Reality Dysfunction - Expansion nd-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The curtains were drawn, casting a rich yellow light throughout the room. There was a small figure lying on the bed wearing a long navy-blue dress, legs tucked up. She didn’t appear starved, or even hungry. Her dress was as clean as though it had just been washed.

  “Hello, Freya,” Horst said softly. Then he looked at her fully, and even more of the savannah’s warmth was drained from his skin.

  Freya raised her head lazily, brushing her shoulder-length hair from her face. “Father Horst, thank you so much for taking me in. It’s so kind of you.”

  Horst’s muscles froze the welcoming smile on his face. She was one of them! A possessed. Below the healthy deeply tanned skin lay a wizened sickly child, the dark dress hid a stained adult’s T-shirt. The two images overlapped each other, jumping in and out of focus. They were enormously difficult to distinguish, obscured by a covering veil which she drew over his mind as well as his eyes. Reality was repugnant, he didn’t want to see, didn’t want truth. A headache ignited three centimetres behind his temple.

  “All are welcome here, Freya,” he said with immense effort. “You must have had a terrible time these last weeks.”

  “I did, it was horrible. Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t speak to me. I hid in the jungle for ages and ages. There were berries and things to eat. But they were always cold. And I sometimes heard a sayce. It was really scary.”

  “Well, there are no sayce around here, and we have plenty of hot food.” He walked along the side of the bed towards the dresser below the window, every footfall magnified to a strident thump in the still room. The noise of the children outside had perished. There was just the two of them now.

  “Father?” she called.

  “What do you want here?” he whispered tightly, his back towards her. He was afraid to pull the curtains open, afraid there might be nothing outside.

  “It is a kindness.” Her voice was deepening, becoming a morbid atonality. “There is no place for you on this world any more. Not as you are. You must change, become as us. The children will come to you one at a time when you call. They trust you.”

  “A trust that will never be betrayed.” He turned round, Bible in hand. The leather-bound book his mother had given him when he became a novice; it even had a little inscription she had written in the cover, the black ink fading to a watery blue down the decades.

  Freya gave him a slightly surprised look, then sneered. “Oh, poor Father! Do you need your crutch so badly? Or do you hide from true life behind your belief?”

  “Holy Father, Lord of Heaven and the mortal world, in humility and obedience, I do ask Your aid in this act of sanctification, through Jesus Christ who walked among us to know our failings, grant me Your blessing in my task,” Horst incanted. It was so long ago since he had read the litany in the Unified prayer-book; and never before had he spoken the words, not in an age of science and universal knowledge, living in an arcology of crumbling concrete and gleaming composite. Even the Church questioned their need: they were a relic of the days when faith and paganism were still as one. But now they shone like the sun in his mind.

  Freya’s contempt descended into shock. “What?” She flung her legs off the bed.

  “My Lord God, look upon Your servant Freya Chester, fallen to this unclean spirit, and permit her cleansing; in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Horst made the sign of the cross above the furious little girl.

  “Stop it, you old fool. You think I fear that, your blind faith?” Her control over her form was slipping. The healthy clean image flickered on and off like a faulty light, exposing the frail malnourished child underneath.

  “I beseech You to grant me Your strength, O Lord; so that her soul may be saved from damnation.”

  The Bible burst into flames. Horst groaned as the heat gnawed at his hand. He dropped it to the floor where it sputtered close to the leg of the bed. His hand was agony, as though it was dipped in boiling oil.

  Freya’s face was screwed up in determination, great rubberlike folds of skin distorting her pretty features almost beyond recognition. “Fuck you, priest.” The obscenity seemed ludicrous coming from a child. “I’ll burn your mind out of your skull. I’ll cook your brain in its own blood.” Her possessed shape shimmered again. The lame Freya below was choking.

  Horst clutched at his crucifix with his good hand. “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I order you, servant of Lucifer, to be gone from this girl. Return to the formless nothing where you belong.”

  Freya let out a piercing shriek. “How did you know!”

  “Begone from this world. There is no place in the sight of God for those who would dwell in Evil.”

  “How, priest?” Her head turned from side to side, neck muscles straining as though she was fighting some invisible force. “Tell me . . .”

  Heat was building along Horst’s spine. He was sweating profusely, frightened she really would burn him. It was like the worst case of sunburn he had ever known, as though his skin was splitting open. His clothes would catch fire soon, he was sure.

  He thrust the crucifix towards the girl. “Freya Chester, come forth, come into the light and the glory of our Lord.”

  And Freya Chester was solidly before him, thin sunken face racked by pain, spittle on her chin. Her mouth was working, struggling around complex words. Terror pounced from her black eyes.

  “Come, Freya!” Horst shouted jubilantly. “Come forth, there is nothing to fear. The Lord awaits.”

  “Father.” Her voice was tragically frail. She coughed, spewing out a meagre spray of saliva and stomach juices. “Father, help.”

  “In God we trust, to deliver us from evil. We seek Your justice, knowing we are not worthy. We drink of Your blood, and eat of Your flesh so we may share in Your glory. Yet we are but the dust from which You made us. Guide us from our errors, Lord, for in ignorance and sin we know not what we do. And we ask for Your holy protection.”

  For one last supremely lucid moment the demon possessor returned. Freya glared at him with a ferocity which withered his resolution by its sheer malice.

  “I won’t forget you,” she ground out between her curled lips. “Never in all eternity will I forget you, priest.”

  Unseen hands scrabbled at his throat, tiny fingers, like an infant’s. Blood emerged from the grazes sharp nails left around his Adam’s apple. He held the crucifix on high, defiant that Christ’s symbol would triumph.

  Freya let out a last bellow of rage. Then the demon spirit was gone in a blast of noxious arctic air which blew Horst backwards. Neatly stacked piles of food packets went tumbling over, the bedlinen took flight, loose articles stampeded off the dresser and table. There was a bang like a castle door slamming in the face of an invading army.

  Freya, the real Freya, all crusty sores, ragged clothes, and bony famined figure, was stretched out on the bed, emitting quiet gurgles from her chapped mouth. She started to cry.

  Horst clambered to his feet, hanging on to the edge of the bed for support. He drew a gasping breath, his body aching inside and out, as though he had swum an ocean.

  Jay and a troop of frantic children rushed in, shouting in a confused babble.

  “It’s all right,” he told them, dabbing at the scratch marks on his throat. “Everything’s all right now.”

  When Jay awoke the next morning she was surprised to see she had overslept. She hardly ever did that, the few minutes alone to herself at the start of each morning were among the most precious of the day. But it had to be dawn. A pale tinge of hoary light was creeping into the cabin’s main room around the reed blinds. The other children were all still sound asleep. She quickly pulled on her shorts, boots, and an adult-sized shirt she had altered to something approximating her own size, and slipped quietly out of the door. Thirty seconds later she ran back in shouting for Father Horst at the top of her voice.

  Far above the lonely savannah cabin, the long vivid contrails of thirteen starship fusion drives formed a cosmic mandala across the black pre-dawn s
ky.

  Chapter 06

  Lewis Sinclair had been born in 2059. He lived in Messopia, one of the first purpose-built industrial/accommodation/leisure complexes to be constructed on Spain’s Mediterranean coast; a cheerless mathematical warren of concrete, glass, and plastic which covered five square kilometres and sheltered ninety thousand people against the ferocious armada storms which were beginning to plague Earth. It was a heavily subsidized experiment by the European Federal Parliament, by that time desperate to tackle the cancerous underclass problem thrown up by the continent’s eighty-five million unemployed. Messopia was a qualified success; its medium-scale engineering industries provided only a minimal return for investors, but it provided a foretaste of the huge arcologies which in the centuries to come would house, protect, and employ Earth’s dangerously expanded population.

  His path through life was never going to be anything other than troublesome; born to low-income parents, who were only in the new microcosm city because of the parliamentary law requiring a socially balanced population. There was no real niche for him in an enterprise geared so resolutely towards the middle-class job/family/home ethic. He played truant from school, turned to crime, drugs, violence. A textbook delinquent, one of thousands who ran through Messopia’s architecturally bankrupt corridors and malls.

  It could have been different, if the education system had caught him early enough, if he had had the strength to hold out against peer pressure, if Messopia’s technocrat designers had been less contemptuous of the social sciences. The opportunities existed. Lewis Sinclair lived in an age of quite profound technological and economic progress, and never really knew it, let alone shared in it. The first batches of asteroid-mined metal were starting to supplement depleted planetary reserves; biotechnology was finally living up to its initial promise; crude examples of the affinity bond were being demonstrated; more and more non-polluting fusion plants were coming on-stream as the supplies of He3 mined from Jupiter’s atmosphere increased. But none of it reached down to his level of society. He died in 2076, seventeen years old; one year after the bitek habitat Eden was germinated in orbit around Jupiter, and one year before the New Kong asteroid settlement began its FTL stardrive research project. His death was as wasteful as his life, a fight with power-blade knives in a piss-puddled subterranean warehouse, him and his opponent both high on synthetic crack. The fight was over a thirteen-year-old girl they both wanted to pimp.

  He lost, the power blade chopping through his ribs to slice his stomach into two unequal portions.

  And Lewis Sinclair made the same discovery as every human eventually made. Death was not the end of being. In the centuries that followed, spent as a virtually powerless astral entity suspended in dimensional emptiness, perceiving and envying mortals in their rich physical existence, he simply wished it were so.

  But now Lewis Sinclair had returned. He wore a body again, weeping for joy at such simple magnificence as raindrops falling on his upturned face. He wasn’t going to go back into the deprivation which lay after physical life, not ever. And he had the power to see that it was so; him and all the others, acting in combination, they were supreme badasses.

  There was more to him than before, more than the strength which flesh and blood provided. Part of his soul was still back there in the terrible empty gulf; he hadn’t emerged fully into life, not yet. He was trapped like a butterfly unable to complete the transformation from dirt-bound pupa to wing-free ephemeral. Often he felt as though the body he had possessed was simply a biological sensor mechanism, a mole’s head peeking out from the earth, feeding sensations back to his feeling-starved soul via an incorporeal umbilical cord. Strange energistic vortices swirled around the dimensional twist where the two continua intermingled, kinking reality. The bizarre effect was usable, bending to his will. He could alter physical structures, sculpt energy, even prise open further links back into the extrinsic universe. His mastery of this power was increasing gradually, but its wild fluxes and resonances caused havoc in cybernetic machinery and electronic processor blocks around him.

  So he watched through the spaceplane’s narrow curving windscreen as the Yaku (now operating under a forged registration) dwindled against the sharp-etched stars, and felt his new muscles relaxing below the seat webbing. The spaceplane systems were an order of magnitude simpler than the Yaku ’s, and critical malfunctions were highly unlikely now. Starflight was a disturbing business, so very technical. His dependency on the machines which his very presence disrupted was unnerving. With some luck he would never have to venture across the interstellar gulf again. He and his five colleagues riding down to the surface would be sufficient to conquer this unsuspecting world, turning it into a haven for other souls. Together they would make it their own.

  “Retro burn in five seconds,” Walter Harman said.

  “OK,” Lewis said. He concentrated hard, feeling round a chorus of distant voices with the peculiar cell cluster in this body’s brain. We’re coming down now,he told pernik Island.

  I look forward to your arrival,the island personality replied.

  The affinity voice sounded clear and loud in his mind. Bitek functioned almost flawlessly despite the energistic turmoil boiling around his cells. It was one reason for selecting this particular planet.

  The manoeuvring rockets at the rear of the little spaceplane fired briefly, pushing him down into the angle of the seat. The conditioning grille above his head was emitting an annoyingly loud whine as the fan motor spun out of control. His fingers tightened their grip on the armrests.

  Walter Harman claimed to have been a spaceplane pilot back in the 2280s, serving in the Kulu Navy. As only three of them had even been in space before, his right to pilot the spaceplane went unchallenged. The body he used belonged to one of Yaku ’s crew, possessed within minutes of Lewis boarding the starship. It was equipped with neural nanonics, which unlike bitek proved almost useless in the constant exposure to the hostile energistic environment a possession generated, so Walter Harman had activated the spaceplane’s manual-control system, an ergonomic joystick which deployed from the console in front of the pilot’s seat. A projection pillar showed trajectory graphics and systems information, updating constantly as he muttered instructions to the flight computer.

  The spaceplane rolled, and Lewis saw the mass of the planet slide round the windscreen. They were over the terminator now, heading into the penumbra.

  Night was always their best time, putting mortal humans at a disadvantage, adding to their own potency. Something about the darkness embraced their nature.

  The spaceplane shook gently as the upper atmosphere began to strike the heatshield belly. Walter Harman pitched them up at a slight angle, and swung the wings out a few degrees, beginning the long aerobrake glide downwards.

  They were still in the darkness when they dropped below subsonic. Lewis could see a hemispherical bauble of light glinting on the horizon ahead.

  “Your approach is on the beam,” the island personality informed them over the microwave channel. “Please land on pad eighteen.” A purple and yellow flight vector diagram appeared on the console’s holoscreen.

  “Acknowledged, Pernik,” Walter Harman said. A three-dimensional simulacrum of the island materialized inside Lewis’s skull, an image far sharper than the porno holographs he used to peddle back in Messopia. He automatically knew which pad eighteen was. A burst of doubt and anxiety blossomed in his mind, which he did his best to prevent from leaking back down the affinity bond to the island personality. This Edenist consensual set-up was so smooth. He worried that they might be taking on more than they could reasonably expect to accomplish.

  The island personality had accepted his explanation that he was representing his merchant family enterprise from Jospool. Not every Edenist used the voidhawks to carry freight, there simply weren’t enough to go round.

  Lewis studied the mental simulacrum. Pad eighteen was close to the rim and the floating quays, there would be machinery there. It would be e
asy.

  Pernik’s coating of moss made the two-kilometre disk a black hole in the faintly phosphorescent ocean. Pale yellow radiance shone from a few windows in the accommodation towers, and floodlights illuminated all the quays. It was 4 a.m. local time, most of the inhabitants were asleep.

  Walter Harman set the spaceplane down on pad eighteen with only a minor wobble.

  Welcome to Pernik,the personality said formally.

  Thank you,lewis replied.

  Eysk is approaching. His family runs one of our premier fishing enterprises. He should be able to fill your requirements.

  Excellent,lewis said. My thanks again for receiving me so promptly. I have spent weeks on that Adamist starship; it was becoming somewhat claustrophobic.

  I understand.

  Lewis wasn’t sure, but he thought there was a mild dose of puzzlement in the personality’s tone. Too late now, though, they were down. Excitement was spilling into his blood. His part of the scheme was by far the most important.

  The airlock opened with a couple of jerky motions as the actuators suffered power surges. Lewis went down the aluminium stairs.

  Eysk was walking across the polyp apron towards pad eighteen. A ridge of electrophorescent cells circling the pad were casting an austere light over the spaceplane. Lewis could see very little of the island beyond; there was one accommodation tower forming a slender black rectangle against the night sky, and the sound of waves sloshing against the rim came from the other side of the spaceplane.

  “Keep him busy,” Lewis ordered Walter Harman as the pilot followed him down the stairs.

  “No problem, I’ve got a thousand dumb questions lined up. Atlantis hadn’t been discovered when I was alive.”