the corpse on the stairs, just a foetal atomy sculpted in
charcoal – impossible to tell its rank, sex, or even if it was an adult or a
child. The wall sconces here hung melted, and further up were gone entirely,
replaced by softly glowing globes strategically stuck to the walls to highlight
this item or that: a gun seemingly etched into a gravplate step that wasn’t
functioning and caused Jem’s stomach to lurch as he stepped over it, a steel
sculpture slumped over, seemingly bowing in obeisance.

Finally
they came to warped double doors which creaked open ahead of Grant, driven by
Polity-tech hydraulic arms attached on this side. The huge apartment lying
beyond had obviously been a high-echelon abode, but little remained of its
furnishings. Jem identified the glass top of a low table melted against the
floor, an ashen mess along one wall all that remained of a mass of computer
hardware, the remains of a motorized massage chair standing like a weirdly
distorted Human skeleton.

‘Loman’s
place,’ said Shree. ‘But only for a short time after he tried to have Amoloran
tortured to death. I think he only occupied it a couple of times.’ She shot a
look at Grant for confirmation.

Grant
had moved over to a window slanting out from the edge, runs of molten glass all
around it showing that the original had melted and that this glass was a
replacement to hold the air in. ‘That’s right, and from here he watched Faith die.’

Wavering
between simple intellectual curiosity and sadness, Jem walked over to stand
beside Grant, and peered down through the cylinder-cap window into the eye of Faith to see a fire-scorched tube, crammed buildings
seared down to cubic skeletons, metal ripples visible on the central spindle.

‘How do
you know Hierarch Loman was here?’ he asked.

‘Because
he’s still here,’ Grant replied.

‘Where?’
asked Jem, that being the only response he could think of.

Grant
turned and gazed at him. ‘Look up.’

Jem
didn’t turn, felt something prickling the back of his neck. All the ruination
here had been a sideshow to the main event, which was now. They’d brought him
here to see whatever lay above him. He fought for resolve, found only
confusion, then turned and looked up, straight into the face of his Hierarch.

‘Within
a microsecond the coherent light turned his body into ionized matter and
plasma,’ said Grant, ‘carrying it straight up in line with the laser blast.’

The grey
ceiling held an image of Hierarch Loman from the waist up, distorted towards
the sides by the ceiling’s curve so it seemed he was in the process of sinking
into a grey pool. He held his arms out and up – his last position as he tried
to fend off the fire that consumed him. Other flaws in the ceiling – spatters
of metal – looked like stars. Seeing them suddenly switched patterns in Jem’s
mind. For a moment the Hierarch did not look like he was sinking away but
rather as if he was rising out of starry void, his arms held up in blessing.

‘Makes
me think of the Turin Shroud,’ said Shree.

Yes . . .

A sudden
feeling of inconsolable loss bubbled up inside Jem, an inner self, a core that
seemed in the process of forming. Orbiting this core were two other
perspectives.

One
considered the huge error they had made in bringing him here to try and twist
him to their purpose: they sought to weaken him by showing him the devastation,
the evidence of the Theocracy’s death, the charred shadow of Hierarch Loman here
on the ceiling. Being so utterly sucked into their machine world of cold facts
and logic they were blind to evidence available here to anyone with any
religious sensibility at all. Hierarch Loman was not dead. Hierarch Loman had
been martyred and achieved sainthood, and here, traced by the very hand of God
for Jem’s eyes alone, was the evidence.

The
other perspective saw a simple mind in which imagination had been wholly slaved
to the task of reinforcing long-term indoctrination. A terrifying, intelligent
perspective devoid of contempt, full of understanding, yet distant from such Human concerns.

Jem
turned away, not sure if he was doing so to avert his gaze from the power of
the image above him, or to hide from the other two the tears glistening in his
eyes.

‘We
identified him from DNA scraped from the floor,’ said Grant. ‘There was none on
the ceiling because the blast burnt the top half of his body down to its
elements.’

No, cried the older of Jem’s orbiting minds, Loman’s base matter was transformed into something supernal, even
the essence of God. The other orbital mind looked on with utterly alien
understanding, translating, reassessing, and coming to its own nihilistic
conclusion, It is just a shape; only extinction is real,
whilst Jem’s inner core cried in the darkness, and believed neither of them.

Super-dense
materials

The invention of force-field and gravity technologies capable of
producing pressures previously impossible for our industries ushered in the era
of super-dense materials and the compacting of matter for numerous uses. Whole
new sets of names needed to be devised to describe new materials, so we ended
up with, for example, ND12 Iron, for iron doped with neutronium on the newly
invented 1 to 24 proportional scale; fibre-diamond (commonly called
monofilament); chainglass; cutting application shearfilm; hyperlead and
hypergold. Gases could be highly compressed to give us super-dense air supplies
and a whole new range of high-explosive devices, and new stable solids were
found, like metallic hydrogen, oxybloc and nitrox geodes. Whole new branches of
materials technologies opened up, and for these we must be grateful. This
technology also ushered out the gemstone market, but that’s a subject for
another time . . .

– From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans

In the first few seconds after it materialized in the real, the mechanism
concentrated on its own condition. Having sat in underspace for nearly two
million years, it found that its maintenance schedule was lagging. Its U-space
engine, having been battered by currents within that continuum for so long,
wasn’t up to spec. A great deal of rebalancing needed doing for it to function,
but beyond that the mechanism did not know what else to pursue: it seemed to
have lost the ability to actually repair the engine. When it also discovered
that viruses and worms surviving its battle with Penny Royal had taken control
of some units within its structure, it reacted with Jain-tech-inspired
paranoia.

Internally
it manufactured scraps of antimatter and fired them towards these units, at the
last enclosing them in full-sphere hardfields. A series of violent but
contained explosions ensued, rendering the units down into concentrated energy
too violent for the mechanism to utilize, so it ejected this through hardfield
tubes.

Destroying
those units used up energy which it replaced in the usual manner by drawing
power from its network of probes spread out across the old Atheter realm.
However, it discovered that traces of Penny Royal’s attack had spread through
them. It began sending self-destruct orders to those affected. In the ensuing
five seconds eight hundred probes everted into the real in the chromospheres of
suns. This left a further five hundred probes and a dearth of energy supply.
Also, the mechanism had lost material mass, had reduced itself from the optimum
in the initial orgy of destruction. A second later it turned its attention to
the nearest available resource: the gas giant by whose gravity well it had made
the underspace fold in which it had hidden itself until now.

It took
whole minutes for the mechanism to make a gravity lens, to effectively punch a
million-kilometre tube down to the surface of the gas giant. Pressure at the
surface, now no longer restrained by the massive gravity of the giant, forced
matter up within the tube like hydraulic oil squirting out of a ruptured hose.
Sucking this in, the mechanism drained off and utilized thermal, chemical and
isotope energy, routed appropriate materials to the variety of fusion reactors
it contained. It also began to crystallize, forge, form, twist and manipulate
materials within internal structures that fell somewhere between the cells of
an organism and auto-factories.

A
pyramidal alien spaceship appeared whilst the mechanism worked and it scanned
the vessel for the patterns it was set to recognize. No sign of gabbleducks, no
Atheter minds, but it upped its alertness when it recognized that this object
contained an artificial intelligence similar to Penny Royal. The mechanism felt
something that in another being might be labelled frustration, for its ability
to respond to something like this remained limited, even though it recognized
that if one of these AIs had tried to resurrect the Atheter, then others might
too, so they were all a danger. That frustration only increased as the ship
folded itself away into U-space and departed. But even frustration was new to
the mechanism – lay outside its original programmed parameters. The years of
battles, rebuilds and the attrition of time had changed it.

The
mechanism continued to rebuild what it had destroyed within itself, began
making new clean probes to send out to occupy the positions of the eight
hundred it had burned, and whilst it did this the alien vessel returned.

Obviously
the new alien civilization here was now aware of the mechanism. This presented
dangers previously not programmed for. A civilization in itself was a danger,
for any such was effectively the prey of Jain technology, the greatest danger
of all. The mechanism used its frustration to push against the limits of its
programming, and found their previous rigidity had faded.

Another
smaller vessel arrived, docked with the first. The mechanism observed these for
a moment, then turned to further self-analysis and repair, and further straining
against its chains. A bigger alien vessel next joined the other two here. All
the mechanism’s problems were interlinked, that seemed clear, but the
developing situation on the Homeworld was its first priority.

Focusing
its attention through those probes in position about the Homeworld, the
mechanism studied the situation there with greater intensity than before.
Traces of Atheter mental thought patterns were plain, but barely active. They
seemed to have an organic basis, and though there was something quite odd about
that, it was enough to enable the mechanism to force further leeway in its
already loose programming.

Time for
action.

Being
located so far from this activity, with only a few probes through which to
operate, the mechanism could not be fully effective both in data gathering and
in responding to that data, for there was no unequivocal proof of Atheter
resurrection. It was also plain that it had failed in its previous two attempts
to suppress such a resurrection. Why else were Penny Royal and the Atheter
biomechanism so close to what it was detecting now? It must relocate itself to
the scene. There it would be able to more easily assess the developing
preconditions for its main function. There, should the situation warrant it, it
would also be able to bring online and distribute around the world the full
array of its pattern disruptors, those machines now stored and somnolent inside
it that it had used to first erase the minds of the largest portion of the
Atheter race and then to tear apart the remains of its civilization.