by Neal Asher
Shree allowed her own face to appear to him, doubtless as one icon of many on some mental screen, just a little explanatory text appearing when he focused his attention on it. ‘Ah, Shree Enkara – our local Masada correspondent,’ he said after a thirty-second delay. ‘What do you have for me?’
‘Jeremiah Tombs,’ she stated.
A beat, then, ‘I have four correspondents as close as I can get them – there’s an AI intervention on this. So what’s your angle?’
‘Tombs is being protected by Leif Grant, Commander Leif Grant, who was my commander during the rebellion, in fact my lover during the rebellion. I think, because of that, I can get close enough for direct recording and interaction.’
‘Human interest?’
‘Not just Human interest,’ said Shree. ‘We’re all aware that there’s something odd about the situation. Why has Tombs been allowed to remain insane for twenty years? It all relates to how he received his injuries during the rebellion – the hooder called the Technician. This also has planetary status implications in that it very likely relates to the Atheter.’
‘You make the approach and I’ll back you from here.’ Uffstetten also did something else, for a new icon appeared in her visual field. Checking it she found a funding link through her aug to her bank account here on Masada. Not that she needed the money, but it all added to her veracity. ‘If you’re blocked, then the usual fee structure applies for something on the whole situation with your personal connection. Agreed?’
‘If I’m not blocked?’
‘Full coverage of your expenses plus eighty New Carth shillings an hour, doubled if the hour is aired.’
‘Make that one hundred shillings and we have a deal.’
After a short pause Uffstetten said, ‘We have a deal,’ and his image blinked out.
Shree sighed out a long breath. Those kinds of pay rates might be enough to tempt someone away from the fight for freedom, but not her. She would take their money and send it where it would be of use. And she would complete her mission, which meant she might not be able to spend it herself anyway.
Shree reached out and picked up her glass, sipped contemplatively whilst attempting to aug back in to the various cams she had positioned about Greenport. She had watched Miloh and Tinsch make their preparations, then seen Miloh fail before her cams at both locations went offline. Still nothing. Something had got to them fast, punching through Tinsch’s quite plausible approach of blocking Tombs’s minders by using hardfields. Certainly Commander Grant was the visible protection of Tombs, but he had powerful invisible protection in the vicinity too.
Shree now tried a direct communication, mentally dialling up the address of Tinsch’s aug. For a moment nothing, then connection.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Tinsch whispered to her, before his communication drifted into a distant sobbing. She cut the link quickly, and just sat there with cold fingers tracing her spine.
Then, suddenly, a cam view called to her attention by a recognition program: Tombs stumbling out towards the site of the old worker huts, the place now used as a spaceport. Coincidentally, she also received a general notification of an imminent landing at the spaceport – something big was coming down. Shree stood up and headed for the door.
Grant gazed in morbid fascination at what had been done to the four here. Conscious again, the woman stared in horror at the console that had now become an extension of her wrists. The Overlander man who had been bleeding his life out only minutes ago was tugging at his ankles. Someone would have to lever out the slab and carry him like a living statue on a plinth to the hospital. The knifeman would be going to the same place with a chunk of wall attached to his back. And Christ knows what that thing had done to David Tinsch: the man was still crying and begging for forgiveness. And it had been so terrifyingly fast.
When Amistad had told Grant that this Penny Royal, an apparently reformed black AI, would be watching over Tombs, he had done a little research. Penny Royal had haunted the Graveyard, that wasteland of worlds lying along the border between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom. It had done things there for which there should never be forgiveness, using its capability of separating a Human into whatever size of living component it chose, and then putting that human back together in whatever order it chose, to horrifying effect – the result often being something that simply could not be described as Human.
‘Why?’ he asked the air, but no reply was forthcoming.
He sensed now that it had gone, shadowing that yelling madman now rounding the end of the street and heading off towards the side exit from Greenport central town.
Grant sprinted off after Tombs. His own role in all this had been carefully directed, supposedly, yet it all seemed like the kind of horrible game Penny Royal had played during its time in the Graveyard. What possible purpose could be served by what it had done to those four back there?
Tombs came back into sight, now heading through the exit, straight out towards what had once been the main worker compound, its rafts now serving as a landing field. Grant slowed to a jog, trying to catch sight of Penny Royal, but seeing nothing. He had only caught glimpses of it before, so had no real idea about its actual form, those glimpses hinting to him that he might not want to know. It had communicated, but the brevity of those communications rendered them almost nonsensical and he’d had to contact Amistad for translation. Amistad laid out the whole drama to be acted out here, but failed to explain what Penny Royal meant by ‘cerebral pressure juncture’, ‘Gleason limit’ and ‘green-stick point upon acting out’. Tombs was being pushed towards sanity and full recovery of his memory, pressure being loaded upon him, but to Grant it seemed that the man was just getting crazier.
As Grant exited Central Town, a shadow slid across the ground towards him, covered him for a moment then slid away again. He glanced up in time to see a spaceship in a U-shape formation, ports dotting its surface like mica crystals in rock, numerous sensor arrays, signal drums and other instruments protruding from its surface like components on an ancient circuit board. The thing was massive: it would encompass the entire landing field, and as far as Grant knew, nothing so large had ever landed here before. The field had been used by occasional private traders, most of the big Polity stuff coming down on the rebuilt landing field up by Zealos. The timing of this vessel’s arrival was almost certainly no coincidence.
Continuing out, Grant noted that Tombs had halted in the middle of the landing field to gaze up at the descending ship. The man fell to his knees – something of a habit of his. Grant picked up his pace, realizing that he needed to get out near Tombs if he didn’t want to find himself underneath a few million tonnes of curving hull. Strange forces seemed to be tugging at his body, and dry flute-grass stems swirled through the air to create a wailing symphony. The ship’s antigravity also seemed to be interfering with Penny Royal’s chameleonware and something formed of sharp honed shadows poised like a wave ready to fall on Tombs.
‘Lies!’ the proctor bellowed. ‘All lies!’
He now held up the dagger he had grabbed, as if hoping to stab the descending spaceship out of the sky. But still it descended.
When twenty metres away from the erstwhile proctor, Grant slowed his pace, aware now that he was within the compass of the ship, and that beside himself, Tombs and the black AI, someone else had come out here. He drew his disc gun and held it down at his side as the woman approached, something recognizable about her flowing walk.
‘Lies!’ Tombs shrieked, as finally the ship’s lower hull made contact with the ground. The thing touched light as a feather, but when its gravmotors shut down the interlinked foamstone rafts all sank abruptly, half a metre of rhizome-tangled mud thumping up between them like the walls of a maze.
Numerous ramps now folded down, first spilling holocams like silver bubbles into the Masadan air. Next came the people, and what people they were. It seemed the full, weird mind-numbing diversity of the Polity had arrived at this one spot. There
were adapts: catadapts, amphidapts, ophidapts, saurodapts, avidapts – human chimera in forms limited only by imagination. Golem walked here too, some in the shape of adapts, some like normal Humans, some skinless chrome skeletons and some metalskins in brass aping a legendary figure. Other robots of all kinds strode amidst this crowd, pets and auto-luggage yapped around ankles, tails, claws and elephantine feet. Coldworlders and hotworlders wore strange esoteric suits. Many wore masks, many did not, still others occupied aquaria striding along on iron spider legs.
‘Lies,’ Tombs whispered.
Grant, now standing just a couple of paces away from the man, could hear him, despite the nearby uproar.
‘Reality is a heavy load to bear sometimes,’ said a voice.
He glanced round. ‘Shree Enkara,’ he said, puzzled to see her here now.
She wasn’t looking at him but gazing at Tombs, her eyes widening in surprise, then her expression twisting with horrified fascination. Grant whirled back and just for a moment could not believe the scene before him. Tombs had pinched out a handful of his own cheek, had cut down behind his ear to his jaw bone and, making a horrible keening sound, began sawing the blade forwards.
Grant hurled himself towards the man but it was as if he had thrown himself at a jagged rock face. As he bounced he momentarily glimpsed black spines and a single stalked red eye, before he hit the ground heavily on his back. Tombs continued to cut, that keening becoming a shrieking which turned wet and bubbly as he exposed his back teeth to the air. Things then went slightly hazy for a moment and Grant found his head resting in a warm lap.
‘They can’t see or hear us,’ said Shree.
It was true, the crowd departing the spaceship were just moving past as if he, Shree, Penny Royal and the screaming bloody thing that was Tombs occupied some blister in reality. Grant wished for that haziness again – some small escape into unconsciousness – but it never came, and he saw the whole horrifying thing to its conclusion: Tombs returned almost to the state in which Grant had first found him, but kneeling with knife in one hand and his sacrifice to his god in the other.
9
When resurrection and actual corporeal immortality are real facts of life, the threats and promises of old-style organized religions become laughable. When education is taken out of the hands of the doctrinaires, religion is castrated at source. With knowledge and experience able to bypass the senses and be loaded directly to the Human mind, the standard level of Human intelligence rises, and religion wilts under its inspection, for religion thrives on ignorance. But when religion crawls away from the light of reasoned inspection it sheds its damaged skin and returns with something thicker and more durable. When science explains the universe, and gets everything right, century after century, one would think that religion should turn into the quaint pursuit of the intentionally deluded, or be a matter for historians. However, the virus that is religion is a difficult one to kill. Over the years it has mutated and adapted to changes in its environment. It turns holy writ into allegory, turns true stories into parables, styles angels as metaphors, admits to embarrassment at demons. It tries to downplay its gods and concentrate on the good it perceives in itself, like the comfort it offers to the faithful, for surely comfort can be found in the knowledge that if you infringe on arbitrary rules written down thousands of years ago you will burn in hell for ever.
– From HOW IT IS by Gordon
‘Since its arrival here its mass has increased by about half,’ said Janice Golden. ‘But still there’s no clear indication of what its purpose is, where it comes from, or who built it.’
The bridge of Cheops had the décor of an Egyptian tomb, and Janice had departed her sarcophagus to sit herself in a perfect historical reproduction of the throne of Rameses II, or rather what some deeply anal historian had decided it might look like. However, her connection to the ship AI remained firm, optics trailing from her bodysuit like a mummy’s unravelled bandages to the sarcophagus.
Her visitor surveyed his surroundings then strolled over to the scroll-edged stool positioned before the throne and sat down. She studied him like an aged parent inspecting a grandchild. In a way he was her descendant, or perhaps a better definition was that he was the next stage, the next evolution of what she had done to herself.
Janice was interfaced with the AI of this ship – as close a connection to an artificial intelligence as had been feasible a century ago. Optic links transferred data between her and Cheops, but only at a speed her augmented mind could handle, because anything more would cause a feedback effect, a brief synergistic loop which for a few seconds would create a supernal melding of AI and Human, but afterwards would leave her a burnt-out husk and Cheops a crystal-minded lunatic.
This man before her was a haiman. The crystal disc with its steel scallop-shell hub on the left-hand side of his skull contained the artificial intelligence he interfaced with. Such AIs were usually at the lower limits of the Turing band – argued by some to be outside present definitions of AI – whilst his own heavily augmented brain, with its cooling grids, its massive amount of implants spilling from the right-hand side of his skull into a half-face augmentation, its bio-electronics, and the whole array of physical supports from his also heavily augmented body, stood at the upper limits of Human function – argued by some to be outside any realistic definition of Humanity. Here, in this being, the gap between AI and Human had been narrowed but, as yet, not closed.
‘I would question your choice of the words “since its arrival here”,’ said the haiman Drode. ‘Having studied your original data recordings before you ran, I see it quite likely this object was concealed in an adjacent U-space fold within the Wizender system.’
‘Position is a rather debatable feast when talking about U-space,’ said Janice, not liking his hectoring tone.
‘As you are aware,’ Drode said, ‘the least energy an object in U-space uses to surface into the real brings it out in its adjacent position there.’ He waved a dismissive hand. ‘This is all semantics.’
Janice blinked, glanced over to her viewing wall, now showing Egyptian tomb paintings, dismissed them and replaced them with a view from her probe nearest the object. Now they looked upon a spectacular view of this thing, still poised over the gas giant but no longer sucking up gas. Below it the surface of that Jovian world still roiled with the storms the thing had caused. They were beautiful, the world striated with all the finely aged colours of the paintings previously occupying the viewing wall. She grimaced to herself and decided not to point out that it wasn’t his criticism of her wording about position in U-space that had annoyed her, but his offhand comment about her running.
It seems that to attain a higher form of Humanity it was necessary to sacrifice tact, Cheops commented, directly into her mind.
No, she replied, I think all aspects of Humanity were upraised here, so if he was an arsehole before they started screwing metal into his head, that means he’s an even bigger arsehole now.
‘So why are you here?’ she asked.
He’d requested a face-to-face talk, docked and boarded when she agreed, and first asked about the current state of the mechanism out there. She couldn’t understand why. Since she’d been instructed to come back here and watch over the thing she’d sent regular reports, and the instrumentation aboard his own vessel should have been quite sufficient to give him an answer to that question.
‘I’m here to make an assessment of all available data and report back,’ the haiman replied.
Ah, commented Cheops, a specialist . . .
‘I still don’t understand why we don’t have more of a presence here,’ said Janice. ‘Surely this thing warrants at least a couple of the newer dreadnoughts and a science vessel?’
‘Calculated risks. The object showed no reaction to Cheops, which was why you got sent back. Bringing in anything bigger or making more aggressive studies of it might result in precisely the kind of reaction we want to avoid.’
It’s big, it might be dangerou
s, keep watch on it but leave it alone, Cheops interpreted.
From her throne Janice peered through a hull-mounted camera at the haiman’s docked vessel. It was one of the new attack ships, a lethal-looking squid of a vessel which she knew possessed the kind of firepower that ought to worry even Cheops. Beneath notice? She thought not.
‘So tell me,’ Drode continued, ‘in your own words, precisely what you have discovered.’
All her data were available, but she understood he wanted more than that. He wanted the opinion of the watcher on site, wanted to make his special assessment, to process data in ways that might yield unforeseen results. Usual AI technique – you throw diverse minds at the weird ones. She sighed, thought for a moment about all that data, then said, ‘The tip of the iceberg.’ She paused. No, that wasn’t right. ‘No, the body, the head of an octopus sticking its head above water, its tentacles all splayed out with their tips peeking out of the same surface some distance from it.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it retains U-com to other transceivers scattered across a realspace region estimated at over a thousand light years across.’ He paused. ‘I am, however, interested to know more about your octopus analogy. You see whatever lies at those other locations as the tips of octopus tentacles – as something less than the object here.’
‘Perhaps a bad analogy.’ Janice tried to see her way through it. ‘My feeling is that this thing is the centre, and that those other transceivers are part of it, part of a network of sensors or perhaps other devices spread out from it.’
‘It does, however, lie on the edge of the region it covers, not at the centre.’
‘Metaphorical centre.’
‘The other objects could be exactly the same as it,’ he suggested.
