Polity 4 - The Technician (43 page)

‘It
probably wasn’t at that location originally,’ Amistad noted.

‘Seems
likely,’ Ergatis opined.

‘They’ll
oscillate in and out of the real at a rate dependent on how much scanning the
main device requires.’

‘No sign
of that oscillation being picked up with this one, over a period of many
years,’ said Ergatis. ‘Yet the speed with which the device attacked Penny Royal
would indicate an oscillation rate of just hours or even minutes, not years.’

‘Perhaps
Penny Royal caused some fault in it. One detected only recently with the result
we have just seen.’

Things
were starting to become clear to Amistad. You only started dumping remote
sensors like that if you either thought they were about to be detected, or if
they had developed some sort of fault that couldn’t be corrected – which, at
this technological level where self-repairing machines were the norm, meant
only one kind of fault: hostile code in the controlling computers.

‘And in
the two we’ve seen destroyed here?’ Ergatis wondered.

‘So it
would seem,’ said Amistad, then enquired, ‘Penny Royal?’

Though
the erstwhile black AI was still nursing its wounds down on the surface, the
response came instantly. ‘Answers in the part of my mind you rubbed out.’

Penny
Royal remained unaware that Amistad had not rubbed out that eighth state of
consciousness, had just drawn it out like a pulsating sting and dropped it in a
sealed container. The answers Amistad wanted certainly did reside in that
vessel presently sitting under the southern ocean, but he did not fancy ending
up on the end of that sting to retrieve them.

‘I put
you back together,’ said Amistad. ‘Evidence indicated that you were first
attacked only on a mental level, then subsequently on both a mental and
physical level.’

‘Yes,’
was all of Penny Royal’s reply.

‘Speculate,’
Amistad instructed.

‘I would
have replied along the route of the attack.’

So it
seemed likely that the device’s sensor out at the Graveyard had been infected
by something Penny Royal had sent, warranting its destruction. That two such
sensors here had been destroyed indicated that the infection might have spread.
Amistad paused for a moment, reviewing what little data was available concerning
those sensors, reviewing a report from some haiman specialist who had been
aboard that science vessel out at the Graveyard, then aboard the old interface
dreadnought that first discovered the Atheter device. Something didn’t add up,
or rather it didn’t add up until Amistad really thought about it for a couple
of microseconds.

‘Something
else was used,’ he noted.

Neither
Penny Royal nor Ergatis responded to this. They had both heard and closely
studied everything Jeremiah Tombs had said in the Tagreb museum and were
probably coming to the same conclusion as Amistad.

‘You
possessed eight states of consciousness, Penny Royal, each perpetually backing
up the others – a scale of redundancy only a few Polity AIs have. During the
second attack upon you, you were hit with something that disrupted you so fast,
both mentally and physically, you had neither the time nor spare capacity to
hold yourself together. If the original sensor had possessed that capability
there would not have been two attacks.’

‘Agreed,’
said Penny Royal, adding, ‘Under the bell.’

Yes,
that made sense. Now shoving himself into a slow orbit about Masada, Amistad
considered how it must have been. The device must have been following narrow
and clearly delineated orders. There was an Atheter AI here on Masada and
Atheter memcordings existed. It probably didn’t respond to the first because
though artificial intelligence aped organic life its underlying mental
functions were nowhere near the same. It didn’t react to the second because a
memcording was static. It must respond only to active Atheter mental processes,
which it must detect by using some sort of very sophisticated
pattern-recognition scanner. Until its encounter with Penny Royal it had been
ignoring everything else, even the fact that a whole new alien civilization now
occupied what had once been the Atheter realm. Having no idea what it was up
against, perhaps thinking it was just dealing with an odd stray, some chunk of
Atheter technology that had been missed, it had attacked Penny Royal in a
limited fashion – through the sensor itself – thus enabling the black AI to
respond. Only after that response had the device deployed the big guns.

Under the bell.

That
there had been Atheter who had not agreed with the suicide consensus presupposed
that the method used to conduct that holocaust incorporated sufficient power to
deal with them too; to deal with advanced minds seeking every recourse to avoid
oblivion, including the technological defences of a race that had been at war
for millennia. It would have been done fast, on a massive scale. And what had
done that had been sent against Penny Royal after the AI demonstrated it could
defend itself.

‘It
probably requires a closer physical location for more effective deployment,’
said Ergatis, obviously thinking along the same lines as Amistad.

So, the
device was coming to Masada to deploy the bell, or bells, whatever it had used
to rub out the minds of millions of Atheter. What had driven it to relocate was
detecting an Atheter mind functioning in a Human being,
so it must now almost certainly be aware of and responding to the new alien
civilization on Atheter home territory.

‘The
cavalry has arrived,’ Ergatis announced.

The big
modern dreadnought the Scold, accompanied by the
interface dreadnought Cheops, had just materialized
in the Masadan system. Amistad felt some relief upon seeing the two ships. In Cheops Earth Central had provided something quite capable
of denuding a planet of life, whilst in Scold it had
provided something capable of converting the same planet into a collection of
smoking asteroids. In light of what he had just learned, Amistad hoped these
two would be enough.

Despite having slept for a good eight hours, Grant still felt tired as he
gazed out of the windows of the Tagreb refectory and reviewed his most recent
exchanges with Amistad. It seemed that now the AIs were getting what they
wanted from Tombs, but more than they bargained for from out in space. He
wondered what further use he could be. Whilst Penny Royal stood guard his own
function as a bodyguard to Tombs had just been an honorary position. He rather
thought that he’d served his real purpose just by his presence – a familiar
face out of Tombs’s repressed past – so perhaps the time had come for him to
quit.

‘Can I
join you?’

He
looked up to see Shree standing over his table. He actually didn’t want her to
join him, had come to realize that though they had been lovers during the
Rebellion, he actually didn’t like her very much now. Even so, he waved to the
chair opposite.

‘So what
happens now?’ she asked, dumping her pack down beside her seat.

Grant
shrugged. ‘We go to Dragon Down, where Tombs gets his next shock treatment, or
revelation, whatever.’

‘What
sort of shock?’ she asked.

Grant
knew precisely the shock involved but, almost instinctively, he wanted to
reveal as little as possible to Shree. Was this because a whole audience might
be looking through her eyes? Or was it because of her still evident hate of the
Theocracy and of Tombs? Grant abruptly felt surprise. In considering Shree
Enkara’s evident feelings he realized that his own had grown dull. Did he hate
Tombs? No. Did he hate the Theocracy? No more than one can hate the corpse of
an enemy.

‘No
idea,’ he said. ‘Something Amistad lined up.’

Shree
shook her head, showing far too obvious disappointment. ‘Surely he should go to
the Atheter AI now. I know it projects holograms, but wouldn’t a gabbleduck
speaking to him do more psyche-loosening than anything else? The Atheter AI
could probably even speak to him in the Atheter language and he’d probably
understand it.’

Obviously
Shree, even with her media contacts, still didn’t know that the Atheter AI
remained uncommunicative and that the last time it projected the image of a
gabbleduck had been twenty years ago. The Polity AIs must have kept this all
thoroughly locked down. Perhaps they were respecting an associate’s privacy.

‘That
seems like an idea,’ said Grant. ‘But what the hell do I know? I wouldn’t have
pegged letting someone hack off his own face as good therapy.’

‘If
Tombs has recovered his sanity.’

‘What’s
sanity?’

Shree
snorted dismissively and looked aside. Perhaps she had her own firm idea of an
answer to that question. Grant realized that he too had once had his own set
ideas about such things and, as he had discovered, a lot of ideas failed to
survive their first contact with reality.

She
looked back. ‘All I do know is that a final encounter like that would be
perfect for me.’ She gestured with one hand towards the windows. ‘But then a
neat climax to the story I’m broadcasting from here isn’t the first concern of
AIs like Amistad.’

No, thought Grant, Amistad’s concern
right now is that a two-million-year-old civilization-wrecking machine is on
its way here. He allowed himself a small grin – Shree’s story was due to
get an awful lot bigger.

‘What’s
amusing you?’ she asked, an edge to her voice.

‘Just
thinking,’ said Grant, ‘that Amistad won’t object to Tombs’s journey taking him
to the Atheter AI – quite probably the opposite in fact.’ If Tombs could elicit
a reaction out of that intelligence he would be getting something the Polity
AIs had been after for the best part of the last two decades.

‘So
we’ll go there?’

‘It’s
not up to me.’

‘Why
don’t you ask Amistad?’

‘You
don’t get it.’ Grant rested his hands on the table, fingers interlaced.
‘Amistad thinks Tombs going to Dragon Down might be unnecessary, but is letting
it run. The drone’s got other irons in the fire right now. Where Tombs goes
after Dragon Down depends on them. When it’s ready the drone will be down here
having a very long talk with Tombs.’

‘So we
just wait in Dragon Down until these “other matters” are dealt with.’

‘No, I’m
to take Tombs wherever he wants to go.’

‘Then
why not to the AI?’

‘That
might be allowed, but it’s his decision,’ said Grant.

‘He’s a
fucking proctor, Grant.’

‘He’s a
free Polity citizen, Shree.’ Grant gazed at her steadily. ‘If you want him to
go to the Atheter AI, then you’d better ask him.’

She
didn’t like that at all, but Grant just did not seem to have the energy to
care.

Dracomen, it seemed, were very literal in the way they named things. The
first two dracomen, created by the massive alien entity calling itself Dragon
and looking nothing like its name, had assumed the appellations Scar and
Non-scar the moment there was a distinction to make. And the reason for
draco-woman Blue’s name stood out at once.

Dracomen
were modelled on what some pre-runcible scientist thought dinosaurs might have
evolved into had they not been wiped out. Of course, being Human, that
scientist anthropomorphized his model to come up with man-dinosaurs, toad-faced
lizard men, in fact the kind of evil critters found in just about every virtual
fantasy experience on the market. Generally dracomen were pale yellow from
throat to groin, their scaling elsewhere ranging from grass green to deep jade.
This female, Blue, however, was precisely as her name implied. Her darker
scales were almost blue-black and the lighter scales down her front were a
curious almost artificial-looking azure.

Stepping
out of her gravan Sanders first studied this female then the small town lying
beyond her. The name of this place was literal too, for it stood at the edge of
where one dragon sphere, the one the Theocracy had labelled Behemoth, had
sacrificed itself to create the dracoman race. Dragon Down, inevitably. Of
course no crater existed here any more – the tricones and the slow tidal
movement of the mud had obliterated it.

‘Please,
this way.’ Blue gestured towards a walkway lying on heavily disturbed mud, then
nimbly leaped onto it with that weird bird-legged gait.

‘I’ve
got luggage,’ said Sanders.

‘Of
course you have,’ replied the blue dracowoman.

Did
Sanders really need her belongings? How long would she be here? Both were
questions she had no answer to. However, she’d felt the need to take back some
control, assert herself. She stepped down past her vehicle to the side door,
sinking in churned mud up to her ankles, her soles coming to rest on the grid
the weight of the gravan had pressed down below the surface. Palming the door
pad she stepped back, removed her remote control from her pocket. After a
moment one of her two hover trunks came trundling out, rocking as its sensors
struggled to read what lay below it. She watched it for a second, until it
managed to compensate, then turned and followed Blue onto the walkway.

The town
was much like the other dracoman towns scattered across Masada. From a distance
it looked like a sprawling mass of giant white puffballs sprouting from the
mud. Only when one drew closer did the other infrastructure reveal itself
between the globular houses, storage tanks, generator stations, crèches,
biofactories . . . though, as Sanders understood it, the difference between
those last two might be something hard to nail down.

‘I’m
here to see someone,’ she said, finding herself reluctant to move further away
from the illusory safety of her vehicle – the same reluctance that had delayed
her arrival here when she decided first to return to Zealos and stay in a
hotel. She didn’t like obeying Amistad, and dracomen worried her. Stupid
really, that last, for though dangerous-looking dracomen were visible
throughout the town, there were also Humans here. Just a few metres away from
her gravan stood a large old ATV, still in camouflage paint, and still bearing
a rail-gun turret on the roof, and beyond that lay an antigravity bus – a utile
transport that rested on the rhizome mat like a brick with windows. A woman who
was probably its driver sat smoking a cigarette on the step of the open door –
a habit some atmosphere-adapted Masadans had taken up as if to raise two
fingers at the hostile environment. She was also gazing out to where other
Humans, probably her intended passengers, were dismounting from huge
lizard-like mounts – one of the creations of those dracoman biofactories, or
crèches.