by Neal Aher
“You are obeying your father-captain’s orders, aren’t you, Flute?” I said.
“Zzzzt,” Flute replied.
“Sverl is using us as a probe to gather information, isn’t he?”
“Zzzt.”
Meanwhile there came a crack from over by the door. I glanced over to see that Riss had driven her ovipositor into the wall beside it, had levered the cover off the palm control and was now working inside it with those small limbs usually folded below her hood. It occurred to me that right now Riss probably regretted keeping such an ineffectual body form.
Now more closely linked into my ship’s systems than ever, I felt the hardfields flicking into existence out there and shifting in random patterns. Flute went immediately from passive scanning to active, firing a laser at the sea over that neutrino lensing effect to read vibrations from the surface, probing deep with an X-ray laser for reflections from hardfields or super-dense matter, rattling through other spectrums of EMR to capture whatever lay below. In seconds, in a frame down in one corner of the screen fabric, an image was building, identifiable as a prador destroyer.
“If he wasn’t aware of our presence a moment ago,” I said, “he is now.”
Flute’s response to that was to fire a sensor probe down towards that ocean. I didn’t need any more confirmation: we were Sverl’s sacrificial goat. This Cvorn, who hated the Polity, might be unable to bear such close inspection without making some response, especially as it would be evident to him that the one doing the inspecting was aboard a Polity destroyer. We were either here to lure Cvorn out so Sverl could attack, or merely here to uncover Cvorn’s plans.
Then we were into U-space again—just a brief flicker, in and out. The world was suddenly closer, and next something slammed into us, the screen fabric whiting out, grav fluctuating and something exploding inside the ship. I guessed we had just lost a hardfield projector.
“He’s killed us,” said Riss.
The screen fabric came back on just as our fusion drive fired up, the massive acceleration hardly compensated for by internal grav. I replayed exterior cam views in my mind, saw one of the planet’s moons revolve towards us what looked like a city of weapons inset in a cavity on its surface, and a particle beam lancing out.
ISOBEL SATOMI
Isobel Satomi sat up in her bed and stretched. She felt good, really good, and as she tossed back the heat sheet and swung her legs over the side of the mattress, her mind was utterly clear. This was unexpected, but only in this moment because just prior to it she must have been static data stored in crystal lattices. She remembered that Penny Royal had recorded her to Trent’s sapphire earring, that she had chosen to leave the body of the hooder she had been residing in. But where was that earring now? Who had resurrected her in this familiar virtuality?
She stood up and walked over to gaze at herself in her screen, which was now on its mirror setting. She was beautiful, as she had once been, and she wondered if she would again have to endure the rapid transformation to ugliness prior to her acceptance of her change into a hooder. She ran her fingers through her black hair, down her neck, and down to cup her breasts. This was what she wanted: just to live in this body again. She slid her hands over her flat stomach, ran her fingers down through her pubic hair and probed one finger into her vagina. The feeling was so intense she quickly snatched her hand away, reminded of the times far in the past when she had touched herself like this while standing before some client. She really didn’t want to perform for some voyeur now. Turning away, she walked over to her wardrobe, opened it and took out underwear and pulled it on, then donned tight black trousers, a pink cotton blouse and sandals, then took some time brushing her hair and applying just a little eyeliner, before selecting a couple of skin-stick ear studs—purple diamonds to match her eyes. But what now?
Maybe Trent had decided to bring her back to life? Or maybe the sapphire earring had passed from his ownership long ago. Perhaps some private individual had powered her up and she was now functioning in a time beyond the Polity?
“Okay, I’m ready,” she said out loud.
With an ominous click, her cabin door unlocked. She turned towards it, walked over and stepped out into a corridor that had definitely not been part of the Moray Firth. Here was a big oval tunnel the shape of those found inside prador vessels, only this one had no artificial rock on the walls, no luminous growths and no lice. She turned to the right and began walking, relishing the feeling of walking upright again, like a human, and not scuttling along on numerous limbs with her belly to the floor. Finally, she came to the large diagonally divided door into a captain’s sanctum. The halves of this rolled aside and disappeared into the walls, but within she could see nothing but darkness. She hesitated.
Did the prador fire up human memplants and venture into virtualities? Had her crystal fallen into the claws of those horrors and, if so, what could they possibly want with her? There was only one way to find out. Obviously, whoever controlled this unreal world was giving her some latitude. But that person wanted something from her too, whether that was to torment her or make her run through endless insane scenarios. She had no power to stop it. She walked slowly into the darkness. Under her feet, she felt the floor become uneven, then her sandals crunched on gravel. Ahead of her, a line etched itself into existence and she smelled the sea. The area above the line abruptly grew lighter, picking out deep blue-grey clouds against a pale sky, the glare of a rising sun keeping everything below in dark silhouette.
“Well, this is unexpected,” said a voice.
The bloated red orb of a sun rose rapidly then slowed above the horizon, while below it heaved a violet sea. Directly ahead lay a beach of rough white sand, upon which waves slopped gently. She heard the cry of something that definitely wasn’t a gull. Checking to her left, she saw an arid landscape scattered with occasional rose-shaped pale green succulents growing at the bases of granite rocks, which stretched into haze and distant spiky peaks. To her right this same landscape rose up to a low hill upon which tall ferns clustered like an encroaching army. In front of her, seated on a rock by the shore, was a man. She walked towards him.
“What is unexpected?” she asked.
The man raised his gaze from inspecting his open hands and looked at her. He was blond, his hair short-cropped, and his eyes were blue. He was pretty enough in his way but didn’t bulk very much in his silly patterned shorts and sleeveless top, and was nowhere near the masculine ideal Isobel preferred.
“How it feels to be really human,” he replied, his voice soft and non-threatening. He reached down and picked up a rock, held it tight in his hand then released it.
Isobel thought about his statement and asked, “Are you an AI slumming it in this virtuality as a human?”
“Partially,” he said, grimacing.
“Haiman?”
“Of a sort.”
“What do you want from me?”
Now he looked sad. “I have studied your entire life, Isobel. I know why you became what you became, and the drivers behind your every action. I was fascinated at first but in the process found a growing abhorrence because, in studying the detail and all the interconnections, one comes to understand that the very concept of choice is a false one.”
“I don’t believe in predestination,” Isobel snapped, suddenly angry. “I did make my own choices. I did choose my own path.”
“Predestination,” he repeated, turning his head away. “As evolved creatures we can’t escape it. But as creatures who can alter both our bodies and our minds, we can introduce the random . . .”
“You still haven’t told me what you want or who and what you are.”
He turned back. “I studied your transformation and your dealings with Penny Royal—for they are the ones of most interest to me. I am Father-Captain Sverl.”
Isobel took a step back. As she had departed the system of the Rock Pool, going in pursuit of Penny Royal, impelled by instincts that were suicidal in that situation, and gradu
ally being swallowed by the hooder war mind, Sverl had contacted her. The words they had exchanged had been few and inconsequential, but the communication on other levels had been vast. He had displayed his mind to her in all its alien glory, its ongoing distortion and its hungry need for . . . something. He had wanted her. He had wanted . . . mental exchanges. And this had terrified her.
“If you have full knowledge of our encounters, you have what you wanted from me, then,” she managed.
“In all but some final details, I do have that information. But it has provided none of the answers I sought. Our only common ground is that we are the victims of Penny Royal. And we have both undergone—and, in my case, am still undergoing—transformation. However, you and I are still very different creatures, Isobel.”
“No shit,” she said. “I’m a human being and you’re a psychotic crab.”
“I was,” Sverl replied, again peering at his hands, “but at this moment I am human—a lesser being, just one third of my whole.”
“Why am I here now?” Isobel asked.
He looked up. “Those final details I mentioned. I have seen everything but those last moments. Your crystal takes me only as far as your intent to kill Thorvald Spear. It takes me to the moment the Weaver seized control of you. Or rather, it commandeered the war mind of which you had become an insignificant portion.”
“But I remember the rest.”
“So you do, but the rest is caught in a time crystal I cannot access. In a manner yet opaque to me, Penny Royal has made that portion of your existence accessible only with your permission. I therefore must assume that it is the portion most important to me.”
Isobel fought to overcome her fear but even as she did so, she felt something dark and huge loom behind this harmless-looking man. She stepped over and seated herself on a rock just a few paces in front of him, reached down and picked up a sea-smoothed flat green pebble and brushed away the grit. She sat upright and hurled it hard and low at the sea. It skipped over the water and, with satisfaction, she counted four bounces. Then, as if Sverl just wanted to remind her who was in control, when she knew it ought to fall into the water the pebble skipped again and again, endlessly across the sea, out towards the bloated sun.
“Then I have something to bargain with,” she said.
“Yes, in a sense you do,” he replied, “but lest you forget, my bargaining position is a stronger one. Please don’t force me to resort to threats, Isobel.”
Yes, he controlled this virtuality, he controlled her. He could put her through an eternity of torment, while only a brief span of time passed for him.
“I want to live,” she said.
“Of course you do, but that is not my choice,” said Sverl. “I have been allowed to activate you by the one who owns you.” Sverl pointed over her shoulder and she turned. Trent Sobel stood there, gazing out to sea.
“Trent!”
He turned and looked at her, reached up to finger that damned earring of his, shook his head dismissively and just faded out of existence. The knowledge dropped easily into her mind. Penny Royal had put her in that earring of his, but here Trent had just been a ghost, an illustration—not real.
“He told me that one day he might resurrect you, Isobel, if he can ever find it in his heart to forgive you.”
Isobel felt suddenly tired and unwell. She reached up to touch her face and felt a hollow forming in her cheek bone.
Not again.
As she sat there, she became certain that a blood-red eye would open in that developing pit and knew in agonizing detail everything that would ensue. She could be forced to relive her transformation by Penny Royal over and over again. She picked up another stone, a small one, and realized after a moment that it was a purple sapphire, but polished smooth, not faceted. She knew Sverl was manipulating both her virtual form and her mind, subtly impelling her to make the response he sought, and she remembered how he could be much more unsubtle.
“Take the damned memories,” she said, and tossed the gem to the man before her.
He snatched it out of the air. “Thank you, Isobel.”
She looked aside, now feeling at once alienated from her identity and yet deeply connected to it too.
“The problem was separating you from what you’d become, so intricately bound were the two,” said a voice she recognized but didn’t want to name to herself. It continued, “The Weaver supplied the answer for its own benefit: change what you were becoming, then make the new being reject the old. Thereafter the only remaining problem was to find the line of division. It was perfect, and restored some balance on Masada too.”
Manipulators were now sprouting out down each side of her extended face. Horror filled her, and this time it wasn’t blunted by a growing hooder psyche; by the predator melding with her own predatory instincts. It wasn’t ameliorated by her knowledge that to survive, she must accept the changes she was undergoing. Everything that had screamed in her when Penny Royal had changed the course of her transformation was screaming again . . . or was that still screaming? Had it ever stopped?
On the shore, Isobel reached up to touch her face again. The eye pit was gone and it was again perfect, but it didn’t feel real. None of this was real anyway; it was just data, moving.
“The war machine left you behind,” said Penny Royal. Yes, it was the AI talking to her, the AI she had supposedly killed.
“I don’t understand,” Isobel managed, her voice horribly distorted by her changing mouth. “Why . . . you do this?” she tried, but knew it was not a question but a plea for mercy.
“I must unravel my past back to its beginning, and it’s to the beginning I will go next,” the black AI replied cryptically. “That is, when all is done here and events ordered and set on their course to conclusion.”
It stopped there. Isobel felt a huge surge of excitement but knew that it wasn’t her own. Momentarily, she glimpsed a flash of something completely out of sync with her current “reality.” She saw a human skull walking on metal legs in some strange garden. Trent Sobel sat on a small stool there, fingering his earlobe, while in his other hand he held a long needle.
“Why!” she shrieked.
“You wanted to tear your enemies apart, and I provided the tools,” said the AI. “That was wrong of me. I have now taken all your tools away from you: your war machine body, your ships, your people, your power, and now only you remain.”
Isobel wailed.
“And now you have a small chance to again be what you once were.”
Isobel’s wail died and the world snapped around her. A shadow passed and aboard this ersatz version of the Moray Firth. Isobel turned, feeling good, to gaze at her screen mirror. She was beautiful again, her mind whole, all her memories accessible.
“How can that be possible?” she asked.
“All you need to do,” Penny Royal replied, “is let go.”
“You mean die.”
“You reside in me now, Isobel, and now it’s time for you to leave.”
“You promise—I have another chance?” Isobel asked, suddenly, unutterably weary.
“I always keep my promises,” said Penny Royal.
“Thank you, Isobel,” Sverl the human repeated. He was now just a disembodied voice, his human form banished with the view of the sea.
“So I was just a messenger,” she replied. “Not even that—just the message’s container, a way to bring Penny Royal’s words to you.”
“An important one.”
“A cipher, a piece of data, a clue.”
“Perhaps it’s not finished for you yet,” Sverl suggested. “Trent Sobel seeks to redeem himself, and he might revive you in the process.”
“There is nothing left for me,” she replied. “I just want to go away now. He can keep me in his damned earring for all eternity. I don’t care.”
“Sleep, then,” said Sverl.
Blackness descended.
THE BROCKLE
The old Polity destroyer—a heavily armoured bulk
a mile long—ejected an escape pod. The pod, just a cone-shaped re-entry capsule, tumbled in vacuum for a while as if to orient itself, then fired up a chemical drive to bring it in towards the detectors and defences about the Tyburn. After deep scanning it, they allowed it through. The Brockle meanwhile kept a mental finger on the switch to initiate the Tyburn’s thoroughly modernized U-space drive. If the detectors out there picked up the slightest non-standard U-signature from the destroyer, which probably meant the launching of a U-jump missile, the Tyburn would be gone, shedding U-field disruptor mines in its wake, and the Brockle’s agreed imprisonment would be over.
Ever since its arrival, there had been no response from the destroyer’s controlling AI to the Brockle’s queries, and it had not used a shuttle to send its prisoners. This particular AI wanted nothing to do with the Brockle—like so many Polity AIs, it saw the Brockle as the mad relative locked in the attic—and, turning its ship away, obviously wanted to leave as quickly as possible. However, just before it dropped into U-space a data package did arrive.
The Brockle opened the package with care. It was unlikely that a simple ship AI could have designed an effective informational attack against an AI like the Brockle, but that did not discount it having brought one from elsewhere. The ship AI had supplied all the requested data. The Brockle had wanted all the technical data the AI could provide about its ship because it was from the same era as Penny Royal’s Puling Child, now renamed the Lance, and of the same design. Now absorbing the package, the Brockle learned very little of use—it illuminated nothing about the black AI’s past, nor how it had turned into what it now was. Perhaps the destroyer’s prisoners would provide more useful information on Penny Royal.
The escape pod was now heading in towards the space doors, automatically tracked by a gigawatt laser, signalling ahead for permission to dock. The Brockle gave it, evacuating the hold and setting the space doors to open, also shutting down grav on the dock floor. The pod finally drifted in, adjusting with puffs of compressed air to swing upright and settle. The Brockle re-engaged grav to bring it down firmly. It was in now, and would be going nowhere.
