The Line of Polity (17 page)

"What happened ... to the two worlds at war?" Eldene asked.

"Well, ECS had to defend the Polity world. That's the charter."

"The other world?"

"It's still habitable at the poles."

Eldene chewed that over: there had always been a deep streak of cynicism in her — probably induced by her early reading — which was perhaps why Fethan had shown such interest in her. She'd never really believed his stories about the Human Polity, precisely because she wanted so badly for them to be true. Even so, she had taken in much of what he had told her and it was her understanding that the Polity would only have to learn of the injustice here for it to unleash ECS on the Theocracy.

"When will ECS come?" she asked eventually.

"When eighty per cent of the population has voted for such or when there has been a complete breakdown of political control and help is asked for," Fethan replied obdurately.

"How in the name of God are we supposed to vote?" Eldene asked.

Fethan glanced at her. "Do you want the Polity in control here? Would you pledge allegiance to the AIs that run the Human Polity?"

"Damned right I would. Anything has to be better than the Theocracy!"

Fethan halted and turned, gripping her by the shoulder. "Say to me your name and tell me what you want."

Eldene stared back at the man and tried to figure out what he meant. "I'm ... I'm Eldene and I want the ... Human Polity running this world. I want to be free. I want..."

Fethan released her. "You have just made your deposition. You've just voted for Polity control here." He tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something. "So far that's just over sixty-eight per cent of the population."

"I don't understand."

"The ballots run a limited physiological probe, to make sure the ballotee is not under duress. But because I am what I am, I can collect depositions without it." He gestured behind with his thumb. "Back there I collected fifty-three depositions, which you may be glad to know include Dent's and Cathol's. You were next on my list before circumstances ... changed."

"Ballots?"

"The Polity has had machines here collecting votes for thirty-eight years, but never managed to get that eighty per cent vote. Your vote, because of your age, has a life of fifty years calculated from average spans here. It's the only way it can work."

"But Dent and Cathol are dead."

"I didn't say the system was perfect, girl."

"I've never seen these ballots," said Eldene, still confused.

"They're machines — they'll be in a ring, an amulet, the button on someone's shirt. Even so, you understand how difficult it would be to get someone to say what you have just said, with proctors and Theocracy cameras watching them at every turn. Most of that sixty-eight per cent is the Underground vote."

Fethan moved on.

"Then how much longer?" Eldene asked.

Fethan was silent for a moment before replying. "I don't think it's gonna be done by vote, girl. I think that the Theocracy will be destabilized. Sometime soon, Earth Central will send certain individuals here, and things will change very quickly."

"Tell me more," said Eldene, excitement twisting her stomach. And Fethan told her much more.

6

"And thus it was that with God's guidance Brother Goodman came at last to the land of the gabbleduck. Hereabouts were trails worn through the grass and the scatterings of the bones of those who had failed the test," the woman told her boy, raising an eyebrow at the picture displayed in the book showing a veritable charnel house.

"The babbleguck, the babbleguck," said the boy impatiently — she had given up trying to get him to pronounce the name correctly and assumed this story would become part of his own personal mythology when he grew up. Scrolling the text down moved the scene along to soon reveal the creature itself: it squatted in the grasses like some monstrously insectile hybrid of Buddha and Kali, with a definite splash of Argus in the ocular region.

"Gabbleduck," said the boy, and the woman looked at him with suspicion before continuing.

"In his right hand Brother Goodman carried the word of God and in his left hand he carried the wisdom of Zelda Smythe. He brought no weapons to the abode of the monster other than these and his Faith. 'Ask me a riddle!' he cried, holding up both books."

At this point, the gabbleduck, with its multiple arms folded on its triple-keeled chest, turned its array of green eyes upon the pious brother.

" 'Scubble leather bobble fuck,' said the duck, and in reply Brother Goodman smote the creature with the word, 'Ung?' "

The woman started giggling as the picture book now showed the enormous creature stooping down and opening its large bill to expose an interior lined with something like white holly leaves.

"Then guess... what... happened?" she managed.

Giggling as well, though not sure why, the boy did not manage a reply. The book showed them both anyway.

The
Occam Razor
was a dark and disturbing ship, made more so because despite its large crew and resident population, it always seemed empty — any crew member possibly being, at any one time, as much as a couple of kilometres away, and that was a disturbing thought. His cabin was large, comfortable, had all the facilities of a plush hotel, and was like a room in an empty house. Standing at the wide screen that served as a window, Cormac sipped a whisky with cubes of normal ice in it, unlike the one he had been poured by Dreyden — whisky with cips ice was a lethal combination — and watched
Elysium,
and the huge sun it orbited, dwindle into invisibility. He felt the need now to be about his business, but there were months yet of ship time to get through before the
Occam Razor
reached its destination. Unable to contain his impatience any longer he swallowed the last of his drink, placed the glass back in the wall dispenser and headed for the door.

The ship was not quiet, yet it had an air of quietude. The sounds Cormac could hear in the corridor were distant and echoey, and as of someone working on things far off: the crackle of a welder, the clang of something dropped, the stutter of a laser drill. He checked the time and, seeing that only an hour had passed since their departure from
Elysium,
he decided not to bother Mika yet — she would hardly have had time to settle in her cabin, let alone establish herself in the ship's forensic laboratory in Medical. He decided he needed to think, and he always thought best while he was walking. There was plenty of room to walk here, so he chose a direction and set off.

In a few minutes it was evident he had left the accommodation area. The walkway soon lost its carpeting — bare gravity plates exposed — then its partition walls, exposing the inner structure of the ship. All around him was an ordered forest of wires and optic cables, ducts and foamed metal beams, and plasma tubes, often intersecting at some bulky wasps' nest of a machine. For a couple of minutes he had a view of something far below him that looked like the Sydney Opera House, but it was soon obscured as some huge deck slid slowly over it. He had been walking for ten minutes when a drone flew waveringly towards him. This particular machine had the smooth shape of an arrowhead with no visible manipulators, and he wondered just what purpose it could possibly serve.

"What's the quickest way to the hull?" he asked quickly, when it became evident the drone was not going to stop. The drone jerked to a halt in midair, turned two ruby eyes towards him, then turned again so it was pointing down the way he was heading.

"First left, about half a klom," it said.

"Thank—"

The drone had already flown off.

Cormac soon came to an intersection of four walkways, and took the one on his immediate left in the hope that he was still going in the right direction. If he was, he would reach his destination in five or ten minutes. After only a couple of minutes it came into sight. The hull of the ship was a steel cliff with neither top nor bottom in sight, just a couple of square kilometres of curving hull-metal. The walkway ended in a circular platform before a shimmer-shield curtaining a rectangular hole piercing the hull. Cormac received an impression of scale it was not often possible to find on a world. This ship was awesome, but it surprised him to have not yet encountered any crewmembers. Strangely, it came as no surprise to him to see a familiar figure awaiting him on the platform, silhouetted against the glitter of stars.

"Now why the hell are
you
here?" he asked as he drew closer.

Blegg was utterly silent until Cormac came to stand beside him, then he gestured to the immensity beyond the shimmer-shield. "Games," he said, while gazing out into the flecked darkness. "Human beings playing at silly games and arguing like children over their toys." He turned to look at Cormac, and Cormac flinched at what he saw in those eyes: a power there, something ineffable.

Blegg went on, "The human race occupies a small fraction of the galaxy, a small sphere at its rim, a hundred star systems at most, but enough that it is beginning to be noticed."

"Yes, I'm sure it is," Cormac replied, fumbling in his pocket and finding a New Carth shilling — the currency used in
Elysium
. He held it out and, remembering the briefing from Blegg he had previously received in VR, tipped his hand and exerted his will to stop the shilling in midair. It bounced off the platform then curved spinning into the space beyond — now obviously outside the influence of the grav-plates he was standing on.

"We are not in VR," Blegg told him.

"Then let me repeat: 'Why the hell are you here?' Did you board at
Elysium
?"

"The human race is beginning to be noticed, Ian Cormac."

"By the likes of the Makers, yes, and we saved the one surviving member of a mission from their race and are now transporting it back. What of that? Its arrival back in its home system is years hence in our terms, and presumably it is now a friend."

"Not just the Makers, Ian, but they illustrate a point — the rogue biological machine of theirs, Dragon, has caused the human race many problems."

Cormac snorted. "You talk of the human race as if you are not a member."

Blegg grinned. "Ye doubt me, Ian?"

"You are capable of things no other human is capable of, at least, to my knowledge."

Blegg allowed that a derisive grunt. "There're others like me, and there'll be more."

Cormac let that ride and instead asked, "Who other than the Makers are beginning to notice us?"

Blegg turned back to the shimmer-shield. It was a moment before he replied. Cormac stamped his feet against the deck plates. He had only just started to notice how cold it was on the platform. A chill blast came up from below, and there were gleaming nodules of ice on the rails.

"They're out there," said Blegg. "They were building starships before humans stood upright. There're star-spanning civilizations that're millions of years old."

"Oh, tell me more, please," said Cormac, his breath visible before his face.

Blegg grinned at him. "Better," he said.

"So what if they are watching us?"

"We have to be ready. Simple examination by such as them could destroy us. Levels of technology — like Dragon. Even now, our astronomers still think that all pulsars and black holes are natural phenomena. They also express amazement at how lucky the human race has been: a moon to prevent Earth's atmosphere becoming as thick as that of Venus, no large asteroid strikes while our kind developed, the aptly timed Ice Age late in our evolution. It also surprises them how abundant are living worlds beyond Earth."

"I presume there is a point to all this?"

"We squabble. We must be unified, strong and as one. Soon we'll be playing grown-up games. As we are we might not survive."

"Masada?"

"Masada. All of them."

Cormac stared at him and waited. He was sure Blegg was bullshitting him again for his own obscure purposes or amusement.
Give the big picture, fine, but what do I do being only a pixel in that picture?
Blegg turned back to watch as a shutter slowly slid down outside the shimmer-shield.

"Entering underspace," said Blegg, and as Cormac felt the strangeness, the dislocation, he saw that for a moment Blegg had gone translucent, flickering like a hologram. He reached out and touched the other man's shoulder, but he was there. His skin felt hot, fevered. As if he had not noticed the touch, Blegg continued to speak.

"Masada is not a heavily populated world but, under the Theocracy there, life is very cheap. The majority of the surface population would rebel, but they do not because they live at a perpetually enforced technological disadvantage. A grid of laser projectors hangs geostationary over their heads and, as I said before, the Theocracy are building a kinetic launcher to suppress what rebellion there is in the planet's Underworld. That religious order controls them all, and most of its members live safely out of the way in satellite cylinder-worlds. The sheep live a hard life on the surface of the planet."

"Sounds idyllic. What do you want me to do?"

"Thirty hours after the
Occam Razor
takes the position of the Outlink station, it will draw the line of Polity across the Masadan system. It would be useful if the populace rebelled against oppression, then they could be helped. It would be useful if there was a valid reason for the
Occam Razor
to enter the Masadan system."

Cormac noted the sarcasm. "Why not just move in and take over anyway?" he asked, deciding not to make things easy for Blegg.

"Politics."

"Yeah? Explain."

"Masada is held up as something of an icon for Separatists across human space. It would be nice if our intervention was on the behalf of the populace — useful if the Theocracy was made to look villainous."

"I still don't get it," said Cormac, deliberately stubborn.

"All-out war costs. You should know that. It has always been your job to prevent it."