Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation nd-3

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Dana?

  The Buddhist act of giving, a sacrifice which will allow the dayaka , the giver, a glimpse of a higher state, helping in transforming one’s own mind.

  I see.

  I would be surprised if you did, at least fully. Edenism seems to have shied away from religion, which I admit I did not anticipate. However, our current problem is more immediate. We have established that you live to experience, and that your past is only a memory.

  Yes.

  Can it harm you?

  No,she said proudly, the logical answer.

  You are incorrect. If that were so you would never learn from mistakes.

  I learn from it, yes. But I can’t be hurt by it.

  You can, however, be influenced by it. Very strongly. I believe we are debating how many angels dance on a pinhead, but influence can be harmful.

  I suppose so.

  Let me put it another way. You can be troubled by memories.

  Yes.

  Good. What effect does that have on your life?

  If you are wise, it stops you from repeating mistakes, especially if they are painful ones.

  This is so. We have established, then, that the past can control you, and you cannot control the past, yes?

  Yes.

  What about the future?

  Sir?

  Can the past control the future?

  It can influence it,she said cautiously.

  Through what medium?

  People?

  Good. This is karma. Or what Western civilization referred to as reaping the seeds you have sown. In simpler terms it is fate. Your actions in the present decide your future, and your actions are based on the interpretation of past experiences.

  I see.

  In that respect, what we have in your case is an unfortunate problem.

  We do?

  Yes. However, before we go any further, I would like you to answer a personal question for me. You are seventeen years old; do you now believe in God? Not some primitive concept as a Creator trumpeted by Adamist religions, but perhaps a higher force responsible for ordering the universe? Be honest with me, Syrinx. I will not be angry whatever the answer. Remember, I am probably the most spiritually inclined of all Edenists.

  I believe . . . I think . . . No, I’m afraid that there might not be.

  I will accept that for now. It is a common enough doubt among our kind.

  It is?

  Indeed. Now, I am going to tell you something about yourself in small stages, and I would like you to apply the most rigorous rational analysis to each statement.

  I understand.

  This is a perceptual reality, you have been brought here to help you overcome a problem.he smiled kindly, a gesture of his hand inviting her to continue.

  If I am undergoing some form of treatment it can’t be for physical injuries, I wouldn’t need a perceptual reality for that. I must have had some kind of mental breakdown, and this is my therapy session.even as she said it she could feel her heart rate increase, but the blood quickening in her veins only seemed to make her skin colder.

  Very good. But, Syrinx, you did not have a breakdown, your own thought routines are quite exemplary.

  Then why am I here?

  Why indeed?

  Oh, an outside influence?

  Yes. A most unpleasant experience.

  I’ve been traumatized.

  As I said, your thought routines are impressive. Those of us running your therapy have temporarily blocked your access to your adult memories, thus avoiding contamination of those routines by the trauma. You can, for the moment, think without interference, even though this state does not permit your intellect to function at full capacity.

  Syrinx grinned. I’m actually smarter than this?

  I prefer the term swifter, myself. But what we have is adequate for our purpose.

  The purpose being my therapy. With my adult mind traumatized I wouldn’t listen. I was catatonic?

  Partly; your withdrawal was within what the psychologist called a psychotic loop. Those responsible for hurting you were trying to force you to do something quite abhorrent. You refused, for love’s sake. Edenists everywhere are proud of you for your resistance, yet that obstinacy has led to your current state.

  Syrinx gave a downcast smile, not entirely perturbed. Mother always said I had a stubborn streak.

  She was entirely correct.

  So what must I do now?

  You must face the root of what was done to you. The trauma can be overcome; not instantly, but once you allow yourself to remember what happened without it overwhelming you as it has done until now, then the auxiliary memories and emotions can be dealt with one at a time.

  That’s why you talked about the past, so I can learn to face my memories without the fear, because that’s all they are, memories. Harmless in themselves.

  Excellent. I will now make them available to you.

  She steeled herself, foolish that it was, clenching her stomach muscles and fisting her hands.

  Look at the owl,wing-tsit chong instructed. Tell me its name.

  The owl blinked at her, and half extended its wings. She stared at the flecked pattern of ochre and hazel feathers. They were running like liquid, becoming midnight-blue and purple. “Oenone !” she shouted. Pernik island rushed towards her at a speed which made her grasp the balcony rail in fright.

  Please don’t, Syrinx, Oenone asked. The deluge of misery and longing entwined with that simple request made her eyes brim with tears. Don’t leave me again.

  Never. Never ever ever ever, beloved.her whole body was trembling in reaction to the years of memory yawning open in her mind. And right at the end, the last before stinking darkness had grasped at her, most vivid of all, the dungeon and its torturers.

  Syrinx?

  I’m here,she reassured the voidhawk unsteadily. It’s okay, I’m fine.

  You saved me from them.

  How could I not?

  I love you.

  And I you.

  I was right,wing-tsit chong said.

  When Syrinx raised her head she saw the old man’s face smiling softly, the multiplying wrinkles aging him another decade. Sir?

  To do what I did all those centuries ago. To allow people to see the love and the sourness which lives in all of us. Only then can we come to terms with what we are. You are living proof of that, young Syrinx. I thank you for that. Now open your eyes.

  They are open.

  He sighed theatrically. So pedantic. Then close them.

  Syrinx opened her eyes to look up at a sky-blue ceiling. The dark blobs around the edges of her vision field resolved into three terribly anxious faces bending over her.

  “Hello, Mother,” she said. It was very difficult to talk, and her body felt as though it were wrapped in a shrunken ship-tunic.

  Athene started crying.

  • • •

  There were fifteen holoscreens in the editing suite, arranged in a long line along one wall. All of them were switched on, and the variety of images they displayed was enormous, ranging from a thousand-kilometre altitude view of Amarisk with the red cloud bands mirroring the Juliffe tributary network, to the terrifyingly violent starship battle in orbit above Lalonde; and from Reza Malin’s mercenaries flattening the village of Pamiers, to a flock of overexcited young children charging out of a homestead cabin to greet the arrival of the hovercraft.

  Out of the five people sitting at the editing suite’s table, four of them stared at the screens with the kind of nervous enthusiasm invariably suffered by voyeurs of suffering on a grand scale, where the sheer spectacle of events overcame the agony of any individual casualty. In the middle of her colleagues, Kelly regarded her work with a detachment which was mainly derived from a suppressor program her neural nanonics were running.

  “We can’t cut anything else,” Kate Elvin, the senior news editor, protested.

  “I don’t like it,” said Antonio Whitelocke. He was the head of Collins’s Tranquillity office
, a sixty-year career staffer who had plodded his way to the top from the Politics and Economics division. An excellent choice for Tranquillity, but hardly empathic with young rover reporters like Kelly Tirrel. Her Lalonde report scared him shitless. “You just can’t have a three hour news item.”

  “Grow some bollocks,” Kelly snapped. “Three hours is just dip-in highlights.”

  “Lowlights,” Antonio muttered, glaring at his turbulent new megastar. Her skinhead hairstyle was devastatingly intimidating, and he’d heard all about poor Garfield Lunde. Marketing always complained about the use of non-mainstream image anchors. When he thought of that pretty, feminine young woman who used to present the breakfast round-up just last month he could only worry that one of the possessed had sneaked back from Lalonde after all.

  “The balance is perfect,” Kate said. “We’ve incorporated the fundamentals of the doomed mission, and even managed to end on an upbeat note with the rescue. That was a stroke of sheer brilliance, Kelly.”

  “Well, gee, thanks. I would never have gone with Horst and the mercs back to the homestead unless it made a better report.”

  Kate sailed on serenely through the sarcasm; unlike Antonio she’d been a rover once, which had included a fair share of combat assignments. “This edit will satisfy both our corporate objectives, Antonio. First off, the rumour circuit has been overheating ever since Lady Macbeth came back; Marketing hasn’t even needed to advertise our evening news slot. Everybody in Tranquillity is going to access us tonight—I’ve heard the opposition are just going to run soap repeats while Kelly’s on. And once our audience access they aren’t going to stop. We’re not just giving them sensenviron impressions of a war, we’ve got a whole story to tell them here. That always hooks them. Our advertising premium for this is going to be half a million fuseodollars for a thirty-second slot.”

  “For one show,” Antonio grumbled.

  “More than one, that’s the beauty. Sure, everyone is going to make a flek of tonight. But Kelly brought back over thirty-six hours of her own fleks, and then we’ve got the recordings taken from Lady Macbeth ’s sensors from the moment they emerged in the Lalonde system. We can milk this for a month with specialist angle interviews, documentaries, and current affairs analysis panels. We’ve won the ratings war for the whole goddamn year, and we did it on the cheap.”

  “Cheap! Do you know what we paid that bloody Lagrange Calvert for those sensor recordings?”

  “Cheap,” Kate insisted. “Tonight alone is going to pay for those. And with universal distribution rights we’ll quadruple Collins group profits.”

  “If we can ever get it distributed,” Antonio said.

  “Sure we can. Have you accessed the civil starflight prohibition order? It just prevents docking, not departure. Blackhawks can simply stay inside a planet’s emergence zone and datavise a copy to our local office. We’ll have to pay the captains a little more, but not much, because they’re losing revenue sitting on the endcap ledges. This can work. It’ll be head office seats for us after this.”

  “What, after this?” Kelly said.

  “Come on, Kelly.” Kate squeezed her shoulder. “We know it was rough, we felt it for ourselves. But the quarantine is going to stop the possessed from spreading, and now we’re alert to the problem the security forces can contain them if there is an outbreak. They won on Lalonde because it’s so damn backwards.”

  “Oh, sure.” Kelly was operating on stimulant programs alone now, fatigue toxin antidote humming melodically in her head. “Saving the galaxy is a breeze now we know. Hell, it’s only the dead we’re up against after all.”

  “If you’re not up to this, Kelly, then say so,” Antonio said, then played his mastercard. “We can use another anchor. Kirstie McShane?”

  “That bitch!”

  “So we can go ahead as scheduled, can we?”

  “I want to put in more of Pamiers, and Shaun Wallace. Those are the kind of events which will make people more aware of the situation.”

  “Wallace is depressing, he spent that entire interview telling you that the possessed couldn’t be beaten.”

  “Damn right. Shaun’s vital, he tells us what we really need to know, to face up to the real problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “Death. Everyone’s going to die, Antonio, even you.”

  “No, Kelly, I can’t sanction this sort of slant. It’s as bad as that Tyrathca Sleeping God ceremony you recorded.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you cut that out. Nobody even knew the Tyrathca had a religion before.”

  “Xenoc customs are hardly relevant at a time like this,” he said.

  “Kelly, we can use that Tyrathca segment in a documentary at a later date,” Kate said. “Right now we need to finalize the edit. Christ, you’re on-line in another forty minutes.”

  “You want to keep me sweet, then put in all of Shaun’s interview.”

  “We’ve got half of it,” Antonio said. “All the salient points are covered.”

  “Hardly. Look, we have got to bring home to people what possession is really all about, the meaning behind the act,” Kelly said. “So far all the majority of Confederation citizens have had is this poxy official warning from the Assembly. It’s an abstract, a problem on another planet. People have to learn it’s not that simple, that there’s more to this disaster than simple physical security. We have to deal with the philosophical issues as well.”

  Antonio pressed the palm of his hand onto his brow, wincing.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Kelly asked hotly. Her arm waved at the holoscreens with their damning images. “Didn’t you access any of this? Don’t you understand? We have to get this across to people. I can do that for you. Not Kirstie blowbrain McShane. I was there, I can make it more real for anyone who accesses the report.”

  Antonio looked at the holoscreen which showed Pat Halahan running through the smoky ruins of Pamiers, blasting his bizarre attackers to shreds of gore. “Great. Just what we need.”

  • • •

  This just wasn’t the way Ione had expected it to go. Joshua hadn’t even looked at her bedroom door when they arrived back at the apartment, let alone show any eagerness. There had been times with him when she hadn’t made it to the bed before her skirt was up around her waist.

  Yet somehow she knew this wasn’t entirely due to the traumas of the mission. He was intent and troubled, not frightened. Very unfamiliar territory as far as Joshua was concerned.

  He’d simply had a shower and a light supper, then settled down in her big settee. When she sat beside him she was too uncertain about the reaction to even rest her hand on his arm.

  I wonder if it’s that girl on Norfolk?she asked dubiously.

  He has endured some difficult times,tranquillity answered. You must expect his usual behaviour to be toned down.

  Not like this. I can see he’s been shaken up, but this is more.

  The human mind is constantly maturing. External events dictate the speed of the maturation. If he has begun to think harder for himself because of Lalonde, surely this is no bad thing?

  Depends what you want from him. He was so perfect for me before. So very uncomplicated, the roguish charmer who would never try to claim me.

  I believe you also mentioned something about sex on occasion.

  Yeah, all right, that too. It was great, and completely guilt free. I picked him up, remember? What more could a girl with my kind of responsibilities want? He was someone who was never going to try and interfere with my duties as the Lord of Ruin. Politics simply didn’t interest him.

  A husband would be preferable to a casual lover. Someone who is always there for you.

  You’re my husband.

  You love me, and I love you; it could never be anything else since I gave birth to you. But you are still human, you need a human companion. Look at voidhawk captains, the perfect example of mental symbiosis.

  I know. Maybe I’m just feeling jealous.

  Of the Norfolk girl?
Why? You know how many lovers Joshua has had.

  Not of her.ione looked at joshua’s profile as he stared out of the living room’s big window. Of me. Me a year ago. The old story, you never know what you have until it’s gone.

  He is right next to you. Reach out. I am sure he needs comfort as much as you.

  He’s not there, not anymore. Not my original Joshua. Did you see that flying he did? Gaura’s memory of the Lagrange stunt nearly gave me a heart attack. I never realized just how good a captain he is. How could I ever take that away from him? He lives for space, for flying Lady Mac and what that can give him. Remember that last argument we had before he left for Lalonde? I think he was right. He’s achieved his métier. Flying is sequenced into his genes the way dictatorship is in mine. I can’t take that away from him any more than he could take you away from me.

  I think you may be stretching the metaphor slightly.

  Maybe. We were young, and we had fun, and it was lovely. I’ve got the memories.

  He had fun. You are pregnant. He has responsibilities to the child.

  Does he? I don’t think mothers require a big tough hunter gatherer to support them nowadays. And monogamy becomes progressively more difficult the longer we live. Geneering has done more to change the old till death do us part concept than any social radicalism.

  Doesn’t your child deserve a loving environment?

  My baby will have a loving environment. How can you even question that?

  I do not question your intentions. I am simply pointing out the practicalities of the situation. At the moment you are unable to provide the child with a complete family.

  That’s very reactionary.

  I admit I am arguing on the extreme. I am not a fundamentalist, I simply wish to concentrate your thoughts. Everything else in your life has been planned and accounted for, the child has not. Conception is something you have done all for yourself. I do not wish it to become a mistake. I love you too much for that.