The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Now it was back in the universe. The humidity and daily rains returned with a vengeance. And with the thick carpet of weeds chopped away from the metal grid runway, spaceplanes were arriving once again. They were complemented by Kiint craft, small blunt ovoids that flew up and down the Juliffe and its myriad tributaries collecting people from the villages and delivering them to Durringham. Over two thousand of them were performing ambulance duties, racing round at hypersonic velocity, scanning the jungle for any remaining humans.

  The Kiint had set up seven fat thirty-storey towers on the edge of the city. They’d been extruded in one go from a provider, coming fully fitted with all the medical equipment necessary to treat dangerously ill humans.

  Ruth Hilton had been picked up on the third day after the Return, as people were calling it. When the flyer landed in front of her, its controlling AI asking her to come inside, she seriously contemplated not bothering. The memories of possession acted like damping rods on her psyche. She certainly hadn’t eaten anything since the Return.

  In the end it was her hope for Jay which made her climb in. For the last few weeks, her possessor had been soaking up aspects of her personality.

  She’d travelled between villages, asking for news of Jay and any of the other Aberdale children who might have survived that fateful night.

  Nobody had heard much from that district after the bomb went off somewhere on the savannah.

  For two days she’d lain in the hospital while the Kiint examined her and made her eat. The big xenocs had smeared a bluish jelly on the areas of her skin around her cancers, which sank into her flesh as if she’d suddenly become porous. They told her it would flush her tumour cells away, a less invasive technique than human medical packages. For one and a half days she peed a very strange fluid.

  By the end of the second day she was fit enough to walk around the ward.

  Like a lot of her fellow patients, she sat in front of the big picture window overlooking Durringham, saying very little. Civil engineering crews were arriving hourly, fat bright-yellow jeeps crawling down the muddy streets. Programmable silicon buildings were mushrooming in the ruined semicircle of mud. Power cables had been strung up; once again electric lights began to shine in several districts during the night.

  As far as she was concerned it was wasted effort. There were too many memories, too many dead children out in the jungle. This could never be her home again, not any more. She kept asking the Kiint and the hospital AI if anyone had found Jay. Always the same answer.

  Then on the sixth day, Horst and Jay walked into the ward, happy and healthy. She clutched Jay to her, not letting her daughter say anything for a long time while she reaffirmed her will to live by the contact.

  Horst pulled a couple of chairs over, and the three of them stared down at the city with its industrious invaders.

  “This is going to be a very busy place for the next century,” Horst said, his voice a mixture of surprise and admiration. “Do you remember our first night? The old transient dormitory’s gone now, but I think that’s the harbour where it was.” He pointed vaguely. The circular basins of polyp had survived.

  “Will they rebuild them?” Jay asked. She thought all the activity was tremendously exciting.

  “I doubt it,” Horst said. “The people who’ll be emigrating here from now on will be wanting five-star hotels.”

  Ruth raised her gaze to look across the sky. The morning rainclouds had just departed eastwards, heading inland to soak the villages upriver.

  They’d left a patch of pristine sky above the town and its boundary of gently steaming jungle. Five brilliant stars shone through the glaring azure atmosphere, the closest one showing a definite crescent. She thought one of them might be Earth itself.

  There were forty-seven terracompatible planets sharing its orbit now. All of them stage-one colony worlds, ready to absorb the population from the arcologies.

  “Are we going back to Aberdale?” Jay asked.

  “No, darling.” Ruth stroked her daughter’s sun-bleached hair. “I’m afraid we lost this world. People from Earth will come here and make it very different to what it was. They don’t have the kind of past to overcome here which we do. It belongs to them now. We need to move on again.”

  The bus rolled smoothly across the docking ledge, and linked its airlock with the reception lounge. Athene was waiting for the pair of them, standing proud in a silky blue ceremonial ship-tunic, the star of captaincy absent from her collar.

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  <> She moved forward and gave a slight bow. “Welcome to Romulus, General Hiltch.”

  It was the moment Ralph had dreaded most of all, passing over the threshold. If there was no forgiveness here he would never find any within this universe. He couldn’t even bring himself to smile at the stately old woman whose face contained so much genuine concern. “I have no army to command any more, Athene. I resigned my commission.”

  “Tell me why you have come, Ralph.”

  “I came out of guilt. I ordered so many Edenists to their death. The Liberation ruined what it was supposed to save. It existed for vanity and pride, not honour. And it was all my idea. I need to say I’m sorry.”

  “We’d like to hear you, Ralph. Take as long as you want.”

  “Will you accept me as one of you?”

  She gave him a compassionate smile. “You wish to become an Edenist?”

  “Yes, though it’s a selfish wish. I was told an Edenist can relieve his burden by sharing it with every other Edenist. My guilt has turned to pure grief.”

  “That’s not selfish, Ralph. You’re offering to share yourself, to contribute.”

  “Will it end? Will I be able to live with what I’ve done?”

  “I’ve brought up a great many Edenist children in my house, Ralph.” She put her arm in his, and started walking him towards the exit. “And I’ve never had a serpent yet.”

  It took several weeks for all the mundane functions of government to return to normal after the Confederation was transferred out of the galaxy. People realized that their circumstances would change, in many ways quite profoundly. Religions strove to incorporate or explain away the singularity’s gospel of the universe. Joshua didn’t mind that: as he told Louise, conviction in one’s God nearly always equated to a conviction in self. Time might well see an end to the undue influence religion had on the way people approached life. Then again, knowing the perversity of humans, maybe not.

  Starflight was also altering. Travel between stars never more than half a light-year apart was incredibly quick, and cheap.

  Every reporter who interviewed Joshua asked why he hadn’t taken the Confederation stars back again. Quite infuriatingly, he just smiled and said he liked the view from out here.

  Governments weren’t so fond of it. There could never be any outward expansion again, unless new propulsion methods were developed. Funds for wormhole research we
re quietly increased.

  There would be no more antimatter to terrorise planetary populations. The stars where the production stations orbited were all left behind in the galaxy (though Joshua had teleported their crews out). Politicians turned their eyes to the defence budget, seeing how funds could be shifted towards more voter-friendly spending sprees.

  The Kiint provider technology was regarded with fascination by the general public as it worked its miracles on the Returned worlds.

  Everybody wanted one of those for Christmas.

  Earth’s population was almost schizophrenic over the new stage-one planets available. On the one hand, their own climate had been reset to normal, making the arcology domes redundant. But Earth’s surface would take a generation to restore. And if it was restored with forests, meadows, jungles, and prairies, there would be a diaspora from the arcologies which would ruin everything. However, if the population was spread around the new planets (less than a billion each), all of them would have a natural environment, allowing them to keep their present level of consumerist industrialisation and not totally screw up the atmospheres with waste heat. Assuming that many people could be moved economically—say if you used those nifty little Kiint craft, or something came out of all that new superdrive research.

  Small, subtle changes were manifesting in all aspects of Confederation life. They would merge and build on each other. And eventually, Joshua hoped, transformation would become irresistible.

  But in the meantime, the methods of governance remained the same. Income had to be earned. Taxes still had to be paid. And laws had to be enforced. Backlogs of court cases worked through.

  Traslov was one world where changes would be a long time coming. A terracompatible planet in the last stages of an ice age, it was one of five Confederation penal colonies. Joshua had included them, too. Much to the relief of various governments, Avon included. Traslov was where the criminals which the Confederation Navy brought in were sent.

  Prison ship flights resumed after three weeks.

  André Duchamp was led into the drop capsule by one of the guards, who fastened him in one of the eight acceleration couches. Once the straps were in place, holding André’s arms and legs against the thin padding, his restraint collar was taken off.

  “Behave yourself,” the guard said curtly, and air swam out through the hatch to fetch the next prisoner.

  With supreme self control, André sat quiet. His flesh was still slightly tender where the medical nanonics had been removed. And he was sure those bastard anglo quack doctors hadn’t fully cured his intestinal tract; he kept getting raging indigestion after meals. If you could call what he’d been fed meals. But his indigestion was nothing to the suffering inflicted by the awesome injustice brought down upon his poor head. The Navy blamed him for the antimatter attack against Trafalgar. Him! An innocent, persecuted blackmail victim. It was diabolical.

  “Hello there.”

  André glared at the badly overweight, balding, middle-aged man in the couch next to him.

  “Guess we ought to introduce ourselves, seeing as how we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. I’m Mixi Penrice, and this is my wife, Imelda.”

  André’s face cracked in mortification as a timid woman, also fat and middle aged, waved at him hopefully from the couch beside her husband.

  “So pleased to meet you,” she said.

  “Guard!” André yelled frantically. “Guard.”

  There was never any contact between the Confederation at large and Traslov, in that every flight was strictly one way: down. The theory was simple enough. Prisoners, voluntarily accompanied by their family, were shot down into the equatorial band of continent not covered by glaciers.

  Sociologists, hired by participating governments to reassure civil rights organizations, claimed that if enough people were brought together then they’d inevitably form a stable community. After a hundred years, or a million people, whichever came first, the flights would be stopped. The communities would expand in the wake of the retreating glaciers. And in another hundred years a self-sustaining agrarian civilization would emerge with a modest industrial capacity, at which point they’d be allowed to join the Confederation and develop like a normal colony. As yet, no one had found out if an ex-penal colony would want to join a society which had exiled every one of their ancestors.

  André’s drop capsule fired down through the atmosphere, hitting seven gees at the top of its deceleration peak. It plummeted through the low cloud layer and deployed its parachute five hundred metres from the ground. Two metres from the ground, retrorockets fired in a half-second burst, killing the capsule’s final velocity as the chute jettisoned.

  The capsule crashed into the scorched earth with a bone-numbing impact.

  André gasped in shock at the pain transmitted along his spine. Even so, he was the first to recover, and flipped his strap catches open. The hatch was a crude affair, like everything else in the capsule. A wonder they ever got down alive. He pulled the release handle.

  They’d landed in a broad valley with gently sloping sides and a fast stone-bed stream running along the bottom. The local grass-analogue was an insipid grey green, its monotony broken by a few wizened dwarf bushes.

  A cold wind blew against the capsule, carrying tiny grains of white ice.

  André shivered violently; the chill factor took it well below freezing.

  He had thought to simply collect his share of the survival equipment from the baggage lockers ringing the base of the capsule and hike away from his fellow exiles. That action would have to be reconsidered now.

  When he looked along the other end of the valley, he was amazed to see the distinct globular shape of starship life support capsules embedded in the soil. He could see at least forty of them. A definitive count would have shown André that a total of sixteen starships had been involved in the incident which had seen them cast away here.

  A lone figure was striding vigorously over the frozen ground towards the drop capsule: a young man in a black fur coat, with a crossbow slung over his shoulder. He stopped just below the hatch and put his hands on his hips to grin up at André.

  “And a very good morning to you, sir; Charles Montgomery David Filton-Asquith at your service,” he said. “Welcome to Happy Valley.”

  The bath water was imbued with the scent of tangerines; bubbles covered its surface to a thickness of ten centimetres. Ione sank into the blood-warm water with a contented moan, sliding down the marble until only her head was visible.

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  <> She allowed the images from the shell’s external sensitive cells shimmer up into her mind. Jupiter orbit was alive with starship flights, both Adamist and voidhawk. Two large industrial stations specialising in organic synthesis were being manoeuvred over to Aethra, where they could start repairing the damage to the young habitat’s shell. Joshua had transferred all forty-odd young habitats from the stage-one systems into orbit above the glorious orange gas-giant.

  <> Tranquillity said.

  <> Her consciousness drifted through the habitat, perceiving the state of the induction cables, the parkland, the light-tube, the vast ring of energy patterning cells. Fusion generators
out on the docking ledge were still supplying seventy per cent of Tranquillity’s power. <>

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  Ione laughed, and reached for a cut-crystal glass of Norfolk Tears. She eyed the fabulous drink as if it was the last drop left in the universe.