It all came to a head one morning.
The room lights came on as usual to wake them up, But when their supervising jasoft didn’t come to collect them for work, Rala quickly got uneasy.
Rala shared her tiny room with Ingre, a cadre sibling. The room was just a bubble blown in nano-engineered rock by Qax technology. There was nothing inside but a couple of bunk beds, a space to store clothes, waste systems, water spigots, a food hole.
Ingre was a little younger than Rala, thin, anxious. She went to the door - which had snapped open at the allotted time, as it always did - and peered up and down the corridor. ‘Luru Parz is never late.’
‘We’ll just wait,’ Rala said firmly. ‘We’re safe here.’
But now there was a tread, steadily approaching along the corridor. It was too heavy for Luru Parz, their controlling jasoft, who was a slight woman. Some instinct prompted Rala to take Ingre’s hand and hold it tight.
A man stood in the doorway. His skin seemed oddly reddened, as if burned. He wore a skinsuit of what looked like gold foil. And there was a thick thatch of black hair on his head. Nobody in the Conurbation, workers or jasofts alike, wore hair.
He wasn’t Luru Parz. He wasn’t from the Conurbation at all.
The man stepped into the room and glanced around. ‘All these cells are the same. I can’t believe you drones live like this.’ His accent was strange. Rala thought his gaze lingered on her body, and she looked away. She had never heard the word ‘drone’ before. He pointed at the panel in the wall. ‘Your food hole.’
‘Yes—’
He smashed the transparent panel with a gloved fist. Ingre and Rala cowered back. Bits of plastic flew everywhere, and a silvery dust trickled to the floor. To Rala this was literally an unthinkable crime.
Ingre said, ‘The jasofts will punish you for that.’
‘You know what this was? Qax shit. Replicator technology.’
‘But now it’s broken.’
‘Yes, now it’s broken.’ He pointed to his chest. ‘And you must come to us for your food.’
‘Food is power,’ Rala said.
He looked at her more closely. ‘You are a fast learner. Report to the roof in one hour. You will be processed there.’ He turned and walked out. Where he had passed Rala thought she could smell burning, like hot metal.
Rala and Ingre sat on their bunk for almost the whole hour, barely speaking. Nobody came to fix the smashed hole. Before they left, Rala scooped up a little of the silver dust and put it in a pocket of her robe.
From the roof the Conurbation domes were a complex of vast, glistening blisters. Rala had been up here only a handful of times in her life. She tried not to flinch from the open sky.
Today this dome roof was full of people. The Conurbation inhabitants, with their shaven heads and long robes, had been gathered into queues that snaked everywhere. Each queue led to a table, behind which sat an exotic-looking individual in a gold skinsuit.
Ingre whispered, ‘Which line shall we join?’
Rala glanced around. ‘That one. Look who’s behind the table.’ It was the man who had come to their cell.
‘He frightened me.’
‘But at least we know him. Come on.’
They queued in silence. Rala felt calmer. Living in a Conurbation, you did a lot of queuing; this felt normal.
Around the Conurbation the land was a plain that shone silver-grey, like a geometric abstraction. Canals snaked away to the horizon, full of glistening blue water. Human bodies drifted down the canals, away from the Conurbation to the sea. That wasn’t unusual, just routine waste management. But there did seem to be many bodies today.
At last Rala reached the front of the queue.
The stranger probably wasn’t much older than she was, she realised, no more than thirty. ‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘The drone who understands the nature of power.’
She bristled. ‘I am not a drone.’
‘You are what I say you are.’ He had a data slate before him, obviously purloined from a Conurbation workstation. He worked it slowly, as if unfamiliar with the technology. ‘Tell me your name.’
‘Rala.’
‘Rala, my name is Pash. From now on you report to me.’
She didn’t understand. ‘Are you a jasoft?’ The jasofts were human servants of the Qax who, it was said, were granted freedom from death in return for their service.
He said, ‘The jasofts are gone.’
‘The Qax—’
‘Are gone too.’ He glanced upwards. ‘At night you can see their mighty Spline ships, peeling out of orbit. Where they are going, I don’t know. But we will go after them one day.’
Could it be true - could the centuries-old Occupation be over, could Luru Parz and the other jasofts really have melted away, could the framework of her whole world have vanished? Rala felt like a lost child, separated from her cadre. She tried not to let this show in her face.
‘What was your sin?’ It turned out he was asking what job she did.
She had spent her working life in vocabulary deletion. The goal had been to replace the old human tongues with a fully artificial language. It would have taken a few more generations, but at last a great cornerstone of the Extirpation, the Qax’s methodical elimination of the human past, would have been completed. It was intellectually fascinating.
He nodded. ‘Your complicity with the great crime committed against humanity—’
‘I committed no crime,’ she snapped.
‘You could have refused your assignments.’
‘I would have been punished.’
‘Punished? Many will die before we are free.’
The word shocked her. It was hard to believe this was happening. ‘Are you going to punish me now?’
‘No,’ he said, tiredly. ‘Listen to me, Rala. It’s obvious you are smart, you have a high degree of literacy. We were the crew of a starship. A trading vessel, called Port Sol. While you toiled in this bubble-town, I hid up there.’ He glanced at the sky.
‘You are bandits.’
He laughed. ‘No. But we are not bureaucrats either. We need people like you to help run this place.’
‘Why should I work for you?’
‘You know why.’
‘Because food is power.’
‘Very good.’
The traders tried to rule their new empire by lists. They kept lists of ‘drones’, and of their ‘sins’, and tables of things that needed to be done to keep the Conurbation functioning, like food distribution and waste removal.
For Rala it wasn’t so bad. It was just work. But compared to the sophisticated linguistic analysis she had been asked to perform under the Occupation, this simple clerical stuff was dull, routine.
Once she suggested a better way to devise a task allocation. She was punished, by the docking of her food ration. That was how it went. If you cooperated you were fed. If not, not.
Her food was the same pale yellow tablets she had grown up with, the tablets produced by the food holes, though less of them. They came from a sector at the heart of the Conurbation where the food holes had been left intact - the only such place, in fact. It was guarded around the clock.
After the first month or so, the battles started in the sky. You would see glowing lights on the horizon, or sometimes flashing shapes in the night, threads and bursts of light. All utterly silent. All these ships and weapons were human. The oppression of the Qax had been lifted, only for humans to fall on each other.
Actually there was a lot of information to be had from the traders’ lists, if you knew how to read them. Rala saw how few the traders really were. She sensed their insecurity, despite the gaudy weapons they wielded: so few of us, so many of them. And now there were challenges from the sky. The traders’ rule was fragile.
But though people muttered about the good old days under the Qax, nobody did anything about it. It wouldn’t even occur to most drones to raise a fist. Besides there was no place else to go, nothing else to eat. Beyond the city there was only the endless nano-chewed dirt on which nothing grew.
There was never enough to eat, though.
In a corner of her cell, away from prying eyes, Rala examined the silvery Qax replicator dust. This stuff had made food before; why wouldn’t it now? But the dust just lay in its bowl, offering nothing.
Of course the food hadn’t come from nothing. A slurry of seawater and waste had been fed to the dust through pipes in the wall. Somehow the silver dust had turned that muck into food. But in the pipes now there was only a sticky, greenish sludge that stank like urine. She scraped a little of this paste over the dust, but still, treacherously, it sat inert. She hid it all away again.
She had been aware of Pash’s interest in her from the first moment they had met.
She built on that tentative relationship. She talked to him about her work, and drew him out with questions about his background. He told her unlikely tales of worlds beyond the Moon, where humans had once built cities that orbited through rings of ice. Perhaps she was developing an instinct for survival; Pash’s interest was something she could exploit.
Eventually he began to invite her to his room. The room, once owned by a jasoft, was set beneath the Conurbation’s outer wall. It had a view of the sky, where silent battles flared.
‘I don’t know what you want here,’ she said to him one evening. ‘You traders. Why do you want a Conurbation? You aren’t very good at running it.’
‘There are worse than us out there.’
‘It isn’t wealth you want, is it?’ She had struggled to understand that trader word, long expunged from her language; for better or worse the Qax had for centuries imposed a crude communism on mankind. ‘There’s no wealth to be had here.’
‘No. There are only people.’
‘Yes. And where there are people, there is power to be wielded. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?’
He fell silent, and she wondered if she had pushed him too far. She sighed. ‘Tell me about Sat-urn again—’
The door slammed open. Somebody was standing there, silhouetted by bright light.
Instinctively Rala stepped forward, spreading her arms to hide Pash. A light shone in her face.
The intruder said, ‘I represent the Interim Coalition of Governance. The illegal seizure of this Conurbation by the bandits of the GUTship Port Sol is over.’
‘We are both drones.’ She rattled off details of her identity and work assignment.
‘You must stay in your cell. In the morning you will be summoned for new details. If you encounter the Port Sol crew—’
‘I will report them.’
There was shouting in the corridor; the Coalition trooper, distracted, hurried away.
Pash murmured, ‘Lethe. Look.’
Beyond the window, in the reddening sky, a Spline ship was hovering, a great meaty ball pocked with weapons emplacements. But this was no Qax vessel; a green tetrahedral sigil, a human symbol, had been crudely carved in its flank.
‘Things have changed,’ Rala said dryly.
Pash asked, ‘Why did you shelter me?’
‘Because I have had enough of rulers,’ she snapped. ‘We must be ready. You will have to shave your head. Perhaps one of my robes will fit you.’
The Coalition had its own, different theory about how to run a Conurbation.
They were all evicted from the city. The people stood in sullen ranks - mostly Conurbation drones, but with at least one trader, Pash, camouflaged among the rest. They had been given tools, simple hoes and spades. The walls of the Conurbation loomed above them all, scorched by fire.
The sun was hot, the air dry, and insects buzzed. These were city folk; they didn’t like being out here. There were even children; the new rulers of the Conurbation had closed down the schools, which even the traders had kept running.
A woman stood on a platform before them. She wore a green uniform, clean but shabby, and she had the green sigil tattooed on her forehead - the symbol, as Rala had now learned, of free humanity. At her side were soldiers, not in uniform, though they all wore green armbands, and had the sigil marked on their faces.
‘My name is Cilo Mora,’ said the woman. ‘The Green Army has restored order to the Earth, overthrowing the bandit traders. But the Qax may return - or if not them, another foe. We must always be prepared. You are the advance troops of a moral revolution. The work you will begin today will fortify your will and clarify your vision. But remember - now you are all free!’
One man near the front raised his hoe dubiously. ‘Free to scrape at the dirt?’
One of the green-armbands clubbed him to the ground.
Nobody else moved. Cilo Mora smiled, as if the unpleasantness had never happened. The man in the dirt lay where he had fallen, unattended.
Fields were marked out using rubble from fallen Conurbation domes. Seeds were supplied, from precious stores preserved off-world. All around the city people toiled in the dirt, but there were machines too, hastily adapted and improvised.