by Neal Asher
Tombs looked nothing like a proctor any more, but there should be no surprise in that, twenty years having passed since he wore the uniform and beat pond workers into submission. He also moved oddly, his disjointed gait carrying him to the more prominent and thick drifts of rhizome, even though all the rhizome layer here, unlike the churned and smoking area over to the right, seemed perfectly flat and easily capable of supporting the weight of a man. He walked like someone carrying a heavy load, as if worried about sinking, but as he drew close, Chanter read no worry in the man. Tombs’s expression was utterly unreadable. His eyes seemed like hollows in a skull.
The three halted before Chanter, Shree and Grant studying him curiously whilst Tombs slowly lost that alien expression and took on the one of a man lost in some internal dream world. Shree and Grant of course knew about adapts, but Chanter supposed they weren’t yet used to seeing them on this backward world.
‘I’m to take you three to the Tagreb,’ Chanter snapped.
‘And Penny Royal.’
Chanter shivered and peered over towards that churned and smoking ground. ‘What happened here?’
‘Amistad didn’t tell you?’ asked the soldier.
‘No, I just got a terse instruction to pick you up and was told that you would fill me in – seems the drone’s a bit busy now.’
‘Penny Royal had a rather close encounter with the Technician.’
‘Is it hurt?’ Chanter asked, peering anxiously towards the churned area.
‘Lying in pieces over there,’ said the woman.
Chanter felt something lurch inside him; all his reason for being. Some black objects were visible, had the Technician been destroyed? He swung back towards them. ‘Where is it?’
Grant pointed at those black objects and led the way. Chanter fell in behind the man, then quickly overtook him. In a moment they reached the objects and Chanter immediately recognized them as pieces of the black AI, and realized his misunderstanding.
‘And the Technician?’ he asked casually.
‘In a lot better shape,’ Grant replied. ‘Didn’t look like it had a scratch on it.’ Chanter continued to conceal his relief as the soldier gestured to Penny Royal’s remains. ‘You got some way we can get these inside your . . . vehicle?’
‘Certainly,’ Chanter nodded, then after a moment called, ‘Mick! Out here now!’
The odd-looking robot peeked out of the mudmarine, the two over there quickly moving away from the entrance as it extended one long-toed foot to test the quality of the ground. After a moment it clambered out like some giant iron cockroach that had been stepped on but still survived, scuttled past the other two, observing them with one hinged-up stalked eye, and came over to Chanter, halting before him like a sheepdog awaiting instructions.
‘All this,’ Chanter gestured to the scattered remains of Penny Royal. ‘Collect it up and put it in the cargo blister. No need to be careful with it – this isn’t one of the Technician’s sculptures.’
Mick scuttled past them, folded out one arm and closed long fingers around a single spine, yanking it up to reveal the heptahedron of grey metal attached to its base, and a length of tentacle extending from one face of that. This went onto Mick’s ribbed back, where the tentacle writhed slightly. The next identical component went on, and studying the rest Chanter realized that all Penny Royal’s components were of this format. He swallowed drily upon seeing one of those tentacles turn and attach to the heptahedron at the base of a separate spine. It seemed likely the black AI wasn’t dead, just inconvenienced. He turned back towards his mudmarine, Grant walking beside him.
‘So you’re Chanter,’ said Grant.
Chanter restrained himself from sarcastic comments about how common mudmarine-occupying amphidapts were on Masada and contented himself with, ‘Evidently.’
‘I’ve known about you for years, of course,’ said Grant. ‘Known that like me you’ve been working for Amistad.’
Chanter felt some chagrin at that. ‘We are colleagues,’ he said. ‘We exchange information and are useful to each other – no more than that.’
Grant shrugged, and said no more as they returned to the other two. Here Chanter gazed with distaste at Shree.
‘You, I will transport to the Tagreb with these two, but you’ll report nothing about me unless I allow it – I’ve been subject to Earthnet hatchet jobs before.’
‘Ah, you mean Earthnet’s reporting on your great interest in the painter Silbus?’ said Shree. ‘That was a long time ago and nothing to do with me.’
Obviously the three here had gone through a frightening experience, and it seemed her reaction was to put on a dismissive air.
‘The restriction orders that resulted from it killed my line of research there – I’m not going to allow that to happen again.’
‘As I understand it,’ said Shree, ‘Earthnet reports were vetted by AIs even then. It wasn’t a hatchet job, just the truth.’
Chanter snorted in annoyance, turning to study Jeremiah Tombs. Still he felt some resentment about what had happened back then, though over the intervening years he had come to understand that he had been rather too . . . enthusiastic.
‘So you’re the one,’ he said.
Tombs just looked at him, looked through him.
Chanter tried, ‘The Technician is an artist and you are art.’
Tombs blinked, seemed to only just realize he was being spoken to. ‘All is art,’ he said, as if this were obvious.
By now Mick had a full load of black spines and tentacles, which it took over to the domed hatch into the mudmarine’s cargo blister. A signal from the robot opened the hatch, and Mick began to try loading the parts of Penny Royal into the space within. Chanter noticed the robot was experiencing difficulties, for many of the separate components had attached to each other, turning the load into a tangled mass. The robot eventually got round this by upending itself and tipping the whole lot inside, where it landed with a sound like rubble pouring into a hopper. The robot then trundled out again to collect the rest.
‘Let’s go inside,’ said Chanter.
With four people inside, the mudmarine’s compartment was cramped. Chanter opened down his wall cot, where Shree and Grant sat. Tombs just studied his surroundings for a moment, then squatted, whilst Chanter himself sat in his control chair.
‘All is art?’ Chanter repeated, now checking feed from his sensor array. There were hooders out there still, some starting to draw closer now the Technician was departing, but none of them close enough to be too much of a worry. It seemed that the common hooders kept their distance from the Technician, but of course, the albino hooder was no part of the common herd.
Tombs remained silent, so Chanter turned to him, only for Shree to add her opinion. ‘Tombs here has been coming out with a lot of stuff like that.’ She eyed the ex-proctor. ‘Maybe if he keeps up this Zen shit the air of mystery around him won’t disperse and the Polity will keep paying him to do just exactly as he pleases.’
Chanter glanced at her with irritated puzzlement. Something didn’t ring true about her words; they sounded almost desperate, as if she was having trouble being dismissive.
‘I’ve studied the Technician’s sculptures for decades,’ Chanter said, switching back to his own concerns. ‘The scientists here see them as the product of malfunction, but I see more. It was I who dated the oldest sculpture and it is I who see beyond such mechanistic views of reality.’
‘He searched for a million years and found the Weaver at last,’ said Tombs.
Chanter just stared at the man, not quite sure what he had heard for a moment, then some mechanistic facts fell into place. He had dated the oldest sculpture at about a million years yet, so Amistad and Clyde claimed the Technician itself dated back to the suicide of the Atheter race, two million years ago.
‘The Technician searched for a million years?’ Chanter asked.
Tombs glanced at him, almost dismissively, then looked past him at the screen showing Mick collecting u
p further parts of Penny Royal.
‘It destroyed his mind, but not completely – broke the circuit but left the components in place. It must have taken him a million years to rebuild himself.’ He shrugged, looked slightly puzzled. ‘That’s the only explanation.’
‘The Weaver?’ Grant enquired, peering at Tombs.
Chanter felt like telling the man to shut up, but then perhaps he did have something to contribute. ‘Yes, what is this weaver?’
‘He died, but what is death?’ Tombs pointed at the screen and Chanter turned to look at it. Mick was trundling in with the last of Penny Royal, but beyond the robot, just visible, a big old gabbleduck was lolloping towards them. Something ran cold fingers down Chanter’s spine. The gabbleduck wouldn’t reach them before Mick finished up, and they would be well out of its reach deep in the mud shortly afterwards, but its presence out there just seemed too coincidental.
‘You found where it happened,’ Tombs stated. ‘He died there, again.’
‘You see – mysterious bullshit,’ said Shree, with a break in her voice as Chanter turned.
Tombs gazed up at him, something more Human returning to his expression. He smiled. ‘I gabble,’ he said.
Chanter reached behind, groping across the console to open com, finding he didn’t need to when Amistad spoke from the speaker. ‘Yes, Chanter?’
‘I missed something,’ said Chanter.
‘You did?’
Chanter frowned – it was so unlike the scorpion drone to pretend such surprise at his mistakes. ‘I did – I need someone to check the data I used to date that old sculpture.’
‘You feel you have the date wrong?’
‘Stop fucking with me Amistad.’
‘What do you want to check?’
‘At a million years in this environment, we’re at the bottom end of mineralization mapping.’ Chanter paused, realized he was both dreading and fascinated by the results that surely could be obtained. ‘I did the mapping from a general mineral content of a Masadan grazer’s bone, the Technician’s usual prey, but I might have that wrong. However, we should be able to backtrack through the map to give us a specific mineral content and thus nail down the precise species of the animal the sculpture was made from.’
‘Even now, Rodol is running the maps . . . one moment.’
After a pause Chanter asked impatiently, ‘Has it got it yet?’
‘Of course,’ Amistad replied.
‘What has it got?’
‘I think you know the answer to that one, Chanter.’
‘Thank you,’ Chanter replied, not feeling in the least bit grateful.
‘They’re gone,’ said Jonas Clyde. ‘Every last one of them that came to this world is gone.’
The clarity came, rolled through Jem like a wave of pure crystal, and it faded to leave odd shells in its wake. Studying those shells was an absorbing task that seemed to fold immediate reality away, in the big place in which Jem resided the immediate seemed some drama playing on a fuzzy screen – the best place for such pain. For a moment he focused back into the real, but he couldn’t nail down the now, and time dislocated . . .
. . .
. . . putting him back in the mudmarine, cramming himself to one side of the small compartment as the robot returned inside and affixed itself to the wall. The robot’s return here ran completely contrary to Chanter’s instruction for it to secure itself in the same compartment as the cargo it had just loaded. The amphidapt probably didn’t understand that the machine had evolved, had stepped up into the Turing band, and now possessed enough consciousness to know it did not want to stay that close to Penny Royal.
‘What was that all about?’ Shree asked.
‘Mick is obviously malfunctioning,’ said Chanter, staring at the robot.
‘Not that.’ Shree waved a hand at the console before Chanter. ‘All that stuff about mineralization mapping.’
Chanter just shook his head, concentrated on taking his vessel under the rhizome layer to avoid hooders and the gabbleduck out there, both of which were starting to draw uncomfortably close. The gabbleduck, Jem realized, would lose the sense of it all and just return to its animalistic existence. No matter – another would be along soon enough.
‘You gabble, you said?’ queried Shree.
Jem realized the comment had been directed at him. She wanted him responding to her. She wanted him to associate with her on a Human level so she could lose her fear of him, of what he might be, and the doubt that cast on her own firm beliefs.
‘Obviously a direct reference to the Gabble,’ said Grant. ‘Language seems his entry point.’ He passed her the shell Jem had given him – the shell Jem hadn’t wanted to keep now he understood its attraction, and the accompanying denial.
The journey slid past, an odd dream, unimportant . . .
. . .
. . . back in the Museum Jem gazed at the neatly preserved carcass of a hooder and felt only a species of disappointment when the mechanisms inside the corpse activated it for those here.
‘I worked that all out when I studied this.’ Clyde gestured towards the corpse. ‘Shardelle and I put it all together – the tricones, the nihilism, all of it.’
Jem replayed the previous events in his mind. He remembered their arrival at the Tagreb, remembered Chanter instructing his robot to unload Penny Royal and the robot simply refusing to move. Like some iron animal self-eviscerating and spilling its guts, the mudmarine opened its cargo compartment, and Penny Royal clattered out. Strewing itself across the ground in the Masadan night, the black AI began to move with the same incremental slowness as the Tagreb itself.
‘It’s still functioning,’ Shree had said.
‘Damaged but unbowed, I’m told,’ Grant had stated. ‘Penny Royal’s still alive and should be able to pull itself together within the next few days.’
Jem only now noticed how Shree had used the word ‘functioning’ whilst Grant had used ‘alive’.
Shortly after that Clyde had come out to greet them, then led them inside. Behind them the whole of Penny Royal shifted with the glacial slowness of a slime mould, but a couple of spines swivelled in their direction as if tracking their progress, which finally brought them to the Tagreb’s museum.
. . .
‘He needs to know it all,’ said Grant. ‘He needs to know all about the Atheter.’
Clyde’s succinct and bitter reply to Grant’s earlier question, ‘Tell us about the Atheter,’ had obviously not been enough.
‘So tell us all about that nihilism,’ said Shree.
‘Here on Masada is where the Atheter committed racial suicide,’ Clyde explained. He folded his arms, his expression slightly irritated, then went on to detail what had happened on Masada – a story he seemed to have become tired of telling.
With half an ear Jem listened, but he knew the story so well now. The rest of his attention focused on the long row of sculptures, then down to the end, where Chanter stood looking at the last in the row, and the oldest. Then, almost as if time itself had shaken out the staples holding it to reality, he found himself sliding back into the near past.
. . .
‘What the hell was that all about?’ Shree asked.
Jem was back in the mudmarine again. Grant had just passed her the penny mollusc shell and she held it like some poisonous insect.
‘It’s a glyph, or a pictograph, or an entire word,’ Grant replied. ‘It’s one of the basic elements of the Atheter language – I thought you got that, Shree.’
‘I get that it’s what many would want to believe.’ She passed the shell back to him. ‘You know what I think? I think our proctor here is playing on the fact that the Polity thinks he has something important locked up inside his skull, and he’s getting away with it because the AIs don’t dare open up his skull and take a good hard look inside.’
‘You saw what he did with the Technician,’ said Grant.
Shree just turned away from him.
What did he do with the Technicia
n? Jem closed his eyes and saw the weaving, recognized that after the scorched-earth return to Homeworld it was coming unravelled, and that his own kind had waded into madness and not recognized it as such.
‘Okay, taking us under,’ said the amphidapt.
Strange creature, Jem felt, yet somehow more familiar to him than both Shree and Grant. Certainly this familiarity stemmed from Chanter’s webbed feet and bulky physique.
As the mudmarine shuddered into motion the floor tilted underneath Jem, so he sat down, ankles crossed, hands resting on his knees . . .
. . .
. . . and now found himself sitting in exactly the same pose on the floor of the Museum. The three close by were peering down at him with varying expressions. Shree just looked with contempt, Clyde with puzzlement, whilst Grant showed expectation. Of course, they had hoped that hearing the full truth of what had happened on this world would free up things in his mind. He sensed Penny Royal, still outside and still mostly immobile, waiting in attendance upon that, still haunting them like some vicious but restrained spectre.
‘You okay?’ Grant asked.
Jem ignored him and gazed at Clyde. ‘They are not all gone – I think you know that.’
The man’s puzzlement increased. ‘Some tried to save themselves or some part of their civilization, but you yourself said the tricones grind very fine.’
‘Not fine enough.’
Victory in Grant’s expression, a slight tilt of his head indicating Penny Royal or the drone Amistad must be talking to him. They thought they had succeeded here with Clyde’s testimony. Jem decided to disabuse them of that notion, pointing to the row of sculptures.
‘It surfaces because of them,’ he said. ‘Chanter knows.’
Jem closed his eyes.
The technology had been all but annihilated, the war machines hunting down and burning to ash the last Jain nodes – the seeds left after the technology completed its millennia-long season of destruction – but the fear and the hatred had not gone away. The people knew that all it would take was one missed node and the whole nightmare would begin again. Retreating, they left behind the worlds seared down to the bedrock, acidic atmospheres and volcanism. Steadily they destroyed every trace of their interstellar civilization, mass dumping of all offworld constructs into suns, using the war machines to take out the rest of their own AIs, then using them at Homeworld to chew remaining offworld tech to dust, before summoning them to the surface for decommissioning. But the Weaver, like so many, did not agree with this.