by Neal Asher
‘This what you wanted me to see, Dragon?’ he wondered out loud, then shuddered at the echo of his voice issuing somewhere to his left.
Chanter unshouldered his pack and squatted on the dusty floor to open it. His tent was a short cylinder he held in one hand. He pressed the activation button then tossed it a few metres away. The cylinder hinged open along its length, the tent expanding out of it as a small pump forced air into the open foam structure of its walls. Within a minute the domed tent, two metres across, extruded barbs along its lower rim to anchor itself to the ground, then the internal light came on. Chanter ate worms before crawling inside and slumping on the inflated bed, where sleep came down like a hammer.
The remains of the hooder revealed no more than that this particular creature had been a young one, which was surprising – the only hooders to die young on land were those killed by Human weapons, yet Chanter could see no sign of their use here. Only after puzzling over the remains for some while, recording images and taking samples, did he begin to search the rest of the cave. Two hours later he found something quite odd where the ceiling slanted down to join the floor and where the gap was so narrow he had to crawl in on his hands and knees. Here a square of stone had been excised from the floor, laboriously cut out using a diamond saw by the looks of it, but no clues remained as to why. An hour after that he found the narrow cleft concealed behind where one of the hooder’s segments lay against the wall, squeezed through the narrow gap and pointed his torch inside.
Rebel cache. On the floor near one wall of the cave were scattered dusty plasmel crates, one of which lay open with its lid propped against the wall beside it. He stomped over and pointed his torch beam inside, noted a single, heavily corroded chemical-propellant rifle, and realized that this must be an old cache indeed – probably placed here when the rebellion was just getting started and before the rebels found their way to the deep underground. He shone the beam around, and felt a sudden surge of incredible excitement when light fell on the object at the back of the cave.
They’d enclosed it – employed what looked like part of the kind of tough, transparent plastic cylinders used in old spaceships to hold deep-frozen members of the crew or passengers. The top of the cylinder was capped off with a steel plate, its lower edge was bolted to the slab of stone it rested upon, and only while studying these bolts and wondering how he might undo them did Chanter realize that the slab was the one that had been excised from the main cave. Incredible. Even while fighting to survive, fighting to get their rebellion under way against the vicious regime here, they had seen the value of this object and sought to preserve it. Here before him stood yet another of the Technician’s sculptures.
Moving nearer, Chanter studied the thing more closely. It was definitely old and looked extremely fragile. He could see where sinews once bound it together, those sections now secured with corroded copper wire. The form itself seemed rough, primitive; the product of the young artist in all its gauche brilliance but lack of refinement. The bone itself had faded to a chalky white and in some areas it seemed that pieces were missing; some pieces had also fallen off and were scattered around it. But this was a discovery indeed, and Chanter wondered what truth Dragon had directed him here to find.
He had to get this back to his mudmarine; he really needed to investigate further. How old was this thing? By his reckoning, the Technician, at its present size, would have been too big to enter the main cave out there, let alone to make its sculpture in that narrow place near the cave’s end. Even the dead young hooder out there could not have squeezed in. The artist must have made this when still but a worm, still spending most of its time rooting up small mud snakes or ambushing grazer young from below. So maybe, from what he knew of the lifespan of hooders, this was as much as a century old.
Chanter stooped and fingered one of the bolts, but they were corroded in place and he hadn’t thought to bring cutting equipment. Next he studied the steel lid and, after a moment, realized only its weight was holding it in place and it possessed no airtight seal as he had suspected. He lifted the edge, and then let it drop back into place – first things first.
Over the next hour he recorded holographic images of every part of this cave, and every detail of the sculpture. He went out into the main cave and packed away all his equipment but for one sample bottle and a pair of tweezers, then returned to the small cave, lifted the lid aside and reached inside to take up some of the scraps of bone scattered about below the sculpture and carefully insert them into the bottle. He could not take the whole sculpture himself – it looked far too delicate – but he couldn’t leave this place without taking something, some trophy.
Back out in the main cave he hoisted his pack and exited into bright day. No matter the risks and no matter how tiring the journey, he would return here with Mick to collect his find. It was important, very important, though he’d yet to figure out why. With renewed vigour he stomped the trail back towards his mudmarine, stopping neither to eat nor rest. As he finally approached the crater rim he wondered if his fatigue was why things began to get rather strange.
There seemed a yellowish haze down in the crater, swirling with odd organic shapes like the ghosts of all the creatures the Technician had killed. An odd taste suffused his mouth and he smelt something nutty and sweet in the air, as if he were walking into a cake shop. As he began to make his way down he spotted four figures further round the rim from him, humanoid, but moving with an odd birdlike gait. They made a rush towards him and terror surged up inside. Dracomen – Dragon had lured him here to finish what it couldn’t finish under the ground.
Chanter broke into a dogged run, determined to reach his mudmarine before they reached him, but something whirred through the air and wrapped itself about his legs. He sprawled, head down towards the crater, and saw yellow ghosts crawling up towards him, a siluroyne opening diamond jaws and a fungus grazer coming to suck out his brains. Glancing back at his legs he saw a bolas tightly wrapped around them, its string like the linked bodies of snakes and its weights like scaled pomegranates. Writhing, it settled itself comfortably, binding his legs more tightly. It must have also injected some sort of poison, for he was finding it hard to breathe, but still he tried to crawl on down. Then a shadow loomed across him.
One of the dracomen stood over him. Here stood one of those things Chanter had seen forming underground from the very substance of Dragon: humanoid, but with legs hinging the other way at the knees, toadlike head jutting forward on a long neck, scaled green and red skin over most of the body but fading to yellow down the front as on the body of a lizard. This creature clutched a rifle that bore the shape of an ancient muzzle-loader, but also looked like something living.
‘Adapted Human,’ it hissed.
‘Hardly edible,’ commented another dracoman, now stepping into view. ‘Is it dead?’
‘No, not yet.’
The first dracoman squatted beside him and tapped the bolas, which abruptly released its hold and wound itself round the creature’s arm. Then Chanter’s consciousness fled to a hot yellow place filled with the burning sculptures of the Technician.
Chanter opened his eyes and gazed up at night sky, the familiar glare of Calypse somewhere over to his right, a background rustle of flute grasses fading in and out of hearing as he turned his head to the left, to utter horror.
Resting there beside him the thing’s lower spines stabbed down into the rhizome mat, the others starred all around. One tentacle with two stalked and lidded red eyes protruding from its tip loomed up above him whilst other tentacles writhed here and there, one stacking single rhizomes, another building cubes out of neatly severed flute-grass stalks, whilst one tentacle snaked into Chanter’s chest, which lay open like a butcher’s shop display, the smaller tentacles into which this main one divided writhing inside like maggots. He tried to pull away, but knew he was dead: the agony would reach him any moment.
‘Keep still, Human,’ said a voice. ‘Penny Royal is saving your life – it
s first-ever experience of putting someone back together rather than taking them apart. Or rather, its first experience of putting someone back together correctly.’
‘What?’ he said, surprised he could speak, seeing as his lungs appeared to be missing.
‘The gas vents every five and a half hours,’ said the voice, closer now. ‘It was one of those random and very rare occurrences the Atheter did not account for in their very thorough nihilism.’
‘Gas?’
‘Hydrogen cyanide,’ the voice explained. ‘It didn’t occur in such quantities when the Atheter wiped themselves out, but is now a product of decay of large tricones. They die to eventually form the chalk layer, but whilst dying here their juices enter narrow mud pipes under the mountains where they flow to the old volcano’s cap to be cooked up in cyanide-infused sandstone and some metallic remains of the Atheter civilization that were missed. The result is gas, which bubbles up in that volcanic pipe you came here through. It would kill a normal Human within a minute, but on one adapted like you acts as a hallucinogen, and takes longer to kill. It can kill hooders, which is why they avoid the area and why that gabbleduck carcass down below remains intact. In fact it was this same gas that killed that young hooder whose remains you found in the cave – it must have received a small dose and so managed to get some distance off before expiring.’
‘Atheter?’
‘You’ve been out of the loop for too long, Chanter, and so lack information vital to your own research. Whilst your previous research might also be of value to me.’
Something happening in his chest cavity. He watched with an utter detachment from reality as two lungs inflated like little pink balloons and one of the smaller tentacles began negligently flicking ribs back across and zipping up intercostal muscle.
‘I’ve stories to tell you,’ said the voice.
Chanter turned his head as the speaker loomed into view, and he wondered if the mentioned hallucinogen was still affecting him. But though the massive scorpion drone seemed a fearsome creature, he recognized a Polity entity and felt some reassurance. The other thing sticking him back together also seemed likely to be a Polity entity of some kind . . .
‘Where are the dracomen?’ he asked.
The scorpion gestured with one claw, and shrugged. ‘They hunt. They saved your life but did not want to be burdened with you, so they called me.’
He felt momentary relief, followed by a touch of confusion, odd images flashing through his mind. ‘So what stories do you have to tell me?’
The drone advanced a little and he flinched, but then it kneaded the rhizome mat with its numerous legs and settled down. It was almost as if it were making itself comfortable, if comfort could matter at all to such a machine.
‘The Atheter, as an intelligent race capable of building civilizations, retreated to their homeworld trashing all their technology behind them, then on their homeworld they committed a form of racial suicide that defies the imagination of an AI,’ the drone told him. ‘They reconstructed and reprogrammed organisms they had created for soil building on other worlds, to diligently grind up every trace of Atheter civilization and technology. They sacrificed their own intelligence, utterly abandoned it to revert to the state of animals, but only after they’d reprogrammed and otherwise reformatted some of their organic war machines so that they would obliterate the remains of those animals as each one died. This was an almost irrelevant piece of nihilism, probably stemming from self-detestation. But that’s how their minds worked back then, as they sought to destroy what they felt had kept them warring with each other over the millennia.’
‘Here?’ said Chanter, realizing at once that the soil builders mentioned must be the tricones.
‘Tricones, hooders and gabbleducks,’ said the drone. ‘The gabbleducks are the animalistic descendants of the Atheter, and the hooders were once war machines.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Jain technology,’ said the drone.
Chanter understood that this Polity machine was now feeding him smaller amounts of information to test the quality of his intelligence, and was probably disappointed by his immediate response of ‘Uh?’ But he recovered and continued, ‘The stuff that kept this place quarantined for so long.’
‘A technology created as a weapon, created to destroy civilizations, yet in itself first appearing to be something that offered great power and knowledge. A poisoned chalice the Atheter took up with the result of millennia of war, worlds burnt down to the bedrock, trillions of deaths, and an eventual choice to put away civilization, put away technology and even to shut off their minds. Racial insanity.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Polity researchers on this world began to see the shape off it, and a surviving Atheter AI, which now resides here, confirmed the likelihood of some of it, though what happened here happened long after it went out of contact with the kind that built it. There’s other proof too. A man called Rho – an adapted Human like you – found an Atheter memchip. Before he could do anything with it, it was stolen from him and taken, along with a gabbleduck, to a black AI called Penny Royal who was willing to do the install.’ The drone waved a claw towards the sea-urchin thing, which was now stretching Chanter’s skin back into place and somehow sealing it invisibly. ‘The result was messy – Atheter technology hidden in U-space activating and shutting the whole thing down, and nearly killing the black AI concerned.’
Again that claw gesture, and Chanter turned to look at the sea-urchin thing with renewed horror. But even as he felt that, Penny Royal gently eased him upright and withdrew its tentacles. Feeling abruptly returned, but just that, no pain. He looked at the AI with suspicion as it nonchalantly continued to stack rhizomes and added greater and greater complexity to its cubic sculpture of flute-grass stalks.
With care, Chanter eased himself to his feet and more closely studied his surroundings, his attention drawn at once to the object standing on the rhizome mat behind the drone. The sculpture was here, still in its glass tube and still mounted on that slab of rock. He gazed at it for a long moment, then swung his attention back towards what Penny Royal was doing, and felt a sudden intimation that he was being told something, but it lay just off the edge of perception, ephemeral, fading when he groped for it.
‘I want detail,’ he said.
‘I have transmitted all the relevant files to your mudmarine computer,’ said the drone. ‘And I have just summoned your robot, Mick, to collect this Technician’s sculpture.’
Chanter gazed at the machine steadily. ‘You’ve told me stories, but I don’t see where your interest lies.’
‘I study insanity.’
Chanter glanced back at Penny Royal. Its presence here made more sense now.
‘Did you know that there is a living Human survivor of a hooder attack?’ the drone enquired.
‘No, but it was sure to happen one day.’
‘This Human was severely damaged, tampered with – the hooder concerned even did things to his mind, actually downloaded something to his mind.’
Chanter felt the skin on his back crawling. ‘Downloaded?’ He looked over to the edge of the clearing to see Mick delicately paddling across the rhizome mat in this direction.
‘The hooder concerned was the Technician.’
The shivering sensation spread out from his back along his arms and down his legs. He realized that this was a return of further sensation, blocked until now. If he’d experienced all this in a fully conscious state, he’d have been screaming by now.
‘We will share information,’ the drone added, and it wasn’t a request. ‘Go back to your vehicle now and hurry, another gas venting is due in twenty minutes. Study the information I’ve given you and give me your conclusions – my address is in your communicator.’
Chanter set off, but when pausing to watch Mick undoing the bolts around the base of the container and then deftly flip it aside, he came to a decision. Before he moved on towards what appeared to be t
he crater rim, he turned back.
‘You know, Dragon gave me the coordinates of this sculpture,’ he said.
‘Which is why I’ve chosen to involve you rather than just seize all the information and artefacts you hold.’
Chanter nodded and headed on towards the safety of his vehicle, and the depths.
Heretic’s Isle (Solstan 2455 – 18 Years after the Rebellion)
One of Amistad’s associates occupied the adjoining control room. Sanders could hear some odd sounds and noted computer displays in the theatre flicking on and running code she did not recognize. Also, the autodocs in the tank were behaving oddly, scuttling around on glass as if anxious to escape something unbearable. Amistad had denied her any kind of access to this entity, even seemed nervous about letting her get close. The whole situation had begun to creep her out until she found out what it was all about. Then she just got angry.
‘An essential part of his acceptance of reality,’ said the big drone, ‘is him being able to go outside without wearing a breather mask.’
‘With his prosthetic he doesn’t need one.’
‘Quite.’
Sanders tried to contain her anger; to keep to the facts. ‘So you won’t allow any kind of intervention inside his skull, but you’re quite prepared, without his permission, to commit him to major surgery elsewhere?’
‘You yourself have experienced that same major surgery, you know what freedom it gives you here on Masada. To be able to breathe the air here makes you a true Masadan and not a dispossessed immigrant.’
‘Bullshit.’
The drone continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘Once the lung and bloodwork is finished and, incidentally, once we’ve replaced his mechanical arm with a tank-grown version that’s been on the shelf for years, regrowth of his facial nerves and the outer tissues can commence, and he will be returned to your care.’
‘You’re going to let me give him back his face?’ Sanders was eager for that, but aware that in some way the scorpion drone had offered her a bribe.
