The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  He might have been granted an escape from the beyond, but remaining free was by no means guaranteed.

  The boy whom Moyo held in front of him began to squirm again, crying out in anguish as Ralph Hiltch vanished from sight. His last hope dashed. He was about ten or eleven. The misery and terror whirling inside his head was so strong it was almost contagious.

  His resolution fractured by Hiltch, Moyo began to feel shame at what he was doing. The craving which the lost souls in the beyond set up at the back of his mind was worse than any cold turkey, and it was relentless.

  They wanted what he had, the light and sound and sensation which dwelt so richly in the universe. They promised him fealty forever if he granted it to them. They cajoled. They insisted. They threatened. It would never end. A hundred billion imps of obligation and conscience whispering together were a voice more powerful than his.

  He had no choice. While the living remained unpossessed, they would fight to fling him back into the beyond. While souls dwelt in the beyond they would plague him to be given bodies. The equation was so horrifically simple, the two forces cancelling each other out. Providing he obeyed.

  His rebirth was only a few hours old, and already independent destiny was denied him.

  “Do you see what we can do?” Annette Ekelund shouted at the ranks of her followers. “The Saldanas reduced to bargaining with us, accepting our terms. That’s the power we have now. And the first thing we must do is consolidate it. Everyone who was assigned to a vehicle, I want you ready to leave as soon as the marines withdraw; that should be in a quarter of an hour at the most, so be ready. If we even appear to lack the courage to go through with this, they’ll unleash the SD platforms on us. You felt Hiltch’s thoughts, you know it’s true. Those of you holding a hostage, get them possessed right now. We need all the numbers we can muster. This isn’t going to be easy, but we can capture this whole peninsula within a couple of days. After that we’ll have the power to close the sky for good.”

  Moyo couldn’t help but glance up. Dawn was strengthening above the barbed tree line, thankfully eradicating the stars and their hideous reminder of infinity. But even with daylight colours fermenting across the blackness the vista remained so empty, a void every bit as barren as the beyond.

  Moyo wanted nothing more than to seal it shut, to prevent the emptiness from draining his spirit once again.

  Every mind around him had the same yearning.

  Moans and shouting broke his introspection. The hostages were being dragged back inside the buildings. Nothing had been said about that, there was no prior arrangement. It was as though the possessed shared a communal unease at inflicting the necessary suffering in full view of each other and the low-orbit sensor satellites. Breaking a person’s spirit was as private as sex.

  “Come on,” Moyo said. He picked the boy up effortlessly and went back into the wooden frame bungalow.

  “Mummy!” the boy yelled. “Mummy help.” He started weeping.

  “Hey now, don’t panic,” Moyo said. “I’m not going to hurt you.” It didn’t make any difference. Moyo went straight through into the living room, and opened the big patio doors. There was a lawn at the rear, extending back almost to the harandrid trees which encircled the town. Two horticultural mechanoids roamed anarchically over the trim grass, their mowing blades digging into the loamy soil as if they’d been programmed to plough deep furrows.

  Moyo let go of the boy. “Go on,” he said. “Run. Scoot.”

  Limpid eyes stared up at him, not understanding at all. “But my mummy …”

  “She’s not here anymore. She’s not even her anymore. Now go on. The Royal Marines are out there in the forest. If you’re quick, you’ll find them before they leave. They’ll look after you. Now run.” He made it fiercer than he had to. The boy snatched a quick glance into the living room, then turned and shot off over the lawn.

  Moyo waited to make sure he got through the hedge without any trouble, then went back inside. If it had been an adult he held hostage, there would have been no compunction, but a child … He hadn’t abandoned all of his humanity.

  Through the living-room window he could see vehicles rumbling down the road. It was a strange convoy which Annette Ekelund had mustered; there were modern cars, old models ranging across planets and centuries, mobile museums of military vehicles. Someone had even dreamed up a steam-powered traction engine which slowly clanked and snorted its way along, dripping water from leaky couplings. If he focused his thoughts, he could make out the profile of the actual cars and farm vehicles underneath the fanciful solid mirages.

  There had been a coupe Moyo had always wanted back on Kochi, a combat wasp on wheels, its top speed three times the legal limit; but he never could quite manage to save enough for a deposit. Now though, it could be his for the price of a single thought. The concept depressed him, half of the coupe’s attraction had been rooted in how unobtainable it was.

  He spent a long time behind the window, wishing the procession of would-be conquerors well. He’d promised Annette Ekelund he would help, indeed he’d opened five of Exnall’s residents for possession during the night. But now, contemplating the days which lay ahead, repeating that barbarity ten times an hour, he knew he wouldn’t be able to do it. The boy had proved that to him. He would be a liability to Ekelund and her blitzkrieg coup. Best to stay here and keep the home fires burning. After the campaign, they would need a place to rest.

  Breakfast was … interesting. The thermal induction panel in the kitchen went crazy as soon as he switched it on. So he stared at it, remembering the old range cooker his grandmother had in her house, all brushed black steel and glowing burner grille. When he was young she had produced the most magnificent meals on it, food with a tang and texture he’d never tasted since. The induction panel darkened, its outline expanding; the yellow composite cupboard unit it sat on merged into it—and the stove was there, radiant heat shining out of its grille as the charcoal blocks hissed unobtrusively. Moyo grinned at his achievement, and put the copper kettle on the hot plate. While it started to boil he searched around the remaining cupboards for some food. There were dozens of sachets, modern chemically nutritious food without any hint of originality. He tossed a couple into the iron frying pan, compelling the foil to dissolve, revealing raw eggs and several slices of streaky bacon (with the rind left on as he preferred). It began to sizzle beautifully just as the kettle started to whistle.

  Chilled orange juice, light muesli flakes, bacon, eggs, sausages, kidneys, buttered wholemeal toast with thickly cut marmalade, washed down with cups of English tea—it was almost worth waiting two centuries for.

  After he was finished eating, he tailored Eben Pavitt’s sad casual clothes into the kind of expensive bright blue suit which the richer final year students had worn when he was a university freshman.

  Satisfied, he opened the bungalow’s front door and stepped out into the street.

  There had never been a town like Exnall on Kochi. Moyo found it pleasantly surprising. From the media company shows he had always imagined the Kulu Kingdom planets to have a society even more formal than his own Japanese-ethnic culture. Yet Exnall lacked any sort of disciplined layout. He wandered along its broad streets, sheltered by the lofty harandrids, enjoying what he found, the small shops, gleaming clean cafés, patisseries, and bars, the little parks, attractive houses, the snow-white wooden church with its bright scarlet tile roof.

  Moyo wasn’t alone exploring his new environment. Several hundred people had stayed behind after Annette Ekelund had left. Most of them, like himself, were ambling around, not quite meeting the eye of their fellow citizens. Everyone was party to the same guilty secret: what we did, what was done for us to return our souls into these bodies. The atmosphere was almost one of mourning.

  The strollers were dressed in the clothes of their era and culture, solid citizens all. Those who favoured grotesquerie and mytho-beast appearances had departed with Ekelund.

  He was delighted that s
everal of the cafés were actually open, taken over by possessed proprietors who were industriously imagineering away the modern interiors, replacing them with older, more traditional decors (or in two cases retro-futuristic). Espresso machines gurgled and slurped enthusiastically, the smell of freshly baked bread wafted about. And then there was the doughnut machine. Set up in the window of one café, a beautiful antique contraption of dull polished metal with an enamel manufacturer’s badge on the front, it was a couple of metres long, with a huge funnel at one end, filled with white dough. Raw doughnuts dropped out of a nozzle onto a metal grid conveyer belt which dunked them into a long vat of hot cooking oil where they fizzled away, effervescing golden bubbles until they rose out of the other side a rich brown in colour.

  After that they dropped off the end onto a tray of sugar. The smell they released into the crisp morning air was delectable. Moyo stood with his nose to the glass for a full minute, entranced by the parade of doughnuts trundling past while electric motors hummed and clicked, and the turquoise gas flames played underneath the oil. He had never guessed that anything so wondrously archaic could be found within the Confederation, so simple and so elaborate. He pushed the door open and went in.

  The new proprietor was behind the counter, a balding man with a handkerchief knotted around his neck and wearing a blue and white striped apron. He was wiping the counter’s shiny wooden top with a dishcloth.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said. “And what can I get you?”

  This is ridiculous, Moyo thought, we’re both dead, we’ve been rescued by some weird miracle, and all he’s interested in is what I want to eat. We should be getting to know each other, trying to understand what’s happened, what this means to the universe. Then he sensed the alarm burbling up in the proprietor’s thoughts, the man’s terribly brittle nature.

  “I’ll have one of the doughnuts, of course, they look delicious. And have you got any hot chocolate?”

  The proprietor gave a big smile of relief, sweat was prickling his forehead. “Yes, sir.” He busied himself with the jugs and cups behind the counter.

  “Do you think Ekelund will succeed?”

  “I expect so, sir. She seems to know what she’s doing. I did hear she came from another star. That’s one resourceful lady.”

  “Yes. Where do you come from?”

  “Brugge, sir. Back in the twenty-first century. A fine city it was in those days.”

  “I’m sure.”

  The proprietor put a mug of steaming hot chocolate on the counter along with a doughnut. Now what? Moyo wondered. I haven’t got a clue what kind of coin to conjure up.

  The whole situation was becoming more surreal by the second.

  “I’ll put it on your bill, sir,” the proprietor said.

  “Thank you.” He picked up the mug and plate, glancing around. There were only three other people in the café. A young couple were oblivious to anything but each other. “Mind if I sit here?” he asked the third, a woman in her late twenties, making no attempt to cloak herself in any kind of image. Her head came up to show tear trails smearing chubby pale cheeks.

  “I was just going,” she muttered.

  “Don’t, please.” He sat opposite her. “We ought to talk. I haven’t talked to anyone for centuries.”

  Her eyes looked down at her coffee cup. “I know.”

  “My name’s Moyo.”

  “Stephanie Ash.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Stephanie. I don’t know what I should be saying, half of me is terrified by what’s happened, the other half is elated.”

  “I was murdered,” she whispered. “He … he. He laughed when he did it, every time I screamed it just made him laugh louder. He enjoyed it.” The tears were flowing openly again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My children. I had three children, they were only little, the eldest was six. What kind of life would they have knowing what happened to me? And Mark, my husband, I thought I saw him once, later, much later. He was all broken down and old.”

  “Hey there, it’s over now, finished,” he said softly. “Me, I got hit by a bus. Which is a tricky thing to do in Kochi’s capital city; there are barriers along the roads, and safety systems, all kinds of protective junk. But if you’re real stupid, and loaded, and part of a group that’s daring you to run the road, then you can jump in front of one before its brakes engage. Yeah, real tricky, but I managed it. So what use was my life? No girl, no kids; just Mum and Dad who would have been heartbroken.

  You had something, a family that loved you, kids you can be proud of. You were taken away from them, and that’s a real evil, I’m not saying it isn’t. But look at you now, you still love them after all this time. And I’ll bet wherever they are, they love you. Compared to me, Stephanie, you’re rich. You had it all, the whole life trip.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “No. But then this is a fresh start for all of us, isn’t it? You can’t allow yourself to grieve over the past. There’s too much of it now. If you do that, then you’ll never do anything else.”

  “I know. But it’s going to take time, Moyo. Thank you, anyway. What were you, some kind of social worker?”

  “No. I was at university studying law.”

  “You were young, then?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “I was thirty-two when it happened.”

  Moyo bit into his doughnut, which tasted as good as it looked. He grinned and gave the proprietor an appreciative thumbs up. “I can see I’ll be coming back here.”

  “It seems silly to me,” she confided.

  “Me too. But it’s the way he’s chosen to anchor himself.”

  “Are you sure it was law, and not philosophy?”

  He smiled around the doughnut. “That’s better. Don’t go for the big issues right away, you’ll only get depressed, start small and work along to quantum metaphysics.”

  “You’ve lost me already, when I did work I was just a councillor at the local junior day club. I adored children.”

  “I don’t think you were just anything, Stephanie.”

  She sat back in the chair, toying with the tiny coffee cup. “So what do we do now?”

  “Generally speaking?”

  “We have only just met.”

  “Okay, generally speaking, try and live the life we always wanted to. From now on, every day is going to be a summer’s day you’ve taken off work so that you can go out and do the one thing you’ve always wanted to.”

  “Dance in the Rubix Hotel,” she said quickly. “It had the most beautiful ballroom, the podium was big enough for a whole orchestra, and it looked out over the grounds to a lake. We never went to a function there; Mike always promised he’d take me. I wanted to wear a scarlet gown, with him in a dinner jacket.”

  “Not bad. You’re a romantic, Stephanie.”

  She blushed. “What about you?”

  “Oh, no. Mine are all pretty basic male daydreams. Tropical beaches and girls with perfect figures; that kind of thing.”

  “No, I don’t believe that. There’s more to you than simplistic clichés. And besides, I told you mine.”

  “Well … I suppose there is mountain gliding. It was a rich-kid sport on Kochi. The gliders were made out of linked molecule films, only weighed about five kilos, but they had a wingspan of about twenty-five metres. Then before you could even get in to one you had to have your retinas and cortical processor implants upgraded so that you could actually see air currents, determine their flow speed; the whole X-ray vision trip. That way you’d be able to pick out the wind stream which could carry you to the top.

  “The clubs would set out courses over half a mountain range. I watched a race once. The pilots looked like they were lying in a torpedo-shaped bubble; the linked molecule film is so thin you can’t even see it unless the sun catches it just right. They were skiing on air, Stephanie, and they made it seem like the easiest thing in the world.”

  “I don’t think either of us is going to be living o
ur fantasies for a while.”

  “No. But we will, eventually, when Ekelund takes over Mortonridge. Then we’ll have the power to indulge ourselves.”

  “That woman. God, she frightened me. I had to hold a man hostage while she spoke to the soldier. He was pleading and crying. I had to give him to someone else afterwards. I couldn’t hurt him.”

  “I let mine go altogether.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It was a boy. I think he got to the marines in time to be evacuated. Hope so, anyway.”

  “That was good of you.”

  “Yeah. I had the luxury this time. But if the Saldana Princess sends her troops in here to find us and claw us back, I’ll fight. I’ll do everything I can to stop them from evicting me from this body.”

  “I hear mine,” Stephanie said. “She’s inside me, lonely and afraid. She cries a lot.”

  “My host’s called Eben Pavitt, he rages the whole time. But underneath he’s scared.”

  “They’re as bad as the souls in the beyond. Everyone is making demands on us.”

  “Ignore them. You can do it. Compared to the beyond, this is paradise.”

  “Not really. But it’s a good first step.”

  He finished his chocolate, and smiled. “Do you want to come for a walk, see what our new town is like?”

  “Yes. Thank you, Moyo, I think I would.”

  Chapter 13

  The Confederation Navy Intelligence Service had originally been formed with the intent of infiltrating the black syndicates that produced antimatter, and hunting down their production stations. Since those early days its activities had expanded along with those of the Confederation Navy as a whole. By the time Admiral Lalwani assumed command, one of its principal functions was to monitor, analyse, and assess the deplorable amount of new and ingenious weapons systems manufactured by governments and astroengineering companies across the Confederation, with emphasis on the more clandestine marques. To that end, the designers of the service’s secure weapons technology laboratory complex were given a brief to contain just about any conceivable emergency, from biohazards to outbreaks of nanonic viruses, to small nuclear explosions.