The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Are you saying we just abandon star systems that have been taken over?”

  “We must isolate them until we have a solution which works. I already have a science team examining the possessed woman we hold in Trafalgar. Hopefully their research may produce some answers.”

  A loud murmur of consternation spiralled around the tiers at that disclosure.

  “You have one captured?” the President inquired in surprise.

  “Yes, sir. We didn’t know exactly what she was until the voidhawk from Atlantis came. But now we do, our investigation can proceed along more purposeful lines.”

  “I see.” The President seemed at a loss. He glanced at the speaker, who inclined his head.

  “I second the motion of the First Admiral for a state of emergency,” the President said formally.

  “One vote down, eight hundred to go,” Admiral Lalwani whispered.

  The speaker rang the silver bell on the table in front of him. “As, at this time, there would seem little to add to the information the First Admiral has presented to us, I will now call upon those here present to cast their votes on the resolution before you.”

  Rittagu-FHU emitted a piping hoot and rose to her feet. Her thick head swung around to look at the First Admiral, a motion which sent the chemical program teats along her neck bobbling, delivering a leathery slapping sound. She worked her double lips elaborately, producing a prolonged gabble. “Speaker statement not true,” the translator block on the table said. “I have much to add. Elemental humans, dead humans; these are not part of Tyrathca nature. We did not know such things were possible for you. We impugn these assaults upon what is real today. If you all have this ability to become elemental, then you all threaten the Tyrathca. This is frightening for us. We must withdraw from contact with humans.”

  “I assure you, Ambassador, we did not know of this ourselves,” the President said. “It frightens us as much as it does you. I would ask you to retain at least some lines of communication until this situation can be resolved.”

  Rittagu-FHU’s fluting reply was translated as: “Who says this?”

  Olton Haaker’s weary face reflected his puzzlement. He flicked a glance at his equally uncertain aides. “I do.”

  “But who speaks?”

  “I’m sorry, Ambassador, I don’t understand.”

  “You say you speak. Who are you? I see Olton Haaker standing here today, as he has stood many times. I do not know if it is Olton Haaker. I do not know if it is an elemental human.”

  “I assure you I’m not!” the President spluttered.

  “I do not know that. What is the difference?” She turned her gaze on the First Admiral, big glassy eyes displaying no emotions he could ever understand. “Is there a way of knowing?”

  “There seems to be a localized disturbance of electronic systems in the presence of anyone possessed,” he said. “That’s the only method of detection we have now. But we’re working on other techniques.”

  “You do not know.”

  “The possessions started on Lalonde. The first starship to reach here from that planet was Ilex, and it came directly. We can be safe in assuming that no one in the Avon system has been possessed yet.”

  “You do not know.”

  Samual Aleksandrovich couldn’t answer. I’m sure, but the damn creature is right. Certainty is no longer possible. But then humans have never needed absolutes to convince themselves. The Tyrathca have, and it’s a difference which divides us far greater than our biology.

  When he appealed silently to the President, he met a blank face. Very calmly, he said: “I do not know.”

  There was a subliminal suggestion of a mass sigh from the tiers, maybe even resentment.

  But I did what was right, I answered her on her own terms.

  “I express gratitude that you speak the truth,” Rittagu-FHU said. “Now I do what is my task in this place, and speak for my race. The Tyrathca this day end our contact with all humans. We will leave your worlds. Do not come to ours.”

  Rittagu-FHU stretched out a long arm, and a nine-fingered circular hand switched off her translator block. She hooted to her mate, and together they made their way to the exit.

  The vast chamber was utterly silent as the door slid shut behind them.

  Olton Haaker cleared his throat, squared his shoulders, and faced the Kiint ambassador who was standing passively in the bottom tier. “If you wish to leave us, Ambassador Roulor, then of course we shall provide every assistance in returning you and the other Kiint ambassadors to your homeworld. This is a human problem after all, we do not wish to jeopardize our fruitful relationship by endangering you.”

  One of the snow-white Kiint’s tractamorphic arms uncurled to hold up a small processor block, its AV projection pillar produced a moiré sparkle.

  “Being alive is a substantial risk, Mr. President,” Roulor said. “Danger always balances enjoyment. To find one, you must face and know the other. And you are wrong in saying that it is a human problem. All sentient races eventually discover the truth of death.”

  “You mean you knew?” Olton Haaker asked, his diplomatic demeanor badly broken.

  “We are aware of our nature, yes. We confronted it once, a great time ago, and we survived. Now you must do the same. We cannot help you in this struggle which you are facing, but we do sympathise.”

  ***

  Starflight traffic to Valisk was dropping off; ten per cent in two days.

  Even though Rubra’s subsidiary thought routines managed the habitat’s traffic control, the statistic hadn’t registered with his principal personality. It was the economics of the shortfall which finally alerted him. The flights were all scheduled charters, bringing components to the industrial stations of his precious Magellanic Itg company. None of them were blackhawk flights from his own fleet, it was only Adamist ships.

  Curious, he reviewed all the news fleks delivered by those starships which had arrived recently, searching for a reason, some crisis or emergency in another section of the Confederation. He drew a blank.

  It was only when his principal personality routine made its weekly routine check on Fairuza that Rubra realized something was wrong inside the habitat as well. Fairuza was another of his protégés, a ninth-generation descendant who had showed promise from an early age.

  Promise, as defined by Rubra, consisted principally of the urge to exert himself as leader of the other boys at the day club, snatching the biggest share, be it of sweets or game processor time, a certain cruel streak with regards to pets, contempt for his timid, loving parents. It marked him down as a greedy, short-tempered, bullying, disobedient, generally nasty little boy. Rubra was delighted.

  When Fairuza reached ten years of age, the slow waves of encouragement began to twist their way into his psyche. Dark yearnings to go further, a feeling of righteousness, a sense of destiny, a quite insufferable ego.

  It was all due to Rubra’s silent desires oozing continually into his skull.

  The whole moulding process had gone wrong so often in the past. Valisk was littered with the neurotic detritus of Rubra’s earlier attempts to create a dynamic ruthless personality in what he considered his own image. He wanted so much to forge such a creature, someone worthy to command Magellanic Itg. And for two hundred years he had endured the humiliation of his own flesh and blood failing him time and again.

  But Fairuza had a resilient quality which was rare among his diverse family members. So far he had displayed few of the psychological weaknesses which ruined all the others. Rubra had hopes for him, almost as many hopes as he once had for Dariat.

  However, when Rubra summoned the sub-routine which monitored the fourteen-year-old youth, nothing happened. A giant ripple of surprise ran down the entire length of the habitat’s neural strata. Servitor animals flinched and juddered as it passed below them. Thick muscle rings regulating the flow of fluids inside the huge network of nutrient capillaries and water channels buried deep in the polyp shell spasmed, creating surg
es and swirls which took the autonomic routines over half an hour to calm and return to normal. All eight thousand of Rubra’s descendants shivered uncontrollably, and for no reason they could understand, even the children who had no knowledge of their true nature yet.

  For a moment, Rubra didn’t know what to do. His personality was distributed evenly through the habitat’s neural strata, a condition the original designers of Eden had called a homogenized presence. Every routine and sub-routine and autonomic routine was at once whole and separate. All perceptual information received by any sensitive cell was immediately disseminated for storage uniformly along the strata. Failure, any failure, was inconceivable.

  Failure meant his own thoughts were malfunctioning. His mind, the one true aspect of self left to him, was flawed.

  After surprise, inevitably, came fear. There could be few reasons for such a disaster. He might finally be succumbing to high-level psychological disorders. It was a condition the Edenists always predicted he would develop after enduring centuries of loneliness coupled with frustration at his inability to find a worthy heir.

  He began to design a series of entirely new routines which would analyse his own mental architecture. Like undercover wraiths, these visitants flashed silently through the neural strata on their missions to spy on the performance of each sub-routine without it being aware, reporting back on his own performance.

  A list of flaws began to emerge. They made a strange compilation. Some sub-routines, like Fairuza’s monitor, were missing completely, others were inactive, then there were instances of memory dissemination being blocked. The lack of any logical pattern bothered him. Rubra didn’t doubt that he was under attack, but it was a most peculiar method of assault.

  However, one aspect of the attack was perfectly clear: whoever was behind the disruptions had a perfect understanding of both affinity and a habitat’s thought routines. He couldn’t believe it was the Edenists, not them with their repugnant superiority. They considered time to be their premier weapon against him; the Kohistan Consensus was of the opinion that he could not sustain himself for more than a few centuries. And a covert undeclared war on someone who didn’t threaten them was an inconceivable breach of their culture’s ethics. No, it had to be someone else. Someone more intimate.

  Rubra reviewed the monitor sub-routines which had been rendered inactive.

  There were seven; six of them were assigned to ordinary descendants, all of them under twenty; as they weren’t yet involved with Magellanic Itg they didn’t require anything more than basic observation to keep an eye on them. But the seventh … Rubra hadn’t bothered to examine him at any time during the last fifteen years of their thirty-year estrangement, his greatest ever failure: Dariat.

  The intimation was profoundly shocking: that somehow Dariat had achieved a degree of control over the habitat routines. But then Dariat had managed to block all Rubra’s attempts to gain access to his mind through affinity ever since that fateful day thirty years ago. Dariat, for all his massive imperfections, was unique.

  Rubra reacted to the revelation by erecting safeguards all around his primary personality pattern; input filters which would scrutinize all the information reaching him for trojan viruses. He wasn’t certain exactly what Dariat was trying to achieve by interfering with the sub-routines, but he knew the man still blamed him for Anastasia Rigel’s death.

  Ultimately Dariat would try to extract his vengeance.

  What remarkable determination. It actually rivalled his own.

  Rubra hadn’t been so stimulated for decades. Maybe he could still negotiate with Dariat; after all, the man was not yet fifty, there was another half century of useful life left in him. And if they couldn’t come to an agreement, well … he could always be cloned. All Rubra needed for that was a single living cell.

  With his mentality as secure as he could make it, he formed a succession of new orders. Again, they were different from anything which existed in the neural strata before; fresh patterns, a modified routing hierarchy, invisible to anyone accustomed to the standard thought routines. The clandestine command went out to every optically sensitive cell, every affinity-capable descendant, every servitor animal: find a match for Dariat’s visual image.

  It took seven minutes. And it wasn’t quite what Rubra was expecting.

  A number of the observation routines on the eighty-fifth floor of the Kandi starscraper had been tampered with. The Kandi was used mainly by the less wholesome of Valisk’s residents, which given the overall content of the population meant that the starscraper was just about the last resort for the real lowlife. It was in the apartment of Anders Bospoort, vice lord and semi-professional rapist, where the greatest anomaly was centred. One of the observation sub-routines had been altered to include a memory segment. Instead of observing the apartment, and feeding the processed image directly into a general event analysis routine it was simply substituting an old visualization of the rooms for the real-time picture.

  Rubra solved the problem by wiping the old routine entirely and replacing it with a viable one. The apartment he was now looking around was a shambles, furniture out of place and smothered by every kind of male and female clothing, plates of half-eaten food discarded at random, empty bottles lying about. High-capacity Kulu Corporation processor blocks and dozens of technical encyclopedia fleks were piled up on the tables—not exactly Bospoort’s usual bedtime material.

  With the restoration of true sight and sound came an olfactory sense; a stiff price to pay: the feculent stink in the apartment was dreadful. The reason for that was simple: Dariat’s obese corpse was lying slumped at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom. There was no sign of foul play, no bruising, no stab wounds, no energy beam charring. Whatever the cause, it had left an appallingly twisted grin scrawled across his chubby face. Rubra couldn’t help but think that Dariat had actually enjoyed dying.

  Dariat was inordinately happy with his new, captive body. He had quite forgotten what it was like to be skinny; to move fast, to slither adroitly between the closing doors of a lift, to be able to wear proper clothes instead of a shabby toga. And youth, of course, that was another advantage. A more vital physique, lean and strong. That Horgan was only fifteen years old was of no consequence, the energistic power made up for everything. He chose the appearance of a twenty-one-year-old, a male in his physical prime, his dark skin smooth and glossy; hair worn thick, long, and jet-black. His clothes were white, simple cotton pantaloons and shirt, thin enough to show off the panther flex of muscles. Nothing as gross-out as Bospoort’s ridiculous macho frame which Ross Nash wore, but he’d certainly drawn the eye of several girls.

  In fact, possession with all its glories was almost enough to make him renege on his task. Almost, but not quite. His agenda remained separate from the others’, for unlike them he wasn’t scared of death, of returning to the beyond. He believed in the spirituality Anastasia had preached, now as never before. The beyond was only part of the mystery of dying; God’s creativity was boundless, of course more continua existed, an after-afterlife.

  He pondered this as he walked with his fellow possessors towards the Tacoul Tavern. The others were all desperately intent on their mission, and so humourless.

  The Tacoul Tavern was a perfect microcosm of life in Valisk. Its once stylish black and silver crystalline interior was a form now abandoned even by designers of retro chic; its food came out of packages where once its cuisine was prepared by chefs in a five-star kitchen; its waitresses were really too old for the short skirts they wore; and its clientele neither questioned nor cared about its inexorable decline. Like most bars it tended to attract one type of customer; in this case it was the starship crews.

  There were a couple dozen people seated at the various rock mushroom tables when Dariat followed Kiera Salter inside. She sauntered over to the bar and ordered a drink for herself. Two men offered to buy it for her. While the charade played out, Dariat chose a table by the door and studied the big room. They’d done well; fiv
e of the drinkers had the telltale indigo eyes of Rubra’s descendants, and all of them wore shipsuits with a silver star on the epaulet: blackhawk captains.

  Dariat concentrated on the observation routines operating in the neural strata behind the tavern’s walls, floor, and ceiling. Abraham, Matkin, and Graci, who also possessed affinity-capable bodies, were doing the same thing; all four of them were sending out a multitude of subversive commands to isolate the room and everything which happened in it from Rubra’s principal personality.

  He had taught them well. It took the foursome barely a minute to corrupt the simple routines, turning the Tacoul Tavern into a perceptual null zone. To complete the act, the muscle membrane door contracted quietly, its grey pumicelike surface becoming an intractable barrier, sealing everyone inside.

  Kiera Salter stood up, dismissing her would-be suitors with a contemptuous gesture. When one of them rose and started to say something, she struck him casually, an openhanded slap across his temple. The blow sent him flailing backwards. He struck the polyp floor hard, yelling with pain. She laughed and blew him a kiss as he dabbed at the blood seeping from his nose. “No chance, lover boy.” The long leather purse in her hand morphed into a pump-action shotgun. She swung it around to point towards the startled patrons, and blew one of the ceiling’s flickering light globes to pieces.

  Everyone ducked as splinters of pearl-white composite rained down.

  Several people were attempting to datavise emergency calls into the room’s net processor. Electronics were the first thing the possessed had disabled.

  “Okay, people,” Kiera announced, with a grossly stressed American twang. “This is a stickup. Don’t nobody move, and shove your valuables in this here sack.”

  Dariat sighed in contempt. It seemed altogether inappropriate that a complete bitch like Kiera should possess the body of such a physically sublime girl as Marie Skibbow. “There’s no need for all this,” he said. “We only came for the blackhawk captains. Let’s just keep focused on that, shall we?”