Lewis Sinclair had been born in 2059. He lived in Messopia, one of the first purpose-built industrial/accommodation/ leisure
complexes to be constructed on Spain’s Mediterranean coast; a cheerless mathematical warren of concrete, glass, and plastic
which covered five square kilometres and sheltered ninety thousand people against the ferocious armada storms which were beginning
to plague Earth. It was a heavily subsidized experiment by the European Federal Parliament, by that time desperate to tackle
the cancerous underclass problem thrown up by the continent’s eighty-five million unemployed. Messopia was a qualified success;
its medium-scale engineering industries provided only a minimal return for investors, but it provided a foretaste of the huge
arcologies which in the centuries to come would house, protect, and employ Earth’s dangerously expanded population.
His path through life was never going to be anything other than troublesome; born to low-income parents, who were only in
the new microcosm city because of the parliamentary law requiring a socially balanced population. There was no real niche
for him in an enterprise geared so resolutely towards the middle-class job/family/home ethic. He played truant from school,
turned to crime, drugs, violence. A textbook delinquent, one of thousands who ran through Messopia’s architecturally bankrupt
corridors and malls.
It could have been different, if the education system had caught him early enough, if he had had the strength to hold out
against peer pressure, if Messopia’s technocrat designers had been less contemptuous of the social sciences. The opportunities
existed. Lewis Sinclair lived in an age of quite profound technological and economic progress, and never really knew it, let
alone shared in it. The first batches of asteroid-mined metal were starting to supplement depleted planetary reserves; biotechnology
was finally living up to its initial promise; crude examples of the affinity bond were being demonstrated; more and more non-polluting
fusion plants were coming on-stream as the supplies of He3 mined from Jupiter’s atmosphere increased. But none of it reached
down to his level of society. He died in 2076, seventeen years old; one year after the bitek habitat Eden was germinated in
orbit around Jupiter, and one year before the New Kong asteroid settlement began its FTL stardrive research project. His death
was as wasteful as his life, a fight with power-blade knives in a piss-puddled subterranean warehouse, him and his opponent
both high on synthetic crack. The fight was over a thirteen-year-old girl they both wanted to pimp.
He lost, the power blade chopping through his ribs to slice his stomach into two unequal portions.
And Lewis Sinclair made the same discovery as every human eventually made. Death was not the end of being. In the centuries
that followed, spent as a virtually powerless astral entity suspended in dimensional emptiness, perceiving and envying mortals
in their rich physical existence, he simply wished it were so.
But now Lewis Sinclair had returned. He wore a body again, weeping for joy at such simple magnificence as raindrops falling
on his upturned face. He wasn’t going to go back into the deprivation which lay after physical life, not ever. And he had
the power to see that it was so; him and all the others, acting in combination, they were supreme badasses.
There was more to him than before, more than the strength which flesh and blood provided. Part of his soul was still back
there in the terrible empty gulf; he hadn’t emerged fully into life, not yet. He was trapped like a butterfly unable to complete
the transformation from dirtbound pupa to wing-free ephemeral. Often he felt as though the body he had possessed was simply
a biological sensor mechanism, a mole’s head peeking out from the earth, feeding sensations back to his feeling-starved soul
via an incorporeal umbilical cord. Strange energistic vortices swirled around the dimensional twist where the two continua
intermingled, kinking reality. The bizarre effect was usable, bending to his will. He could alter physical structures, sculpt
energy, even prise open further links back into the extrinsic universe. His mastery of this power was increasing gradually,
but its wild fluxes and resonances caused havoc in cybernetic machinery and electronic processor blocks around him.
So he watched through the spaceplane’s narrow curving windscreen as the
Yaku
(now operating under a forged registration) dwindled against the sharp-etched stars, and felt his new muscles relaxing below
the seat webbing. The spaceplane systems were an order of magnitude simpler than the
Yaku
’s, and critical malfunctions were highly unlikely now. Starflight was a disturbing business, so very technical. His dependency
on the machines which his very presence disrupted was unnerving. With some luck he would never have to venture across the
interstellar gulf again. He and his five colleagues riding down to the surface would be sufficient to conquer this unsuspecting
world, turning it into a haven for other souls. Together they would make it their own.
“Retro burn in five seconds,” Walter Harman said.
“OK,” Lewis said. He concentrated hard, feeling round a chorus of distant voices with the peculiar cell cluster in this body’s
brain.
We’re coming down now,
he told Pernik Island.
I look forward to your arrival,
the island personality replied.
The affinity voice sounded clear and loud in his mind. Bitek functioned almost flawlessly despite the energistic turmoil boiling
around his cells. It was one reason for selecting this particular planet.
The manoeuvring rockets at the rear of the little space-plane fired briefly, pushing him down into the angle of the seat.
The conditioning grille above his head was emitting an annoyingly loud whine as the fan motor spun out of control. His fingers
tightened their grip on the armrests.
Walter Harman claimed to have been a spaceplane pilot back in the 2280s, serving in the Kulu Navy. As only three of them had
even been in space before, his right to pilot the spaceplane went unchallenged. The body he used belonged to one of
Yaku
’s crew, possessed within minutes of Lewis boarding the starship. It was equipped with neural nanonics, which unlike bitek
proved almost useless in the constant exposure to the hostile energistic environment a possession generated, so Walter Harman
had activated the spaceplane’s manual-control system, an ergonomic joystick which deployed from the console in front of the
pilot’s seat. A projection pillar showed trajectory graphics and systems information, updating constantly as he muttered instructions
to the flight computer.
The spaceplane rolled, and Lewis saw the mass of the planet slide round the windscreen. They were over the terminator now,
heading into the penumbra.
Night was always their best time, putting mortal humans at a disadvantage, adding to their own potency. Something about the
darkness embraced their nature.
The spaceplane shook gently as the upper atmosphere began to strike the heatshield belly. Walter Harman pitched them up at
a slight angle, and swung the wings out a few degrees, beginning the long aerobrake glide downwards.
They were still in the darkness when they dropped below subsonic. Lewis could see a hemispherical bauble of light glinting
on the horizon ahead.
“Your approach is on the beam,” the island personality informed them over the microwave channel. “Please land on pad eighteen.”
A purple and yellow flight vector diagram appeared on the console’s holoscreen.
“Acknowledged, Pernik,” Walter Harman said.
A three-dimensional simulacrum of the island materialized inside Lewis’s skull, an image far sharper than the porno holographs
he used to peddle back in Messopia. He automatically knew which pad eighteen was. A burst of doubt and anxiety blossomed in
his mind, which he did his best to prevent from leaking back down the affinity bond to the island personality. This Edenist
consensual set-up was so smooth. He worried that they might be taking on more than they could reasonably expect to accomplish.
The island personality had accepted his explanation that he was representing his merchant family enterprise from Jospool.
Not every Edenist used the voidhawks to carry freight, there simply weren’t enough to go round.
Lewis studied the mental simulacrum. Pad eighteen was close to the rim and the floating quays, there would be machinery there.
It would be easy.
Pernik’s coating of moss made the two-kilometre disk a black hole in the faintly phosphorescent ocean. Pale yellow radiance
shone from a few windows in the accommodation towers, and floodlights illuminated all the quays. It was 4 a.m. local time,
most of the inhabitants were asleep.
Walter Harman set the spaceplane down on pad eighteen with only a minor wobble.
Welcome to Pernik,
the personality said formally.
Thank you,
Lewis replied.
Eysk is approaching. His family runs one of our premier fishing enterprises. He should be able to fill your requirements.
Excellent,
Lewis said.
My thanks again for receiving me so promptly. I have spent weeks on that Adamist starship; it was becoming somewhat claustrophobic.
I understand.
Lewis wasn’t sure, but he thought there was a mild dose of puzzlement in the personality’s tone. Too late now, though, they
were down. Excitement was spilling into his blood. His part of the scheme was by far the most important.
The airlock opened with a couple of jerky motions as the actuators suffered power surges. Lewis went down the aluminium stairs.
Eysk was walking across the polyp apron towards pad eighteen. A ridge of electrophorescent cells circling the pad were casting
an austere light over the spaceplane. Lewis could see very little of the island beyond; there was one accommodation tower
forming a slender black rectangle against the night sky, and the sound of waves sloshing against the rim came from the other
side of the spaceplane.
“Keep him busy,” Lewis ordered Walter Harman as the pilot followed him down the stairs.
“No problem, I’ve got a thousand dumb questions lined up. Atlantis hadn’t been discovered when I was alive.”
Lewis reached the landing pad and tensed—this was it, make or break time. He had altered his facial features considerably
during the starflight; that old journalist back on Lalonde had given him a nasty moment. He waited for the approaching Edenist
to shout an alarm to the island.
Eysk gave a slight bow in greeting, and directed an identity trait at Lewis. He waited politely for Lewis to return the punctilio.
Lewis didn’t have one. He hadn’t known. His only source of data on Edenist customs was far beyond his grasp.
Deep down at the centre of his brain there was a presence, the soul which used to own the body he now possessed. A prisoner
held fast by the manacle bonds of Lewis’s thoughts.
All of the possessors had a similar prisoner, visualized as a tiny homunculus contained within a sphere of cephalic glass.
They pleaded and they begged to be let out, to come back; annoying background voices, a gnat’s buzz across consciousness.
The possessed could use them, torment them with glimpses of reality in return for information, learning how to blend in with
the modern, starkly alien society into which they had come forth.
But the centre of Lewis’s mind contained only a heavy darkness. He hadn’t told the others that, they were all so boastful
of how they controlled their captives, so he just brazened it out. The soul he had usurped as he came to this body neither
entreated nor threatened. Lewis knew it was there, he could sense the surface thoughts, cold and hard, formidable with resolution.
Waiting. The entity frightened him, he had come to possess the body the same way he had walked Messopia’s corridors, The King
of Strut—thinking he could handle it. Now the first fractures of insecurity in his hyped-up confidence were multiplying. The
usurped soul’s personality was far stronger than him; he could never have withstood such dread isolation, not simply beyond
sensation, but knowing sensation was possible. What kind of person could?
Are you all right?
Eysk asked kindly.
I’m sorry. I think it may have been something I ate. And the ride down was a god-fucking bitch.
Eysk’s eyebrow rose.
Indeed?
Yeah, feel like I’m gonna puke. Be all right in a minute.
I do hope so.
“This is Walter Harman,” Lewis said out loud, knowing he was making a colossal balls-up of things. “A pilot, so he claims.
After that flight, think I’m going to ask the captain for a dekko at his licence.” He laughed at his witticism.
Walter Harman smiled broadly, and put out his hand. “Pleasure to meet you. This is one hell of a planet. I’ve never been here
before.”
Eysk seemed taken aback. “Your enthusiasm is most gratifying. I hope you enjoy your stay.”
“Thanks. Say, I tasted some gollatail a year back, have you got any round here?”
I’m just going for a walk, get some air,
Lewis said. Down in his memories were a thousand hangovers; he gathered together the phantom sensation of nausea and cranial
malaise, then broadcast them into the affinity band.
It ought to clear my head.
Eysk flinched at the emetic deluge.
Quite.
“I’d like to try some again, maybe take back a stock of my own,” Walter Harman prompted. “Old Lewis here can tell you what
our ship’s rations are like.”
“Yes,” Eysk said. “I believe we have some.” His gaze never left Lewis’s back.
“Great, that’s just great.”
Lewis stepped over the half-metre ridge of electrophorescent cells around the pad, and headed towards the island’s rim. There
was one of the floating quays ahead, a twenty-metre crane to one side for lifting smaller boats out of the water.