by Neal Asher
‘Yes, we understand now that the damage about his skull, caused during the Technician’s downloading process, is irrelevant – repairing it does not in itself have any effect on the download.’
‘So you’ve got all you can get from the scanners in his prosthetic. This is still bullshit, Amistad.’
‘Perhaps you would like to explain?’
‘Him being able to go outside is not essential to his acceptance of reality,’ she said, trying to order her thoughts. ‘In fact, him being able to go outside distances him from his life before – makes his present experiences more unreal to him. If you wanted to rub his nose in reality you’d stick him in a breather mask and dump him out in the flute grasses next to the nearest hooder.’
‘I see that you understand.’
‘Damn right I do. You’re up to something and I’m not sure it’s okay with those above you.’
‘I have full competence here.’
‘Why, Amistad? Why?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘I’m used to complexity.’
‘Integration of elements of the download will reach a crucial nexus, whereupon he will drive himself to face surfacing memory.’
‘He’ll be going on a journey of discovery?’
‘Yes.’
‘He can’t even walk.’
‘As you said: his failure to walk is not a physical problem.’
Sanders turned away from the drone to gaze across at Tombs, now floating in the amniote within this newly installed tank, the autodocs scuttling all around him, but not yet beginning their work. He’d rendered himself unconscious again after accessing the Atheter database through his computer. She’d cleaned him up and moved him to his bed and left him there while going to hers, but then strange scrapings and spooky noises in the sanatorium had brought her here, just glimpsing something big and sinister shooting out of sight at the end of a darkened corridor – that ‘associate’ – before finding Amistad and her charge.
‘Do you know when this journey will begin?’ she asked.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ the drone replied. ‘You need to watch him, take note of any changes in his behaviour patterns and notify me the moment such changes occur.’
The autodocs all froze for a second, then abruptly launched themselves from the sides of the tank to fall onto Tombs’s body, some of them trailing various tubes, optics and other attachments from ports positioned around the inside. They started to cut, and even though this surgery was very precisely controlled, the tank fluid still turned cloudy with blood and other debris.
‘Let me know when I can get to work on his face,’ said Sanders, and walked away.
Chanter’s Base (Solstan 2453 – 16 Years after the Rebellion)
As Chanter brought his mudmarine to the surface, he reached out without thinking to engage the chameleonware, then with irritation snatched his webbed hand away from the controls. Only then did he actually add things up and realize that this was his first time home in almost a hundred Masadan days. Whilst the automatic dock engaged he spun his chair to observe Mick, upright and clamped to the inner hull, the old sculpture cradled delicately against its back. He reached into his pocket and fingered the sample bottle for a moment, then said, ‘The museum.’
Mick detached from the hull, sliding down flat, sculpture still supported on its back. The mudmarine’s door slid open into its cleaner compartment as the robot approached. After a contemplative pause, Chanter swung his chair back to his console and without the usual security checks, sent the data here aboard his vessel to the main database in his home. No point in running checks for worms or viruses – if Polity AIs wanted to fuck with him there wasn’t much he could do about it. Then he stood and followed Mick out.
The rebels weren’t the only ones to discover the numerous cave systems underneath the mountains of Masada. Chanter had mapped many of them from the smuggler’s ship that transported his mudmarine and other supplies to this place, and even as he descended to the surface on an antigravity platform, he had already chosen his base. He’d worked in a rush, because he had needed to get to the surface before the Theocracy finished setting up its planetary grid of laser satellites and high-definition cameras, but he remained satisfied with his choice.
The marine sat in a sticky pond twenty metres long by ten wide, nearly occupying it completely. Below this pond a pipe curved for two hundred metres out into the main soil of the planet and within it a specially adapted shimmer-shield kept the tricones out. The pond itself occupied a cavern that was a fifty-metre-diameter cylinder over a hundred metres long, though shortened now by twenty or so metres with the foamstone construction that was both his home and the housing for his collection – a construction he’d have to extend if he was ever to find any more of the Technician’s sculptures, which seemed increasingly unlikely now.
He stomped out across his dock, turned right and trailed Mick across the worn basalt. Mick entered a lower door in the foamstone to install the new exhibit, whilst Chanter climbed a stair to the door to his accommodation. He was curious to look at the data Amistad had supplied, and wanted to run tests on the contents of the sample bottle in his pocket. However, so as not to turn into a complete introvert slob, he always followed set rules when back here: first a long soak in his large bath, followed by skin-oil balancing and a medical scan; plenty of food next, which would include those vitamins and minerals the medical scan always told him he was lacking; then a long and contemplative study of his collection.
The bath leached out all sorts of nasty stuff and when, after a brief analysis, his oil machine provided him with the right mix and he sprayed himself, his skin started tightening up and losing its pouchy feel. As well as noting deficiencies of the usual vitamins, the medical scan warned him of a dangerously high deficiency in magnesium, and when he ate fat cherub beetles laced with the required additives, they were nectar, and he soon put away two large platefuls of the fat insects before heading downstairs to his collection.
Mick had already installed the new sculpture in its inert gas case, but had yet to position it in the collection. Using precise isotope-dating techniques Chanter had arrayed the twenty-three sculptures in chronological order, covering a period of nearly a century because, like this latest one, they weren’t all sculptures he had seized shortly after the Technician made them. Studying this order he could see steady transitions and occasional abrupt changes as the artist sought perfection, found inspiration, and sometimes abandoned it. This new addition should fit in at the very start, yet it seemed so utterly different in style from the others here. It occurred to him that perhaps some longish time gap – perhaps some artistic block – lay between it and the others.
Further contemplation did not dispel his puzzlement, but then he was used to being puzzled by the work of the Technician. Eventually he made his way through to the small laboratory he maintained next to his collection, and ran his usual battery of tests on the samples from the bottle. Puzzlement returned when only one of the dating techniques seemed to work, but rendered erroneous data. He checked his system then, wondering if Amistad had used something to trash his computers here, but everything seemed to be working. He ran further tests on the mineral content of the bone, and got some odd results there too. Suddenly he grew angry, feeling he had been duped. This wasn’t a sculpture by his Technician; it was a carving from some sort of rock!
Chanter nearly abandoned testing at that point, but a micro-scan of the surface bone revealed the familiar marks, the familiar signature of the Technician, only much much smaller. Widening parameters and trying other dating techniques available to him but never used before, he began to get an intimation of what he had here. This sculpture had been buried in that cave, probably only revealed when early rebels dug out the cave as a hide. Statistical analysis of mineral leaching from bone in this environment – the complex chemical processes of petrification here – finally revealed the truth, and it terrified him.
Since the Technician had made
that sculpture squatting in its case out there, quite some time had passed. The artistic gap between it and the other twenty-three was a wide one – about a million years wide.
4
Sealuroynes
Whilst the study of the land forms of Masada progressed quickly, study of the oceans of Masada was put on hold. Further delays ensued when it became evident that the ecology of the land was a constructed one; that hooders were based on war biomechs created by the Atheter which might or might not have been first based on creatures of that world, or might even have no original evolutionary basis at all; that gabbleducks were the (deliberately) devolved descendants of the Atheter; and that the whole tricone basis of that ecology was manufactured. However, a proper taxonomic survey of the sea-life has now begun, with the sealuroynes, and already oddities are being found. These creatures bear some resemblance to the gabbleducks in that their brains are just too large and contain too many complexities for their marine predatory lifestyle. They show the same tendency to play odd games with their prey. For a brief while philologists speculated that the noises sealuroynes make to each other were actually a language, but they were unable to translate it, for it seems that – like the devolved Atheter – they gabble too.
– From QUINCE UIDE compiled by Humans
Present Day
Sanders brought her foot down on a slab of rock covered with domed transparent limpets that were direct relations to the penny molluscs whose shell patterns Jeremiah Tombs drew so intently. Inside the shells she saw writhing movement, peered at it for a moment noting single, spookily Human-looking eyes gazing up at her from each shell, then waded ashore. She had recorded and studied most biota like this around the island, and these were nothing new to her.
She had been swimming naked again, as had become her custom here, not so much because she was an exhibitionist, but because it drew a reaction from Tombs, and such reactions, she felt sure, slowed his steady retreat from reality. Picking up her towel from the fluorescing sand she dried herself with sensual deliberation, wondering what to do today. Maybe she should check data from undersea probes she had scattered about the islands, or check new research notes transmissions from Earth? Perhaps she could get back to writing her history of the early development of scoles here on Masada? Contemplating these options with a wry smile, realizing that her excitement of two years ago, when Amistad had arrived, was now fading, she coyly looked up towards the terrace.
Surprisingly there was no sign of Tombs. Usually he would be peering over the low wall at her, then abruptly snatching his attention back to his sketch pad when she looked in his direction. She slung the towel over her shoulder, pushed her toes into her sandals and headed for the steps leading up.
Tombs was nowhere on the terrace, and Sanders felt a frisson of excitement at this change in behaviour. She walked over to the stone table he usually parked his chair beside and gazed down at the latest sketches, all held down with a paperweight of jade carved in the shape of a coiled hooder – Amis-tad’s idea, that. The sketch on top was complete, and still in the pad, and the erstwhile proctor’s electric pencil lay beside it. Usually, when Tombs finished a sketch he abandoned it, then started at once on the next. Never before had he abandoned both sketch pad and pencil, in fact he became hugely agitated if they were taken away from him, then ended up smearing shit on his bathroom floor in just the same way as he had begun his art career – something Sanders did not want to encourage. She gazed at these items for a second, then turned and strode over to pick up her loose dress and shrug it on over her head before returning inside through the shimmer-shield that contained Human-normal air inside the sanatorium.
Just in from the terrace lay what had once, and briefly, been an occupational therapy room. Tombs wasn’t here either. Sanders stepped over to a nearby pedestal table, picked up the button of her comunit and stuck it to the material over her collarbone.
‘Amistad,’ she said – the name gave instant access through the unit to the ever-watchful war drone.
‘Here,’ the drone replied perfunctorily.
‘We’ve got a behaviour change.’
‘Record and detail – I’m busy.’
This dismissive attitude from Amistad had been common two years ago after she’d first met him, but less often of late. It had something to do with one of his associates. Sanders got the distinct impression that the individual concerned might be hard to handle on occasions, and dangerous, even to a drone of Amistad’s capabilities.
She moved on into the sanatorium, heading directly for Tombs’s room. Finally stepping through the door she came to a dumbfounded halt. For a second or two she was confused; trying to figure out what was wrong here. Then she saw it: Tombs’s wheelchair stood empty in the middle of the floor. He wasn’t in the bed and it seemed unlikely he was in the bathroom unless he had crawled there.
‘Jeremiah?’ she enquired.
‘Right here,’ he said from behind her, his arm winding round her throat and the point of an oyster knife pressing against her cheek just below her eye.
Sanders made a sudden mental shift: she remembered that Tombs wasn’t just a pathetic mental cripple confined to a wheelchair. He had been a proctor, one of the brutal religious police of Masada. He had probably tortured, beaten and killed people, and he had received military training prior to his induction into his latter profession.
‘You’re out of your chair,’ she said, trying to keep calm.
‘Did you think you could keep me confined here forever?’ he murmured in her ear. ‘Did you think your pathetic Polity techniques could break my faith?’
‘No one has been trying to break your faith,’ she replied. ‘We’ve just been trying to do our best here for you. Your mind and body were severely damaged by the Technician and the process of repair has been . . . difficult.’
‘Your experiment has failed – now you will show me the way to the surface and I will return to my people.’
The surface?
‘We’re on Heretic’s Isle,’ she replied. ‘You know where we are – you’ve been living here for the last twenty years.’
Tombs turned her towards the door. ‘Show me the way out, woman, and understand that I choose martyrdom over imprisonment, but that will only occur after you have died.’
‘We aren’t underground, Jeremiah – just search your memory.’
‘I have searched my memory and, despite your drugs and your mind-breaking techniques, I know the truth. You have tampered with my mind to create illusions. They are powerful illusions but faith is the tool that unravels them, that and your own foolish vanity.’
‘Vanity? I don’t understand,’ she said as she walked slowly out into the corridor.
‘You cover my face to conceal that I have not aged, yet you fail to cover your own face and you flaunt your youthful body.’
So, her looking young had further confirmed his delusion that very little time had passed; his delusion that he had not been in this place for twenty years. Ironic, since both her and his youthful looks were a direct result of technology from the Polity now ruling this world – another fact he constantly denied. And the covering of his face was another fiction. She had replaced his head prosthetic two years ago, shortly after Amis-tad’s ‘associate’ replaced his mechanical arm and then surgically adapted him to breathe the air of Masada. Though for reasons still opaque to her, Amistad did not want him to know about either his adaptations or the loss of his prosthetic.
Always Tombs claimed that they created fictions for him, yet he lived in his own, adjusting facts to suit his perception of how the world should be. He believed he was still a captive of the Underground, still the subject in an experiment in breaking religious faith, but holes were beginning to show. Her ‘flaunting’ of her youthful body was something that stuck in his mind from his last two years out on the terrace pretending not to see her swimming naked, so he hadn’t managed to bury everything from then, and perhaps from the eighteen years before.
She walked on t
owards the old occupational therapy room and the way out onto that same terrace, but slowly, for she had no idea how he might react when reality in the form of open sky and sea hit him in his face. Hopefully Amistad would soon be focusing his attention back here and would intervene.
‘You were attacked by a hooder called the Technician,’ she said. ‘It did things to you that even the Polity AIs that now control this world fail to understand, and this is why full repair of the damage has not been allowed.’
‘Just keep walking,’ he said.
She noted that he wasn’t pushing her very hard and had begun leaning much of his weight on her. Though his chair had been running muscle-tone programs through his legs all the time he had been in it, they were still weak and wobbly. Where was that fucking war drone?
In the room beside the terrace he paused, and she was able to peer round at him. She could read little in his expression, but he had grown very still now and his gaze fixed on the view beyond the shimmer-shield.
‘Here is the reality,’ she told him.
‘Projection,’ he said dismissively, and shoved her forward.
As they approached the shimmer-shield he kept hesitating, his gaze straying to the various items scattered about this room.
‘I can even see where the projection begins,’ he said. ‘This had better be the way out, woman, or I will have to spoil some of the source of your vanity.’
He pressed the knife harder below her eye and she felt the sting of a cut. She realized he was seeing the slight glimmer of the shield interface, that effect seen in heat mirages caused by differences in air pressure. He shoved her again and she stepped through, feeling the slight tugging on her body. He followed her out onto the terrace, his gait abruptly turning into a stumble.
‘I . . . cannot breathe . . . here,’ he said.
The knife slid down, cutting her face, but she managed to grab his wrist and push it away, turning and quickly stepping from him, slapping a hand to the wound. He stumbled forward, slicing the knife through the air, once, twice, but he seemed like someone trying to find an opponent in a darkened room. Then something slapped against his shoulder and spun him, and with his mouth moving spastically he reached back to feel that place, then toppled over like a felled tree.
