The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  This island expanding, new land growing out from the cliff edges. Land that’s covered in rich green life. We are a seed here, we can germinate into something wonderful. Heaven is what you make it: that’s such a precious destiny, every human’s entitlement. And we can see it. Out there, waiting for us. We’ve come so far, they cannot be allowed to contaminate our minds with their dark yearning to remain in the past.”

  Soi Hon raised an eyebrow. “A seed? That’s how you see this island?”

  “Yes. One that can bloom into whatever kingdom we want.”

  “I doubt that. I really do. We are humans in stolen bodies, not embryonic godlings.”

  “And yet, we’ve already taken the first step.” She lifted her hands up in a theatrical offering to the sky. “After all, we said there was to be light, didn’t we?”

  “I’ve read that book, but not many of my people did. How typically Euro-Christian, you think your origins and mythology populated the world. All you actually gave us was pollution, war, and disease.”

  Annette grinned wolfishly. “Come on, Soi, show a little levity. Get radical again. This place can be made to work. Once we eliminate the serjeants we’ll have a chance.” Her smile faded as she sensed the babble of confusion and surprise emanating from within the communal mind of the serjeants. Ever-present, it sat on the edge of her consciousness, a dawn refusing to rise. Now their cool thoughts were changing, coming as close to panic as she’d known. “What’s upset them?”

  She and Soi walked over to the end of the tent, and looked over at the dark mass of serjeants clustering in the foothills of Catmos Vale’s lost walls.

  “Well, they’re not charging at us,” Soi said. “That’s gratifying.”

  “Something’s wrong.” She brought up her field binoculars, and searched the serjeants’ encampment, trying to spot any abnormality amid the large dark bodies. They were sitting calmly together as always. Then she realized every head was turned to face her. The binoculars came down, allowing her to frown back at them. “I don’t get this.”

  “There, look.” Soi was pointing at a bright spark rushing over the town’s perimeter fortifications. The soldiers below it were shouting and gesticulating wildly as it soared imperviously overhead.

  It hurtled towards the mound at the centre of town.

  “Mine,” Annette said warmly. With her feet apart, she brought her hands together in a pistol grip. A squat black maser carbine materialized, blunt barrel lining up on the approaching crystal.

  “I don’t think that’s a weapon,” Soi said. He started to back away from Annette. “It didn’t come from the serjeants, they’re as puzzled as us.”

  “It doesn’t have permission to enter my town.”

  Soi started to run. A slim flare of intense white fire spewed out of Annette’s gun, darting towards the approaching crystal. It veered effortlessly aside, arcing over Soi. He stumbled as the spires of light pirouetted around him.

  Smoothly and methodically, Annette turned to follow the invader. She pulled back on the trigger again, flinging the most potent bolt of white fire she could muster. It had no effect. The crystal whipped round in a tight parabola above Soi and accelerated back the way it came.

  The serjeants watched it return. This time it never even slowed down as it tore through the air above them. Once it was over the cliff it began to curve downwards. Delvan rushed up to the very edge and flung himself flat on the crusted mud, head just peeping over. The last he saw of it was a glimmer of light descending parallel to the crinkled cliff-face before disappearing underneath the antagonistic planes of fractured rock.

  The traders hooted and clanked their way along Cricklade’s drive in seven big lorries. Steam hissed energetically out of the iron stacks behind their cabs, while gleaming brass pistons spun the front wheels. They growled to a halt in front of the manor’s broad steps, dripping oil on the gravel and wheezing steam from leaky couplings.

  Luca came forward to greet them. As far as he could tell, the thoughts of the people riding in the cabs were amicable enough. He wasn’t expecting trouble; traders had visited Cricklade before, but never in a convoy this size. A group of ten estate workers were on close call, just in case.

  The traders’ leader climbed down out of the lead lorry and introduced himself as Lionel. He was a short man with flowing blond hair tied back with a leather lace, wearing worn blue denim jeans and a round-neck sweater: working clothes which were almost an extension of his forthright attitude. After a couple of minutes’ conversation, sizing each other up, Luca invited him indoors.

  Lionel settled appreciatively into the study’s leather armchair, sipping at the Norfolk Tears Luca offered him. If he was concerned about the restrained, moody atmosphere grumbling around the manor, it never showed.

  “Our main commodity this trip is fish,” he said. “Mostly smoked, but we have some on ice as well. Apart from that, we’re carrying vegetable and fruit seeds, fertilised chicken eggs, some fancy perfumes, a few power tools. We’re trying to build a reputation for reliability, so if there’s something you want which we haven’t got, we’ll try to get hold of it for our next visit.”

  “What are you looking for?” Luca asked as he sat down behind the broad desk.

  “Flour, meat, some new tractor bearings, a power socket to recharge the lorries.” He raised his glass. “A decent drink.” They grinned, and touched their glasses. Lionel’s gaze lingered on Luca’s hand for a moment. The contrast between their skin was subtle, but noticeable.

  Luca’s was darker, thicker, a true guide to Grant’s age; Lionel maintained an altogether more youthful sheen.

  “What sort of exchange rate were you thinking of for the fish?” Luca asked.

  “For flour, five to one, direct weight.”

  “Don’t bugger about wasting my time.”

  “I’m not. Fish is meat, valuable protein. There’s also carriage; Cricklade’s a long way inland.”

  “That’s why we have sheep and cattle; we’re exporting meat. But I can pay your carriage costs in electricity, we have our own heat shaft.”

  “Our power cells are seventy per cent charged.”

  The haggling went on for a good forty minutes. When Susannah came in she found them on their third round of Norfolk Tears. She sat on the side of Luca’s chair, his arm around her waist. “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “I hope you like fish,” Luca told her. “We’ve just bought three tons of it.”

  “Oh bloody hell.” She plucked the glass of Tears from his hand, and sipped thoughtfully. “I suppose there’s room in the freezer room. I’ll have to have a word with Cook.”

  “Lionel has some interesting news, as well.”

  “Oh?” She gave the trader a pleasant, enquiring look.

  Lionel smiled, covering a mild curiosity. Like Luca, Susannah was letting her host body’s age show. The first middle-aged people he’d seen since Norfolk came to this realm. “We got our fish from a ship in Holbeach, the Cranborne. They were docked there a week ago, trading their cargo for an engine repair. Should still be there.”

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “The Cranborne is a merchant multitramp,” Luca said. “She just sails between islands picking up cargo and passengers, whatever pays; she can fish, dredge, harvest mintweed, icebreak, you name it.”

  “Her current crew have rigged her with nets,” Lionel said. “There’s not much charter work going at the moment, so trawling has become their livelihood. They’re also talking about trading between islands. Once things have settled down, they’ll have a better idea of who produces what and the kind of goods they can carry to exchange.”

  “I’m happy for them,” Susannah said. “Why tell me?”

  “It’s a way of getting to Norwich,” Luca said. “A start, anyway.”

  Susannah looked hard into his face, now falling back into Grant’s familiar features. The relapse had been accelerating ever since he returned from his trip to Knossington with the news that the aeroambulance di
dn’t work, its electronics simply couldn’t operate in this realm. “A voyage that far would be expensive,” she said quietly.

  “Cricklade could afford it.”

  “Yes,” she said carefully. “It could. But it’s not ours any more. If we take that much food or Tears or horses the others will claim we stole it. We wouldn’t be able to come back, not to Kesteven.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, we. They’re our children, and this is our home.”

  “One means nothing without the other.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, deeply troubled. “What’s to make the Cranborne crew stick to the agreement once we cast off?”

  “What’s to stop us stealing their whole ship?” Luca replied wearily. “We have a civilization again, darling. It’s not the best, I know that. But it’s here, and it works. At least we can see treachery and dishonesty coming a long way off.”

  “All right. So do you want to go? It’s not as if we haven’t got enough troubles,” she said guiltily, flicking a glance at the diplomatically quiet Lionel.

  “I don’t know. I want to fight this; going means Grant has won.”

  “It’s not a battle, it’s a matter of the heart.”

  “Whose heart?” he whispered painfully.

  “Excuse me,” Lionel said. “Have you considered that the people possessing your daughters might not be exactly welcoming? What were you planning on doing anyway? It’s not as if you can exorcise them and go walking off into a sunset. They’ll be as alien to you as you are to them.”

  “They’re not alien to me,” Luca said. He sprang up from the chair, his whole body twitchy. “Damn it, I cannot stop worrying about them.”

  “We’re all succumbing to our hosts,” Lionel said. “The easiest course is to acknowledge that, at least you’ll have some peace then. Are you prepared to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Luca ground out. “I just don’t.”

  Carmitha ran her fingers along the woman’s arm, probing the structure of bone and muscle and tendon. Her eyes were closed as she performed the examination, her mind concentrated on the swirl of foggy radiance that was the flesh. It wasn’t just tactile feeling she relied on, cells formed distinct bands of shade, as if she was viewing a very out-of-focus medical text of the human body. Fingertips moved on half an inch, she pushed each one in carefully, as if she were stroking piano keys.

  Searching an entire body this way took over an hour, and even then it was hardly a hundred per cent effective. Only the surface was inspected.

  There were a great many cancers which could affect the organs, glands, and marrow; subtle monsters that would go unnoticed until it was far, far too late.

  Something moved sideways under her forefinger. She played with it, testing its motion. A hard node, as if a small stone was embedded below the skin. Her mind’s vision perceived it as a white blur, sprouting a fringe of wispy tendrils that swam out into the surrounding tissue.

  “Another one,” she said.

  The woman’s gasp was almost a sob. Carmitha had learned the hard way not to hide anything from her patients. Invariably, they knew of the spike of alarm in her own thoughts.

  “I’m going to die,” the woman whimpered. “All of us are dying, rotting away. It’s our punishment for escaping the beyond.”

  “Nonsense, these bodies are geneered, which makes them highly resistant to cancer. Once you stop aggravating it with energistic power it should sink into remission.” Her stock verbal placebo, repeated so many times in the days since Butterworth’s collapse that she’d begun to believe it herself.

  Carmitha continued the examination, moving past the elbow. It was just a formality now. The woman’s thighs had been the worst; lumps like a cluster of walnuts where she’d driven away flab to give herself an adolescent glamour-queen’s rump. Fear had broken the instinct and desire for sublime youthful splendour. The unnatural punishment of her cells would end. Maybe the tumours really would go into remission.

  Luca came knocking on the side of the caravan just as Carmitha was finishing. She told him to stay outside, and waited until the woman had put her clothes back on.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said, and hugged her. “You just have to be you now, and be strong.”

  “Yes,” came the dismal answer.

  It wasn’t a time for lectures, Carmitha decided. Let her get over the shock first. Afterwards she could learn how to express her inner strength, fortifying herself. Carmitha’s grandmother used to place a lot of emphasis on thinking yourself well. “A weak mind lets in the germs.”

  Luca carefully avoided meeting the woman’s tearful eyes as she came down out of the caravan, standing sheepishly to one side.

  “Another one?” he asked after she went into the manor.

  “Yep,” Carmitha said. “Mild case, this time.”

  “Jolly good.”

  “Not really. So far we’ve just seen the initial tumours develop. I’m just praying that your natural high resistance can keep them in check. If not, the next stage is metastasis, when the cancer cells start spreading through the body. Once that happens, it’s over.” She just managed to keep her resentment in check; the landowners and town dwellers were descended from geneered colonists, the Romanies had shunned such things.

  He shook his head, too stubborn to argue. “How’s Johan?”

  “His weight’s creeping back up, which is good. I’ve got him walking again, and given him some muscle-building exercises—also good. And he’s abandoned his body illusions completely. But the tumours are still there.

  At the moment his body is still too weak to fight them. I’m hoping that if we can get his general health level up, then his natural defences will kick in.”

  “Is he fit enough to help run the estate?”

  “Don’t even consider it. In a couple of weeks, I’ll probably ask him to help in my herb garden. That’s the most strenuous work therapy I’ll allow.”

  Nothing he did could hide the disappointment in his mind.

  “Why?” she asked in suspicion. “What did you want him to do that for? I thought the old estate was working smoothly. I can hardly notice the difference.”

  “Just an option I’m considering, that’s all.”

  “An option? You’re leaving?” The notion startled her.

  “Thinking of it,” he said gruffly. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t. But I don’t understand, where will you go?”

  “To find the girls.”

  “Oh, Grant,” she laid her hand on his arm, instantly sympathetic. “They’ll be all right. Even if Louise got possessed, no soul is going to alter her appearance, she’s too gorgeous.”

  “I’m not Grant.” He glanced round the courtyard, twitchy and suspicious. “Talk about having an inner demon, though. God, you must be loving this.”

  “Oh yeah, having a ball, me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “How many have you got?” she asked quietly.

  There was a long pause before he answered. “Some down my chest. Arms. Feet, for Christ’s sake.” He grunted in disgust. “I never imagined my feet to be anything different. Why are they there?”

  Carmitha hated his genuine puzzlement; Grant’s possessor was making her feel far too sympathetic towards him. “There’s no logic to these things.”

  “Not many people know what’s happening, not outside Cricklade. That trader fellow, Lionel: hasn’t got a clue. I envy him that. But it won’t last, people like Johan must be dropping like flies all across the planet. When everyone realises, things are going to fall apart real fast. That’s why I wanted to start the voyage soon. If we have a second wave of anarchy, I might never find where the girls are.”

  “We should get some real doctors in to take a look at you. That white fire could be used to burn the tumours away. We’ve all got X-ray sight now. No reason why it couldn’t. Maybe we don’t even need to be that drastic, you can just wish the cells dead.”

  “I don’t know.”

/>   “That’s not like you, either of you. Don’t just sit around on your arse, find out. Get a doctor in. Massage and tea won’t help much in the long run, and that’s all I can provide. You can’t leave now, Luca, people accept you as the boss. Use what influence you’ve got to try and salvage this situation. Get them through this cancer scare.”

  He let out a long reluctant sigh, then tilted his head, looking at her out of one eye. “You still think the Confederation’s coming to save you, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “They’ll never find us. They’ve got two universes to search through.”

  “Believe what you have to. I know what’s going to happen.”

  “Friendly enemies, huh? You and me?”

  “Some things never change, no matter what.”

  He was saved from trying to get in a cutting reply by a stable hand running out into the courtyard, yelling that a messenger was coming from the town. He and Carmitha went through the kitchen and out through the manor’s main entrance.

  A woman was riding a white horse up the drive. The pattern of thoughts locked inside her skull was familiar enough to both of them: Marcella Rye. Her horse’s gallop was matched by the excitement and trepidation in her mind.

  She came to a halt in front of the broad stone stairs leading up to the marble portico and dismounted. Luca took the reins, doing his best to soothe the agitated beast.

  “We’ve just had word from the villages along the railway,” she said.

  “There’s a bunch of marauders heading this way. Colsterworth council respectfully requests, and all that bullshit. Luca, we need some help to see the bastards off. Apparently they’re armed. Raided an old militia depot on the outskirts of Boston, got away with rifles and a dozen machine guns.”

  “Oh, this is fucking brilliant,” Luca said. “Life here just keeps getting better and better.”

  Luca studied the train through his binoculars (genuine ones, handed down to Grant by his father). He was sure it was the same one as before, but there had been changes. Four extra carriages had been added, not that anyone travelled in comfort. This was an iron battle wagon whose armour plates (genuine, Luca thought) ran along its entire length, riveted crudely around ordinary carriages. It clanked along the rail track towards Colsterworth at an unrelenting thirty miles an hour. Bruce Spanton had finally managed to turn the concept of an irresistible force into a physical entity, putting it down straight into Norfolk’s Turneresque countryside where it didn’t belong.