The Technician

by Neal Asher

  ‘They’ve got Human accommodation there, haven’t they?’

  ‘Of a sort – dracowoman Blue has prepared for your arrival.’

  ‘You seem pretty sure I’m going to do what you ask,’ said Sanders. ‘My opinion of your methods and your aims has not changed. If you finally get to what the Technician downloaded into Tombs, if there’s anything of value in his head at all, that will also result in a sane individual and someone of no interest to you whatsoever.’

  ‘Tombs has returned to what you Humans classify as sanity,’ Amistad told her. ‘He has even become, by your definition, more sane – his whole belief system collapsing and reconfiguring.’

  ‘What?’ Sanders halted outside the door leading into the Bishop’s garden.

  ‘It’s amusing really,’ the drone continued. ‘He maintained his own fiction by believing your aim was to break his faith by feeding him false information. That false information is the truth, yet the reality is that even the truth cannot break faith – it is by its nature not dependent on truth.’

  ‘So what returned him to sanity?’ Sanders opened the door and stepped into the garden, her breathing now deeper and faster.

  ‘His return to sanity was an acceptance of the truth, impelled by him trying to cut off his own face, which he believed to be a Polity prosthetic.’

  ‘What!’ Sanders’s throat tightened with horror. What horrible grotesque games was this drone playing with Tombs’s mind?

  ‘The damage has been repaired,’ Amistad added.

  ‘He cut off his face and lost his faith?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You just said—’

  ‘I just said that truth does not destroy faith – exterior input does not change that kind of indoctrination.’

  ‘So how is he losing his faith?’

  ‘Something internal – something that wasn’t there before.’

  ‘The download.’

  ‘That seems the most likely explanation.’

  Once she stood on the path outside the sanatorium, she turned and looked back. ‘What’s going to happen to this place?’

  ‘There was a proposal to turn it into a museum, but there are enough museums covering the Theocracy’s distasteful rule here,’ the drone replied. ‘I believe another proposal is being considered – turning the place into a holiday resort.’

  For a second Sanders felt that wrong and wanted to protest, then she reconsidered. What a perfect denial of the island’s hideous past. How much better to move on rather than revel in that past.

  Finally reaching her gravan she stowed the two hover trunks inside before climbing into the driver’s seat.

  ‘So you will be heading for Dragon Down?’

  ‘When will he be there?’

  ‘I would like you there, and ready, within the next two days,’ the drone replied. ‘Will you go?’

  ‘I think you know the answer to that.’

  Sanders set the van’s gravmotors running, grabbed the joystick and lifted the vehicle from the ground. She still didn’t like what Amistad was doing, but for twenty years she had conducted some utterly one-sided conversations with Tombs. Now, it seemed, he had become a functional Human being. Neither Amistad’s requirements nor the drone’s power to order her obedience informed her decision to go to the place beside where the dragon sphere had come down and given birth to a new race from its substance. She just wanted to talk to Tombs and have him talk back to her.

  As the ship ascended Grant watched Tombs taking a deep breath of Masadan air he should not be able to breathe, then return his attention to his two companions. Something had changed about the proctor, the man seemed somehow more assured, yet sad. Even his speech patterns seemed to have changed, and not once during the rest of their tour of Faith, then the cylinder world Charity, had he mentioned his own faith or resorted to mindless recitation of something by Zelda Smythe.

  In Charity they’d walked The Aisles; the walls formed of giant honeycomb structures, each one of their tens of thousands of cells containing the brain-burnt body of a Theocrat, awaiting some future time when Polity AIs had finished their investigations and deemed those bodies safe enough to serve as vessels for the mind recordings of dead Polity citizens. There Tombs had said nothing about decent burial, had not prayed, though his reaction to the news that the Polity Soul Bank contained millions of mind recordings had not been unexpected.

  ‘Do all Polity citizens . . . back themselves up?’ he had asked.

  ‘Not all,’ Grant had replied.

  ‘How do you know who?’

  ‘You don’t, unless they tell you – it’s personal.’

  Tombs turned to Shree. ‘Like me you breathe the air here. Have you taken advantage of this mind-recording technology?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  Turning back to Grant, ‘And you have not either?’

  ‘No,’ Grant replied. ‘This stuff is new to us – we weren’t born in the Polity.’

  ‘Was Sanders?’

  ‘Born in the Polity?’ said Grant. ‘No, born in Zealos, though got herself smuggled out of Masada and trained as a medtech in the Polity.’

  ‘She wasn’t backed up?’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ Grant lied.

  Tombs shook his head, his expression miserable. Grant had expected more of a reaction from the man, expected him to talk of souls or some other religious claptrap. Was he now sufficiently emotionally invested? Grant didn’t know. Penny Royal, once again awake, close, and looming like an invisible wall of knives, was silent – nothing coming over Grant’s comlink.

  ‘So what now and where now?’ asked Tombs, still gazing up at the ascending ship.

  Grant did not want to admit that he didn’t know. Tombs had returned to sanity, perhaps a sanity he hadn’t possessed before, but revelations were not forthcoming and they still had no idea what the Technician had done to him.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked – easy response of question to question.

  Tombs reached up and touched his face, switched his gaze to the nearby town and stared at it with a bitter intensity. ‘I am an outcast, a pariah, and an anachronism who only has value by dint of what is hidden in my mind. But I am curious about the things I have heard that relate to that.’ His attention now snapped to Grant. ‘Unless you want it otherwise I want to hear direct from those involved about what has been discovered here on this world, so I can assess the truth.’

  ‘What sort of truth would that be?’ Shree asked.

  ‘There is only one sort of truth,’ Tombs shot at her.

  ‘No, there’s our sort of truth and there’s your sort of religious truth.’

  Tombs just stared at her bitterly for a long moment then swung back to Grant. ‘I heard you talking about this Tagreb, about the researchers who revealed the truth,’ he emphazised the word, ‘about what the Atheter did to themselves. I want to go there and speak to these people.’

  ‘That can be arranged,’ said Grant. Now Penny Royal was being uncommunicative he needed to put some distance between himself and the other two so he could talk to Amistad – to find out what should be done next, maybe arrange transport to the Tagreb if that was what the drone wanted.

  ‘Slowly.’

  The word ghosted over his comlink from Penny Royal. Grant was beginning to understand the brevity of the AI’s instructions. He glanced over towards Greenport and came to an instant decision. ‘Come on then.’

  He led the way in towards the port town, towards the gate, but turned right before reaching it, following a foamstone path circumventing the town, finally connecting to the road leading down to the port itself. Shree walked close at his side while Tombs walked a pace or two to the right, keeping a small but significant distance between them. The man also surveyed their surroundings with singular focus, often halting to gaze at those structures that had appeared here over the last two decades.

  ‘I saw Hell,’ he said when they drew athwart the factories being built on the foamstone rafts to one side of th
e port road. ‘What do you see?’

  Grant found no reply for a moment, stumped by Tombs’s use of the past tense. ‘I see pond workers’ huts swept away and replaced by Polity technology, Polity wealth and a better life for us here.’

  Tombs nodded then abruptly headed over to the edge of the road, squatting down beside where a bank had mounded up, perhaps by the action of tricones underneath, and where purple-orange spikes of lizard tails were sprouting.

  ‘Where the hell are we going, Grant?’ Shree asked.

  ‘To my ATV.’

  ‘Surely this is important enough to warrant some fast transport?’

  ‘Apparently not.’ Grant gazed at her, not wanting to reveal his interpretation of Penny Royal’s Slowly.

  She stared at Tombs, showed a flash of irritation, quickly concealed. ‘Why does he dawdle so?’

  Though at first Grant had liked the idea of her coming along, he had begun to find her company grating. On the face of it, it seemed action was all she wanted, that providing drama for her news service was all-important to her, yet he sensed an underlying viciousness that made light of her claim to be seeking a new life. He felt it in himself too. Why had he struck Tombs? Why react with such anger to the kind of nonsense the man had been spouting for two decades? Trying to step back from his contempt for the man, Grant could see that maybe that had been his last chance, that his anger arose from the feeling that Tombs was changing, and that in the future such anger might no longer be justified.

  ‘We’re in no hurry to get anywhere but inside that man’s head,’ he replied.

  ‘So we just let him saunter along doing what he wants,’ said Shree. ‘He should be pushed. He should be forced.’

  ‘How, precisely?’

  ‘Confront him with the realities here. Rub his nose in them. Show him the dracoman town, maybe Zealos, maybe even the Atheter AI – that should wake him up.’

  Perhaps she didn’t know that the Atheter AI was now even less communicative than Penny Royal – it wasn’t common knowledge.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ she added.

  Grant shrugged and walked over to the erstwhile proctor. Tombs was now down on one knee, looked like he might be praying, and Grant felt a momentary justification for his violence up in Charity. But no, with gritty mud-smeared hands the man was raking his fingers through the soil, picking out mollusc shells and making a small stack of them beside him. The soldier felt something cold touch his spine when he saw the shells bore Euclidean patterns; they were the shells of penny molluscs.

  ‘Who designed my clothing?’ Tombs asked.

  ‘It’s what they provided aboard the ship, but I reckon Penny Royal or Amistad had something to do with it.’

  Tombs nodded, scooped up the shells and deposited them in his pocket. ‘Yes, I remember Amistad – a machine made in the shape of some arthropod. It terrified me.’ He looked up at Grant. ‘I have to wonder why they make themselves into such shapes.’

  ‘Amistad was a war machine, once,’ Grant replied. ‘Its shape was both functional – evolution still comes up with the best designs – and intended to terrify the Prador, an alien enemy the Polity once fought.’ Even as he said it, Grant felt unsure. Many Polity machines bore shapes that were a cause for unease, and they weren’t all made for war.

  ‘The Prador, yes, I know about them.’ Tombs stood and peered back the way they had come as if looking for someone, but Shree wasn’t over there, no one stood over there. The man then closed his eyes for a moment, dipped his head then raised it, eyes open now and glistening. He continued, ‘Evolution . . . but how much of it is there here?’

  ‘You mean since the Creation,’ said Shree from just behind Grant, saying precisely what he had been about to say.

  ‘No, since the uncreation of the Atheter race.’

  Grant now felt contempt for himself – how easy those old patterns of thought.

  Tombs still held one shell which he cleaned against his clothing, smearing mud over the text in the cloth with almost blasphemous unconcern. He gazed at the pattern on the shell, then nodded towards Greenport.

  ‘Those who tried to kill me used shapes like these to replace Satagent text on clothing that was a negative of that worn by proctors.’ He paused, forehead furrowed. ‘I saw it as the writing of demons.’

  ‘You saw it? So how do you see it now?’

  ‘Patterns.’

  Grant tried to make sense of that but found only confusion. ‘Shall we get on?’

  Tombs followed him as he moved off. Grant noticed how the erstwhile proctor now walked at his side whilst Shree kept her distance, perhaps better to record them for her news service.

  Soon they were down on the hard-standing where Grant had parked his ATV. Gazing across at the port he saw that no ships were docked, though one was visible out on the sea, either heading away or heading in, he couldn’t tell.

  ‘We’ll take the North Road up towards Zealos, turn off at Bradacken, then it’s wilderness driving all the way to the Tagreb.’ Grant hauled open the ATV side door and climbed inside, ducking forward to head for the driver’s compartment. Here were seats for driver and co-driver, with two further seats behind. He glanced back as first Tombs then Shree entered. The proctor halted in the rear compartment and studied his surroundings with the same peculiar intensity with which he had been gazing at Greenport. Did he recognize this vehicle? Did he recognize the since much modified and updated vehicle that had served as an ambulance – the one in which Grant had taken him back to Triada Compound after the Technician tore him apart?

  After a significant pause, Tombs moved forward and took one of the rear two seats, whilst Shree moved up and took the seat beside him. Grant had expected at least one of them to come up and sit beside him. Why Shree hadn’t done so became evident shortly after Grant started up the ATV’s engine and headed towards the port road.

  ‘So, Jeremiah Tombs, perhaps you would like to give me your opinion on the Theocracy, on the Polity occupation of Masada – your impressions of everything you’ve seen and experienced since your . . . recovery?’

  A personal interview, then. Was Tombs aware of Shree’s position as a reporter for Earthnet, and what that entailed?

  ‘Shree Enkara is your name,’ said Tombs.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Once a rebel whose main enemies were those in the same position as I used to occupy,’ said Tombs. ‘If one of our number disappeared we would hold a wake precisely ten days afterwards, the presumption being that if they were lost and out of communication in the wilderness they would be dead within that time, or that if they had been captured by you they were dead anyway. How impartial is this interview going to be, Shree Enkara?’

  It seemed Tombs knew the situation precisely.

  ‘If partiality on my part doesn’t result in this being pulled, it’s usually detailed by secondary narrative, either from an Earthnet presenter or, if not, by AI. You’ll get a fair hearing, though whether or not you deserve one I leave to others to decide. Tell me, Tombs, how many beatings did you deliver, how many people have you killed?’

  It seemed Shree had decided on partiality.

  ‘I delivered one beating, with a stick, whilst in proctor training. This was overseen by the Bishop of Triada and considered an essential part of my induction.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘I vomited publicly afterwards and the Bishop had me beaten by one of the other trainees as punishment.’

  ‘I’m sure the Bishop wanted to ensure his proctors received proper training.’

  Shree’s voice had an edge to it now. This wasn’t going anything like she wanted.

  ‘I am sure he had time to regret that when rebels sewed him up in a sack and threw him into a squerm pond,’ Tombs shot back. ‘I wonder if the squerms tore him apart before he drowned.’

  ‘We’re getting away from the subject now, which is you. How many people have you killed?’

  ‘I may have hit someone during the fire fight in Triada Compound. I c
annot be sure – we were too busy running and dying at that point.’

  ‘Surely you were involved in executions? Surely you were present when someone was pinned down over new flute-grass growth?’

  ‘No, I never saw nor was I involved in that. I saw my commander shoot a pond worker through the head once, but that’s all.’

  ‘How did that make you feel?’

  ‘I threw up – safely out of sight that time.’

  ‘So you’ve never killed anyone.’

  ‘As a proctor, no.’

  ‘So you have killed someone?’ said Shree, sniffing blood.

  After a long pause Tombs spoke slowly and distinctly, but with a catch in his voice, as if he were on the edge of tears. ‘I killed a medtech I only know as Sanders as I escaped Heretic’s Isle.’

  Why had he given Shree that, Grant wondered. ‘Her full name is Jerval Sanders,’ he said and, only after saying it, realized why Tombs had spoken about this. He was making his confession.

  ‘Jerval,’ Tombs repeated.

  ‘Did you vomit after you killed her?’ Shree asked nastily.

  Grant concentrated on his driving. If this interview went out, Tombs would not look so bad and Shree was damning herself, especially when it became known that Jerval Sanders wasn’t dead and Tombs had been fooled into believing he killed her. Grant grimaced. Only a short time ago he had felt that the burden of guilt Amistad had loaded on the man was a just punishment. Now he wasn’t so sure. He knew it was one of the mental drivers that had pushed Tombs to mutilate himself and thus, by some weird form of sacrifice, restitution, recover his sanity, but was there any need for it now?

  ‘This interview is over,’ said Tombs.

  ‘Why, I haven’t even got to the good stuff yet. I want your thoughts on the Theocracy and the occupation, on the Polity . . .’

  ‘No, Shree Enkara, you want to hold me up as an example of why you think you are right. You want to affirm your own bitterness, your own faith.’

  ‘Faith is a good subject too.’

  Tombs didn’t reply and, when Grant glanced back, the man was leaning against the side of the vehicle, gazing out of the side window, his expression grim, bitter.