by Neal Asher
‘Tower gravplates are active on the other side,’ Grant informed them. ‘And there’s air.’
The inner door admitted them to a fire-charred corridor, the drag of gravplates dropping them hard onto the remains of lush carpets. Ornate sconces protruded from the walls and burned with pink-tinged artificial flame. Each of these seemed to be made from a decorative lacework of precious metals and stones. The walls themselves were decorated with icons, many blackened by fire, whilst alcoves held alabaster sculptures of previous Hierarchs – a display of wealth suitable for this place, surely?
Grant removed his helmet and hung it on a hook at his belt. Shree copied him and Jem did the same only when something clicked in his neck ring and, coming loose, it threatened to topple away. The smell hit him immediately. It was as if he had just stepped inside a furnace that had been dead for years.
‘Mind where you walk,’ said Grant.
Jem’s gaze strayed down to the charred corpse stuck to the carpet just ahead, and his throat tightened. Some of its proctor uniform remained, but this individual’s occiput, back and the backs of the legs had been seared down to ropes of now desiccated muscle. Next, his colder mind studied precisely what had been burned here, how the burn damage seemed directional, and he realized the fire must have travelled up this corridor from the end they were heading towards.
‘A lot entirely evaporated,’ Grant explained. ‘In other areas fires burned until the air got sucked out.’
‘The Hierarch?’ Jem enquired.
‘Lot of windows and other openings in his upper tower, so most of it was flash-burnt inside. Not much to see up there, but we’ll go take a look anyway.’
At the end of the corridor they reached a spiral stairway, every step gravplated on the way up. Having earlier considered the cost of smuggling these plates into the Theocracy, Jem couldn’t help but feel some disapproval at such profligacy, yet even as he felt that, he understood why. Ever since being a child he had been aware of a schism between planet-bound and cylinder-world theocrats. Those down on the surface of Masada, like himself, had always been more puritan, more stoic in their faith. But both possessed such faith, which made the gap between the two minuscule compared to the gulf between them both and the Polity.
‘Oops, here’s another one,’ said Shree.
There wasn’t much left of the corpse on the stairs, just a foetal atomy sculpted in charcoal – impossible to tell its rank, sex, or even if it was an adult or a child. The wall sconces here hung melted, and further up were gone entirely, replaced by softly glowing globes strategically stuck to the walls to highlight this item or that: a gun seemingly etched into a gravplate step that wasn’t functioning and caused Jem’s stomach to lurch as he stepped over it, a steel sculpture slumped over, seemingly bowing in obeisance.
Finally they came to warped double doors which creaked open ahead of Grant, driven by Polity-tech hydraulic arms attached on this side. The huge apartment lying beyond had obviously been a high-echelon abode, but little remained of its furnishings. Jem identified the glass top of a low table melted against the floor, an ashen mess along one wall all that remained of a mass of computer hardware, the remains of a motorized massage chair standing like a weirdly distorted Human skeleton.
‘Loman’s place,’ said Shree. ‘But only for a short time after he tried to have Amoloran tortured to death. I think he only occupied it a couple of times.’ She shot a look at Grant for confirmation.
Grant had moved over to a window slanting out from the edge, runs of molten glass all around it showing that the original had melted and that this glass was a replacement to hold the air in. ‘That’s right, and from here he watched Faith die.’
Wavering between simple intellectual curiosity and sadness, Jem walked over to stand beside Grant, and peered down through the cylinder-cap window into the eye of Faith to see a fire-scorched tube, crammed buildings seared down to cubic skeletons, metal ripples visible on the central spindle.
‘How do you know Hierarch Loman was here?’ he asked.
‘Because he’s still here,’ Grant replied.
‘Where?’ asked Jem, that being the only response he could think of.
Grant turned and gazed at him. ‘Look up.’
Jem didn’t turn, felt something prickling the back of his neck. All the ruination here had been a sideshow to the main event, which was now. They’d brought him here to see whatever lay above him. He fought for resolve, found only confusion, then turned and looked up, straight into the face of his Hierarch.
‘Within a microsecond the coherent light turned his body into ionized matter and plasma,’ said Grant, ‘carrying it straight up in line with the laser blast.’
The grey ceiling held an image of Hierarch Loman from the waist up, distorted towards the sides by the ceiling’s curve so it seemed he was in the process of sinking into a grey pool. He held his arms out and up – his last position as he tried to fend off the fire that consumed him. Other flaws in the ceiling – spatters of metal – looked like stars. Seeing them suddenly switched patterns in Jem’s mind. For a moment the Hierarch did not look like he was sinking away but rather as if he was rising out of starry void, his arms held up in blessing.
‘Makes me think of the Turin Shroud,’ said Shree.
Yes . . .
A sudden feeling of inconsolable loss bubbled up inside Jem, an inner self, a core that seemed in the process of forming. Orbiting this core were two other perspectives.
One considered the huge error they had made in bringing him here to try and twist him to their purpose: they sought to weaken him by showing him the devastation, the evidence of the Theocracy’s death, the charred shadow of Hierarch Loman here on the ceiling. Being so utterly sucked into their machine world of cold facts and logic they were blind to evidence available here to anyone with any religious sensibility at all. Hierarch Loman was not dead. Hierarch Loman had been martyred and achieved sainthood, and here, traced by the very hand of God for Jem’s eyes alone, was the evidence.
The other perspective saw a simple mind in which imagination had been wholly slaved to the task of reinforcing long-term indoctrination. A terrifying, intelligent perspective devoid of contempt, full of understanding, yet distant from such Human concerns.
Jem turned away, not sure if he was doing so to avert his gaze from the power of the image above him, or to hide from the other two the tears glistening in his eyes.
‘We identified him from DNA scraped from the floor,’ said Grant. ‘There was none on the ceiling because the blast burnt the top half of his body down to its elements.’
No, cried the older of Jem’s orbiting minds, Loman’s base matter was transformed into something supernal, even the essence of God. The other orbital mind looked on with utterly alien understanding, translating, reassessing, and coming to its own nihilistic conclusion, It is just a shape; only extinction is real, whilst Jem’s inner core cried in the darkness, and believed neither of them.
10
Super-dense materials
The invention of force-field and gravity technologies capable of producing pressures previously impossible for our industries ushered in the era of super-dense materials and the compacting of matter for numerous uses. Whole new sets of names needed to be devised to describe new materials, so we ended up with, for example, ND12 Iron, for iron doped with neutronium on the newly invented 1 to 24 proportional scale; fibre-diamond (commonly called monofilament); chainglass; cutting application shearfilm; hyperlead and hypergold. Gases could be highly compressed to give us super-dense air supplies and a whole new range of high-explosive devices, and new stable solids were found, like metallic hydrogen, oxybloc and nitrox geodes. Whole new branches of materials technologies opened up, and for these we must be grateful. This technology also ushered out the gemstone market, but that’s a subject for another time . . .
– From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans
In the first few seconds after it materialized in the real, the mechanism concentrat
ed on its own condition. Having sat in underspace for nearly two million years, it found that its maintenance schedule was lagging. Its U-space engine, having been battered by currents within that continuum for so long, wasn’t up to spec. A great deal of rebalancing needed doing for it to function, but beyond that the mechanism did not know what else to pursue: it seemed to have lost the ability to actually repair the engine. When it also discovered that viruses and worms surviving its battle with Penny Royal had taken control of some units within its structure, it reacted with Jain-tech-inspired paranoia.
Internally it manufactured scraps of antimatter and fired them towards these units, at the last enclosing them in full-sphere hardfields. A series of violent but contained explosions ensued, rendering the units down into concentrated energy too violent for the mechanism to utilize, so it ejected this through hardfield tubes.
Destroying those units used up energy which it replaced in the usual manner by drawing power from its network of probes spread out across the old Atheter realm. However, it discovered that traces of Penny Royal’s attack had spread through them. It began sending self-destruct orders to those affected. In the ensuing five seconds eight hundred probes everted into the real in the chromospheres of suns. This left a further five hundred probes and a dearth of energy supply. Also, the mechanism had lost material mass, had reduced itself from the optimum in the initial orgy of destruction. A second later it turned its attention to the nearest available resource: the gas giant by whose gravity well it had made the underspace fold in which it had hidden itself until now.
It took whole minutes for the mechanism to make a gravity lens, to effectively punch a million-kilometre tube down to the surface of the gas giant. Pressure at the surface, now no longer restrained by the massive gravity of the giant, forced matter up within the tube like hydraulic oil squirting out of a ruptured hose. Sucking this in, the mechanism drained off and utilized thermal, chemical and isotope energy, routed appropriate materials to the variety of fusion reactors it contained. It also began to crystallize, forge, form, twist and manipulate materials within internal structures that fell somewhere between the cells of an organism and auto-factories.
A pyramidal alien spaceship appeared whilst the mechanism worked and it scanned the vessel for the patterns it was set to recognize. No sign of gabbleducks, no Atheter minds, but it upped its alertness when it recognized that this object contained an artificial intelligence similar to Penny Royal. The mechanism felt something that in another being might be labelled frustration, for its ability to respond to something like this remained limited, even though it recognized that if one of these AIs had tried to resurrect the Atheter, then others might too, so they were all a danger. That frustration only increased as the ship folded itself away into U-space and departed. But even frustration was new to the mechanism – lay outside its original programmed parameters. The years of battles, rebuilds and the attrition of time had changed it.
The mechanism continued to rebuild what it had destroyed within itself, began making new clean probes to send out to occupy the positions of the eight hundred it had burned, and whilst it did this the alien vessel returned.
Obviously the new alien civilization here was now aware of the mechanism. This presented dangers previously not programmed for. A civilization in itself was a danger, for any such was effectively the prey of Jain technology, the greatest danger of all. The mechanism used its frustration to push against the limits of its programming, and found their previous rigidity had faded.
Another smaller vessel arrived, docked with the first. The mechanism observed these for a moment, then turned to further self-analysis and repair, and further straining against its chains. A bigger alien vessel next joined the other two here. All the mechanism’s problems were interlinked, that seemed clear, but the developing situation on the Homeworld was its first priority.
Focusing its attention through those probes in position about the Homeworld, the mechanism studied the situation there with greater intensity than before. Traces of Atheter mental thought patterns were plain, but barely active. They seemed to have an organic basis, and though there was something quite odd about that, it was enough to enable the mechanism to force further leeway in its already loose programming.
Time for action.
Being located so far from this activity, with only a few probes through which to operate, the mechanism could not be fully effective both in data gathering and in responding to that data, for there was no unequivocal proof of Atheter resurrection. It was also plain that it had failed in its previous two attempts to suppress such a resurrection. Why else were Penny Royal and the Atheter biomechanism so close to what it was detecting now? It must relocate itself to the scene. There it would be able to more easily assess the developing preconditions for its main function. There, should the situation warrant it, it would also be able to bring online and distribute around the world the full array of its pattern disruptors, those machines now stored and somnolent inside it that it had used to first erase the minds of the largest portion of the Atheter race and then to tear apart the remains of its civilization.
‘Emotional reintegration in process,’ Penny Royal informed Amistad.
The scorpion drone integrated that and slotted it into the complex formulae in his expanded mind before returning to his contemplation of the distant coiled shape of the Technician, and internally to a growing angst. In retrospect there was something to be said for the lesser intellect he had possessed before. Though aware the universe could be a dangerous place he had reneged on responsibility because, of course, there were other higher intellects taking care of things and because, in that lesser state, he had remained utterly ignorant of the sheer extent of that danger. Take, for example, Jain technology.
Amistad had been aware that this dangerous technology had been created as a weapon by one divergent part of the Jain race to destroy another part, an almost separate race. Analysis showed that after taking care of its intended target that technology must have turned on its makers, since they weren’t around any more. Reappearing recently it had caused some serious problems in the vicinity that had wholly occupied the attention of some of those higher minds. Now included in that select group of AIs, they vouchsafed Amistad further information. Jain technology had come a spit away from annihilating the Polity, and it still hadn’t been nailed back in its box. Yes, Amistad knew that right at that moment a vast bloom of it occupied an accretion disc some hundreds of light years away where a vast engineering project was being made to contain it. But that select group of AIs estimated the chances of success there at something like fifty-fifty.
Now this.
‘Clyde tells me it was trying to make Atheter minds,’ Chanter had said. ‘Structures within its sculptures match up with gabbleduck neural structures.’
Clyde?
Amistad just got to Rodol in time to tell that AI not to permit Jonas Clyde’s request to be allowed to switch back to alcoholic mode. Clyde had been rather unhappy about this.
‘Look,’ he had said, ‘you don’t fucking need me. When have you quartz-heads ever needed organic input?’
‘Tell me,’ Amistad instructed.
‘Some massive twist in the Technician’s perception of reality,’ Clyde explained. ‘It was got at.’
And there lay the problem. The data indicated that the Technician was over two million years old and to say it was a rugged biomechanism would be to venture into farcical understatement. The most powerful force on this world, ever since the Atheter opted out of civilized existence, had been the Theocracy. All the data on the Theocracy’s hunt for that creature was now easily available to Amistad. Even with satellite weapons the Theocrats had failed miserably. The disaster that occurred the one time they managed to track it down and close in had remained a secret throughout the remainder of the Theocracy’s existence – not that there were many survivors of the hunting party to tell tales.
They’d hit the creature with their satellite lasers, bombed
it from the air with conventional explosives, then nuked the area where it went to ground. Their big mistake had been to land and search for remains. The search party had consisted of eight hundred troops, fifty-eight ground transports, forty aerofans and twenty-six tanks, of which just enough remains were found to fill a small squerm pond. An interesting footnote to this was that though Ragnorak’s first targets were to be the rebel caves, its next target was the Technician. The thing scared the Theocrats in ways that outreached its sheer destructive might.
‘Perhaps damaged during that attack?’ Penny Royal opined from its present position inside the Monument.
‘I think you know better,’ Amistad replied. ‘A self-repairing biomechanism might have lost data but its own genetics dictate that it would have rebuilt itself to some earlier form. The likelihood of its perception of reality being so distorted, even by nuclear mutation, that it conflates physical structures with mental ones, is remote. Clyde was right: it’s been got at – most likely by what got at you.’
That ancient Atheter device that had reached out of underspace to prevent Penny Royal from loading an Atheter mind to a gabbleduck, and had all but destroyed the black AI in the process, had been active before. It seemed certain now that what the Technician had been trying and failing to do for about a million years with its sculptures, it had tried before, but that time with a sufficient probability of success for the mechanism to reach out and interfere with the biomech internally. It had not only reprogrammed the Technician but physically altered the structure of its mind.
‘So what initiates it?’ Penny Royal enquired.
‘You have no idea?’
‘All a blank to me.’
There was the rub. Penny Royal had fought some savage informational battle with that device and, just like with Jeremiah Tombs and the things Amistad needed to know from him, knowledge of that battle was locked up in some dark part of its consciousness. However, unlike with Tombs, that dark region no longer resided within the mind that gave it birth but in the state of consciousness Amistad had removed to turn Penny Royal into a more acceptable being – the eighth state had been where all Penny Royal’s murderous impulses had resided.
