Hilldiggers

by Neal Asher

  Why did their mother die? Apparently it had been a miserable accident, though Orduval had suspicions about that. Had Orbital Combine been conducting some kind of experiment that went wrong, and then swiftly concealed the evidence?

  ‘Did they kill you, Mother?’ he asked, his mouth already dry again.

  He desperately wanted to drink more water, but decided he must reach the mount first and so he trudged on. A Sudorian human needed to consume an estimated gallon of water every four hours, to survive here in direct sunlight, so after his day under this sun he was now severely dehydrated. His clothing felt crusty – sand and salt combined – and he began to feel damp with a sweat that would have earlier quickly evaporated. It seemed as if shadows now accompanied him on his trek – the expected hallucinations were beginning to arrive.

  ‘But who was our father?’ he asked the desert night.

  Amenable to his request, the silvered darkness provided a shadowy figure, though not located in that same darkness but somehow standing just aside of it. He tried to discern its features and could not. He and his siblings had once asked Utrain about their father, but their grandmother could provide no answers: Elsever had formed no permanent attachments on Corisanthe Main. A brief liaison, then? Perhaps even a brief liaison with something not human. The figure changed into an unknowable spectre poised on the edge of his perception. The Shadowman? Orduval shivered and turned away, to find himself falling into his own abyss.

  An unknown time later, voices called him out of it:

  ‘With all your understanding of the human condition, is this the best solution you can find?’ Harald sneered.

  ‘I am saddened,’ said Rhodane. ‘But I understand.’

  ‘Get up, Orduval,’ Yishna urged. ‘The mount is not so far.’

  He was lying on his side, and the salty taste in his mouth was blood from where he had bitten his tongue. It occurred to him that in his weakened condition he might not even need the pills, for the next fit might kill him. He struggled to his feet and moved on.

  ‘Pathetic, weak . . . are you sure you are one of us, Orduval?’ Harald taunted.

  It was so unfair. He wanted to cry, but his body lacked sufficient moisture to allow him tears. Immediately after the moment of self-pity, he grew angry. Yes, pathetic, weak, but what other recourse did he have? Staying there in the asylum was no life, and the fits so disrupted his thinking that he could pursue no selected subject as deeply as he wished. He could have chosen to just keep on existing, but to him that was displaying weakness. He cursed and shook his head . . . and his siblings fragmented into the night. Clasping his failing body under an iron will, he forced himself onwards. Hours later, when his boot finally came down on stone, he considered that a victory, allowed himself a celebratory drink of water, then began to climb the rocky slope ahead. Hundreds of feet above the desert, weariness finally clubbed him. He drank once again, then curled up in a sandy hollow in the rock, and slept.

  Morning; the sun rougeing the horizon and glimmer wings twinkling in the twilight. Up on his knees, Orduval drank more and now felt ravenously hungry. New day, new perspective? He felt suddenly optimistic, as if he could continue living. But this feeling was precisely why he had walked out here, the previous day and night, since there could never be any return. He stood and peered up the slope above him. He would climb to the very top, watch the desert for a while, and then ease his way gently from life with the pills. But the moment he moved, dizziness washed through him, and it was on unsteady legs he began to negotiate the slope. And with a degree of reluctance – where was his moment of clarity? That strangeness during the night was already fading in memory. So unfair—

  Blackness slammed him down.

  Orduval woke to utter agony. Perhaps his suicidal impulse was working, with him climbing such a difficult slope when he suffered from fits. With vision blurring he gazed at the shards of bone poking from his right shin, the dislocated fingers of his left hand, the rips in his clothing and the blood. The sun, now shining straight down on him, burned acidically into his wounds, and thirst lay like a twisted knot inside him. His water carrier was nowhere in sight, but maybe he could summon up enough saliva to swallow the pills without water. He groped into his pocket with his right hand, searching for the pill tube. Couldn’t find it. Summoning the will to lift his head and look, he saw the pocket was torn open. He moaned with self-pity, then the ensuing anger drove him to crawl on. At least he could find some shade where the sun did not burn so.

  Harald came to taunt him, the sun a halo around his furnace head; Rhodane came to sympathize, and Yishna to offer pragmatic advice. Utrain called him in to supper and stood some way to one side, holding out a chilled glass of fruit juice. Memories surfaced and fled and another fit took him away for a while. How many hours? How many hours did he make animal sounds of pain? Shade then . . . cool . . . and was that trickling water he heard? He lay still, sliding in and out of consciousness. A kind of relief settled on him, and a calm, for he felt the worst suffering had passed and death was now coming to embrace him. The hallucinations seemed to lose their potency . . . but for one appearing near the end. His fevered mind painted a metal beast out of surviving biological files from Earth, squatting at the mouth of the cave in which he lay.

  ‘Screw non-intervention and screw Geronamid,’ grumbled the silver tiger. ‘I’m not going to let you die, Orduval.’

  – Retroact 9 Ends –

  6

  The colonists of Brumal required very few adaptations – and those mostly concerning toughening their bodies to the acidic environment and a mild amphidaption to their watery surroundings. Their leaders instituted building programmes – quickly setting up a domed encampment much like the one we set up at Transit. Exploration led to the discovery of deep cave systems, huge forests and massive river systems. The leaders were preparing to build their communal and socially just isocracy, whereupon they would of course relinquish control. However, then the first out-gassing occurred upon the first close pass of the planet Sudoria, and for frantic days the Brumallians thought our predecessors here were gas-attacking them from orbit. But then they discovered, in the mountains, the geothermal vents spewing out pure chlorine gas. The atmosphere became rapidly intolerable, and their technology began to corrode and decay around them – the landing craft they had so congratulated themselves on retaining becoming unusable within a matter of weeks. Salvaging what they could, they retreated into the shelter of the cave systems. The first Brumallians – as we know them – did not step outside until seventy years later. What changes they made to themselves and their society in the intervening period we know to have been radical, and occurred almost certainly because they never managed to lock their fanatics outside like we did.

  Uskaron

  McCrooger

  Injury hunger was again churning up my insides by the time we reached the bottom of the brick-lined shaft. It persisted because of the broken bones I had suffered aboard the escape-pod, and was exacerbated by the constant physical abuse this environment subjected me to. If I did not eat something soon, IF21 would kill me or I would change horribly. The change would begin by me starting to go a little crazy, then chewing plates would begin to harden inside my tongue and its tip begin to hollow prior to it turning into the feeding mouth of a leech. I would then turn violent, and it would be others who would die.

  ‘I need something to eat,’ I informed Rhodane.

  She glanced at me, then after a moment removed her visor. Dropping it into a pocket in her belt, she then pushed back her hood to release tousled blonde hair. I noted how her dark skin displayed a greenish cast, the same hue even evident in the whites of her eyes. Hard skin ran along the line of her jaw bone, divided into segments like the scales on a reptile’s tail, and ran up before her ear to terminate in rough fibrous patches.

  ‘You’ll be provided for once we reach our destination,’ she said.

  I kept my complaints to myself and hoped we would reach there soon. Right then I did not fee
l up to frittering away time by asking how she managed to breathe atmosphere that would leave any other Sudorian writhing, coughing and retching on the ground.

  Riveted steel gates opened to admit us to an underground marina. Biolights clustered on the rocky ceiling a hundred feet above, and the chamber ahead was packed with all manner of watercraft moored to floating jetties. Leading off from this chamber were numerous tunnels, some containing canals with paths down either side, and some leading directly to stairs. Far to my left I observed cargo being craned from a barge onto motorized pallets, which in turn were driven by Brumallians right into a huge lift, whether to go up or down I could not guess. As we chugged through into the marina, one craft nearby particularly drew my attention. The thing looked alive, insectoid, with legs folded along its sides, antennae sprouting from the weirdly shaped bowsprit, and a rudder that looked more like a tail than anything else.

  I pointed. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Something made before the War,’ Rhodane replied.

  I mentally compared the biolights and those pumps on the surface with all the other simple mechanisms up on the surface and down here. When a society adopted the biotechnology route, its results tended to fill every niche, gradually displacing all those objects and processes that used to be the products of plain manufacturing. On a world called Hive, right on the far edge of the Polity, the AIs only kept passive watch, for that world had fallen under the control of another race (another story) and the small human population there was ruled by the CGs, or Chief Geneticists. Once, when visiting there, I saw an organism whose sum purpose was to produce nails and screws. I asked the designer of this thing, whose life work it had been, why for so prosaic a purpose she had made something so complex and in need of such nurturing, when simple machines were easily available for the same task. She replied, ‘But simple machines cannot be bred to replace themselves.’ I guess she had a point.

  ‘Do Brumallians still possess the capability to produce such things?’ I asked Rhodane.

  ‘Should the Polity concern itself with such matters?’ she countered.

  Any complex technology is the product of many antecedents. Destroy the infrastructure of a society supporting such technology and, though the knowledge itself might not be lost, the society would lose the basis on which the tech was built. Members of a human civilization bombed back into the Stone Age are hardly going to be able to build computers from flint and wood.

  Rhodane then relented. ‘Much was lost during the War.’

  Our craft motored into a space alongside a jetty, whereupon one of the quofarl leapt out to secure the mooring rope. Rhodane stepped out ahead of me, and as I stood to follow her a sharp hunger pang stabbed through me. I peered down at my hand and spied the shade of blue presaging a horrible transformation, and inside I felt a churning sickening sensation as the two viral forms competed for predominance. The quofarl still onboard reached out and prodded my shoulder – just a nudge to indicate I should now go ashore.

  I turned on him. ‘Touch me again and I’ll knock those fucking mandibles through the back of your thick skull.’ He did not understand me, since I spoke a language not known in this Solar System, but he understood my tone. He began to lean forward, mandibles grating together and eyes narrowing. Luckily the surge of pure rage passed and I managed to get myself under control, abruptly turning away to step ashore.

  ‘Rhodane, I really need something to eat.’

  ‘There is nothing suitable here. We’ve got supplies of Sudorian food over in Granitesville, and should be there within the hour.’

  ‘You don’t understand. After recent changes I’ve undergone to adapt to your environment I need to eat substantial amounts, regularly, or my judgement and reason can be impaired. I can become . . . dangerous.’

  ‘He can –’ began the quofarl on the jetty.

  ‘– become dangerous,’ finished the one still aboard the boat.

  Much clattering mandipular laughter ensued, and Rhodane chuckled too.

  ‘Please let me explain,’ I continued doggedly. ‘This is not a usual condition with me, but one brought on by recent injuries and my adjustment to your environment. Additionally, I can eat Brumallian food.’

  ‘Whoo, Mr Dangerous –’

  ‘– wants to chew –’

  ‘– grobbleworms.’ The last came from Rhodane who seemed to have been caught up in the joint communication. It only dawned on me then how she easily managed the clicks and rattles of spoken Brumallian, and I realized this had something to do with those physical changes evident on her face. But I did not feel inclined to satisfy my curiosity about that right then. My left hand began to quiver, and I really really wanted to put my fist through the nearest quofarl’s head – the one on the jetty. I needed to get this sorted fast before I lost control. I decided on a half-measure.

  ‘Let me illustrate.’ I grabbed the chosen quofarl by the front of his dungarees, since the material looked strong enough, hoisted him from the jetty one-handed and hurled him over the boat into the water beyond. Turning to Rhodane, I said, ‘If I lose control, people will die.’

  She stared out to where the quofarl had now surfaced and began swimming back towards us from about twenty feet out. She glanced down at the other quofarl on the boat, whose mandibles were hanging wide apart, then turned to study me cautiously.

  ‘Follow me,’ she instructed abruptly.

  The grobbleworm seller occupied the first stall of a market running alongside a canal that tunnelled off from the marina. Even as we approached, a fisherman brought his catch to the stall – a basket full of the same armoured worms making a racket like snakes writhing in a barrel of stones. Their pincers extruded through the basket mesh, sharp tail fins stabbed out like knives. The stallholder extended one mandible, directing him to a stack of similar baskets ranged to one side, then turned her attention towards us, or rather to me. She stared, mandibles hanging wide in what I now recognized as an expression of surprise or shock.

  ‘Give me your attention,’ Rhodane said in Brumallian, though the subtext she signed went something like, ‘Consensus Speaker business – stop staring at the weird human.’ She continued out loud with, ‘I want ten worms – six of them overcooked.’

  Once the stallholder got over her surprise she pulled on gauntlets and began the dodgy task of pulling arm-thick worms from a nearby basket and threading them onto long steel skewers, before plunging them into a pot of boiling water.

  ‘Why overcooked?’ I asked.

  ‘It weakens the acid content, which is more acceptable to me, and I presume would be more acceptable to you?’

  ‘You presume right.’

  Six skewered worms squirmed and thrashed in the boiling water. The stallholder paused for a while before dropping in the remaining four, long enough only for them to stop thrashing about. I felt a surge of nostalgia for Spatterjay, where similar monsters met a similar end in similar pots. By this time the quofarl I had thrown into the water had turned up. I expected some display of anger or resentment, but he showed none I could identify.

  ‘Grobbleworms –’ he rubbed his meaty hands together.

  ‘– good,’ his companion completed.

  Meaty hands continued, ‘You weren’t joking –’

  ‘– about being hungry,’ the companion supplied.

  Rhodane took the four minimally cooked worms from the stallholder and handed them to the two quofarl, who, holding the skewers in their right hands whilst pulling off shell with mandibles and left hand, began stuffing the gristly meat into their mouths. Observing them, I realized one did not really need mandibles, since these worms looked no more difficult to eat than say a lobster or a prill. When at last the six overcooked worms were ready, Rhodane took two for herself and handed the remaining four to me. I placed three of the loaded skewers down on the stall and impatiently started on the other, pulling the worm apart and stuffing chunks into my mouth and sometimes chewing up shell as well as flesh. It took the skin off the inside of my mouth,
burned like jalapeño chillies and caused such an eructatious racket in my stomach that those passers-by who stopped to gaze at me hung around to listen to the symphony until Rhodane shooed them away. But my body’s need took over, quickly regrowing damaged skin in my mouth and adjusting itself to this acidic nutriment. By the time I sucked the last piece of meat from the last piece of shell, the worms tasted like chilli-flavoured frog-whelk to me, and I was hooked.

  ‘Less chance of you turning dangerous now?’ Rhodane asked, eyeing the remnants of shell and the discarded skewers about my feet.

  I glanced longingly at the pot, but the worms had taken the edge off my hunger so I decided not to push my luck. ‘That will sustain me for a little while,’ I conceded.

  She handed a small black rod to the stallholder, who pressed it into some kind of reader before handing it back. Some transaction had obviously just taken place. I knew nothing about their economic system here, but supposed they must use some form of currency since few human societies ever have managed to survive without it. We moved on, stared at all the while. As I walked, feeling a little calmer and more able to assess my situation, I considered what I had seen back at the stall. The Brumallians didn’t really need mandibles to handle their food, so were they a result of inefficient recombinant techniques, or had some bastard in their past saddled these people with mandibles to make some obscure ideological point? Again, one of those things I would probably never find out.

  – RETROACT 10 –

  Yishna – on Corisanthe Main

  The screen showed the distinct words:

  HATE . . . SKIRL SAND . . . IMPACTED . . . FIRE

  Keleon, the OCT who had heard those words in his mind, had told her in detail the sensations and thoughts accompanying them. He had experienced the usual fantasies, some violent, some sexual. He described to her how he imagined setting at each other’s throats two OCTs he knew had had him thrown out of the Cognizants – yet another sect aboard this station – then went on to describe to her how he had vividly visualized buggering her over a console in a study unit. After this Keleon had taken the opportunity to suggest that this might be something they could try – strictly in the interests of research. Yishna had subsequently dismissed him and had used her consoles for more prosaic activities.