The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Loren,” he gasped.

  Chapter 15

  After five centuries of astounding technological endeavour and determined economic sacrifice by the Lunar nation, the God of War, Mars, had finally been pacified. The hostile red gleam which had so dominated Earth’s night skies for millennia was extinguished. Now the planet had an atmosphere, complete with vast swirls of white and grey clouds; blooms of vegetation were expanding across the deserts, patches of sepia and dark green vegetation staining the tracts of rust-red soil. To an approaching starship it seemed, at first, almost identical to any other terracompatible planet to be found within the Confederation’s boundaries.

  Disparities became apparent only when the extent of the remaining deserts was revealed, accounting for three-fifths of the surface; and there was a definite sparsity of free water. Although there were thousands of individual crater lakes, Mars had only one major body of water, the Lowell Sea, a gently meandering ribbon which wrapped itself around the equator. Given the scale involved it appeared as though a wide river were flowing constantly around the planet. Closer inspection showed that circumnavigation would be impossible. The Lowell Sea had formed as water collected in the hundreds of large asteroid-impact craters which pocked the planet’s equator in an almost straight line.

  Population, too, was one of the planet’s quirks: a phenomenon which was also visible from orbit, provided you knew what to look for. Anyone searching the nightside for the usual sprawling iridescent patches of light which marked the kind of vigorous human cities normally present after five centuries of colonization would be disappointed; only six major urban areas had sprung up so far. Towns and villages were also present amid the rolling steppes, but in total the number of people living on the surface didn’t exceed three million. Phobos and Deimos were heavily industrialized, providing homes for a further half-million workers and their families. They at least followed a standard development pattern.

  Apart from stage one colony planets in their formative years, Mars had the smallest human population of any world in the Confederation. However, that was where comparisons ended. The Martian technoeconomy was highly developed, providing its citizens with a reasonable standard of living, though nothing like the socioeconomic index enjoyed by Edenists or the Kulu Kingdom.

  One other aspect of mature Confederation societies missing from Mars was a Strategic Defence network. The two asteroid moons were defended, of course; both of them were important SII centres with spaceports boasting a high level of starship traffic. But the planet was left open; there was nothing of any value on its surface to threaten or hold hostage or steal.

  The trillions of fuseodollars poured into the terraforming project were dispersed evenly throughout the new biosphere. Oxygen and geneered plants were not the kinds of targets favoured by pirates. Mars was the most expensive single project ever undertaken by the human race, yet its intrinsic value was effectively zero. Its real value was as the focus of aspirations for a whole nation of exiles, to whom it had become the modern promised land.

  None of this was readily apparent to Louise, Genevieve, and Fletcher as they observed the planet growing in the lounge’s holoscreen. The difference from Norfolk was apparent (Genevieve said Mars looked worn-out rather than brand-new) but none of them knew how to interpret what they were seeing in geotechnical terms. All they cared about was the lack of glowing red cloud.

  “Can you tell if there are any possessed down there?” Louise asked.

  “Alas no, Lady Louise. The planet lies far outside my second sight. All I can feel is the shape of this doughty ship. We could be alone in the universe for all the perception I have.”

  “Don’t say that,” Genevieve said. “We’ve come here to get away from horrible things.”

  “And away from them we certainly are, little one.”

  Genevieve spared a moment from watching the holoscreen to grin at him.

  The voyage had calmed her considerably. With very little to do for any of the passengers during the flight, the novelty of bouncing around in free fall had soon worn off, and she had swiftly learned how to access the flight computer. Furay had brought some old voice-interactive tutorial programs on-line for her, and she had been engrossed ever since with AV recordings of children’s stories, educational files, and games. Genevieve adored the games, spending hours in her cabin, surrounded by a holographic haze, fighting off fantasy creatures, or exploring mythological landscapes, even piloting ships to the galactic core.

  Louise and Fletcher had used the same programs to devour history encyclopedia files, reviewing the major events which had shaped human history since the mid 1800s. Thanks to Norfolk’s restrictive information policies, most of it was as new to her as it was to him. The more she reviewed, the more ignorant she felt. Several times she had been obliged to ask Furay if a particular incident was genuinely true; the information in the Far Realm’s memory was so different from that which she’d been taught. Invariably, the answer was yes; though he always tempered it by saying that no one viewed anything in the same context. “Interpretation through the filters of ideology has always been one of our race’s curses.”

  Even that cushion didn’t make her any happier. The teachers at school hadn’t exactly been lying to her, censorship was hardly practical given the number of starship crews who visited at midsummer; but they’d certainly sheltered her from an awful lot of unsavoury truths.

  Louise ordered the flight computer to show a display of their approach vector. The holoscreen image shifted, showing them the view from the forward sensor clusters overlaid with orange and green graphics. Phobos was falling towards the horizon, a darkened star embedded at the heart of a large scintillating wreath of industrial stations. They watched it expand as the Far Realm matched orbits at a tenth of a gee. Inhabited for over five centuries, it had a weighty history. No other settled asteroid/moon of such a size orbited so close to an inhabited planet. But its proximity made it ideal to provide raw material for the early stages of the terraforming project. Since those days it had reverted primarily to being an SII manufacturing centre and fleet port. The spin imparted to provide gravity within its two biosphere caverns had flung off the last of the surface dust centuries ago. Naked grey-brown rock was all that faced the stars now; large areas had a marbled finish where mining teams had removed protrusions to enhance the symmetry, and both ends had been sheared flat. With its cylindrical shape and vast encrustations of machinery capping each end its genealogy appeared to be midway between ordinary asteroid settlements and an Edenist habitat.

  Captain Layia slotted the starship into the spaceport approach vector which traffic control assigned her, then spent a further twenty minutes datavising the SII fleet operations office, explaining why their scheduled return flight from Norfolk had been delayed.

  “You didn’t mention our passengers then?” Tilia said when the exchange was over.

  “Life is complicated enough right now,” Layia retorted. “Explaining to the operations office why they’re on board, and the financial circumstances, isn’t going to make a good entry on anyone’s record. Agreed?”

  She received a round of apathetic acknowledgements from the other crew members.

  “None of them have passports,” Furay commented. “That might be a problem when we dock.”

  “We could get them to register as refugees,” Endron said. “Under Confederation law the government is obliged to accept them.”

  “The first thing they would have to do is explain how they got here,” Layia said. “Come on, think. We’ve got to off load them somehow, and without any comebacks.”

  “They’re not listed on our manifest,” Tilia said. “So no one’s going to be looking for them. And if the port Inspectorate does decide to give us a customs check we can just move them around the life-support capsules to keep them out of sight of their team. Once our port clearance comes through we can sneak them into the asteroid without any difficulty.”

  “Then what?”

  “They
don’t want to stay here,” Furay said. “They just want to find a ship which will take them to Tranquillity.”

  “You heard traffic control,” Layia said. “All civil flights have ended. The only reason our Defence Command didn’t swarm all over us is because we still have a Confederation Navy flight authorization.”

  “There might not be any flights to Tranquillity from Mars, but if anyone in this system is going there, it’ll be from Earth. Getting them to the O’Neill Halo shouldn’t be too difficult, there are still plenty of inter-orbit flights, and Louise has enough money. She was talking about chartering the entire ship, remember?”

  “That could work,” Layia said. “And if we can acquire some passports for them first, then nobody in the Halo will ask how they got to Mars. From that distance, everything at this end will appear perfectly legitimate.”

  “I might know someone who can fix passports for them,” Tilia volunteered.

  Layia snorted. “Who doesn’t?”

  “He’s not cheap.”

  “Not our problem. All right, we’ll try it. Endron, tell them the way it is. And make certain they cooperate.”

  The Far Realm settled lightly on a docking cradle. Umbilical hoses snaked up to jack into the lower hull. Genevieve watched the operation on the lounge’s holoscreen, fascinated by all the automated machinery.

  “We’d best not tell Daddy we came here, had we?” she said without looking up.

  “Why not?” Louise asked. She was surprised; it was the first time Gen had mentioned either of their parents since they’d left Cricklade. But then, neither have I.

  “Mars has a Communist government. The computer said so. Daddy hates them.”

  “I think you’ll find the Martians are a bit different from the people Daddy’s always moaning about. In any case, he’ll be glad we came here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’ll be glad we got away. The route we travel isn’t really important, just that we get safely to our destination.”

  “Oh. I suppose you’re right.” Her face became solemn for a moment. “What do you think he’s doing right now? Will that nasty knight man be making him do things he doesn’t want to?”

  “Daddy isn’t doing anything for anyone. He’s just stuck inside his own head, that’s all. It’s the same as being in prison. He’ll be thinking a lot, he’s perfectly free to do that.”

  “Really?” Genevieve looked at Fletcher for confirmation.

  “Indeed, little one.”

  “I suppose that’s not so bad then.”

  “I know Daddy,” Louise said. “He’ll be spending the whole time worrying about us. I wish there were some way we could tell him we’re all right.”

  “We can when it’s all over. And Mummy, too. It is going to be all over, isn’t it, Louise?”

  “Yes. It’s going to end; someday, somehow. And when we get to Tranquillity, we can stop running and do whatever we can to help.”

  “Good.” She smiled primly at Fletcher. “I don’t want you to go, though.”

  “Thank you, little one.” He sounded ill at ease.

  Endron came gliding through the ceiling hatch, head first. He twisted neatly around the ladder and touched his feet to a stikpad beside the holoscreen.

  Fletcher kept very still. Now that she knew what to look for, Louise could see how hard he was concentrating. It had taken several days of intense practice for him to learn how to minimise the disruption his energistic effect exerted on nearby electronics. In the end it had paid off; it had been fifty hours since the last time any of the Far Realm’s crew had come flashing through the life-support capsule searching for an elusive glitch in the starship’s systems.

  “We made it home,” Endron started off blithely. “But there is a small problem with your legal status. Mainly the fact you don’t have a passport between you.”

  Louise deliberately avoided glancing at Fletcher. “Is there a Norfolk Embassy here? They may be able to issue us with some documentation.”

  “There will be a legal office to handle Norfolk’s diplomatic affairs, but no actual embassy.”

  “I see.”

  “But you have a solution,” Fletcher said. “That is why you are here, is it not?”

  “We have a proposal,” Endron said edgily. “There is an unorthodox method of acquiring a passport for the three of you; it’s expensive but has the advantage of not involving the authorities.”

  “Is it illegal?” Louise asked.

  “What we have here is this: Myself and the rest of the crew have rather a lot of Norfolk Tears on board which we can sell to our friends, so we really don’t want to draw too much official attention to ourselves right now.”

  “Your government wouldn’t send us back, would they?” Genevieve asked in alarm.

  “No. Nothing like that. It’s just that this way would be easier all around.”

  “We’ll get our passports the way you suggested,” Louise said hurriedly.

  She felt like hugging the genial payload officer; it was exactly what she had been nerving herself up to ask him.

  ***

  Moyo didn’t exactly sleep, there were too many pressures being applied against his mind for that, but he did rest for several hours each night.

  Eben Pavitt’s body wasn’t in the best condition, nor was he in the first flush of youth. Of course, Moyo could use his energistic power to enhance any physical attribute such as strength or agility, but as he stopped concentrating he could feel the enervation biting into his stolen organs.

  Tiredness became an all-over ache.

  After a couple of days he had learned the limits pretty well, and took care to respect them. He was lucky to have obtained this body; it would be the direst of follies to lose it by negligence. Another might not be so easy to come by. The Confederation was larger now than when he had been alive, but the number of souls back in the beyond was also prodigious. There would never be enough bodies to go around.

  The slim blades of light which dawn drove through the loose bamboo blind were an unusually intense crimson. They shifted the bedroom from a familiar collection of grisaille outlines to a strong two-tone portrait of red and impenetrable black. Despite the macabre perspective, Moyo was imbued by a feeling of simple contentment.

  Stephanie stirred on the mattress next to him, then sat up frowning.

  “Your thoughts look indecently happy to me all of a sudden. What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.” He got up and padded over to the window. His fingers pressed the slim tubes of bamboo down. “Ah. Come and look.”

  The sky above Exnall was clotting with wisps of cloud, slowly condensing into a broad disk. And they glowed a muted red. Dawn’s corona was rising up to blend with them. Only in the west was there a dark crescent of night, and that was slowly being squeezed to extinction.

  “The stars will never rise here again,” Moyo said happily.

  There was a power thrumming through the land now, one which he could feel himself responding to, contributing a little of himself towards maintaining the whole. A vast conjunction of will, something he suspected was akin to an Edenist Consensus. Annette Ekelund had won, converting the peninsula to a land where the dead walked free once more. Now two million of them were marrying their energistic power at a subconscious level, bringing about the overriding desire which also dwelt within the latent mind.

  Several shadows flittered across the bottom of the garden where the overhanging boughs granted immunity against the spreading red light. The horticultural mechanoids had long since cranked to a halt, though not before wrecking most of the flower beds and small shrubs. When he opened his mind to the dark area he found several nervous bundles of thought. It was the kids left over from the possession again. He hadn’t been alone in letting one go. Unfortunately the Royal Marines had executed a fast, efficient retreat.

  “Damn. They’re back for the food again.”

  Stephanie sighed. “They’ve had all of the sachets in the kitchen. What else can we
give them?”

  “There are some chickens in one of the houses opposite; we could always cook them and leave the meat out.”

  “Poor little mites. They must be frozen sleeping out there. Could you go and fetch some chickens, please? I’ll get the range cooker hot, we’ll cook them in the oven.”

  “Why bother? We can just turn them straight into roasts.”

  “I’m not convinced about that; and I don’t want them to catch anything from food that hasn’t been cooked properly.”

  “If you just zap the chickens they’ll be cooked properly.”

  “Don’t argue. Just go and get them.” She turned him around and gave him a push. “They’ll need plucking, as well.”

  “All right, I’m going.” He laughed as his clothes formed around him.

  Argument would be pointless. It was one of the things he enjoyed about her. She didn’t have many opinions, but those she did have … “By the way, what are we going to do for food? There’s none left in the bungalow, and people have been helping themselves to the stocks in the stores on Maingreen.” After some experimenting he’d found his energistic power wasn’t quite as omnipotent as he’d first thought. He could cloak anything in an illusion, and if the wish was maintained for long enough the matter underneath would eventually flow into the shape and texture which he was visualizing. But the human body needed to ingest specific proteins and vitamins. A lump of wood that looked, tasted, and smelt like salmon was still just a lump of wood when it was in his stomach. Even with real food he had to be sensible. Once he’d actually thrown up after transforming sachets of bread into chocolate gateau—he hadn’t removed the foil wrapping first.

  “That’s something we can start thinking about later,” she said. “If necessary we can move out of the town and set ourselves up in one of the farms.”

  He didn’t like the idea—he’d lived all his life in cities—but didn’t say anything out loud.