Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “I need to ask you some questions,” Master Faye said. His accent was slightly different to his apprentice’s, suggesting they’d been born far apart. Or it would have, anywhere else. “Where do you come from?”

  Elyria hesitated. If Darius was a normal world, the cover story would have held up perfectly – or at least it would have taken them several months to verify it, during which time she could be extracted from the jail, leaving the locals with nothing more than a mystery. But if there was something wrong with the coins, there might be something wrong with the cover story too. In hindsight, maybe they should have taken more time to survey the planet first, even though they’d never been so exposed before landing on Darius. The whole situation was as unprecedented as the rest of the planet.

  “Athol,” she said, finally.

  “I fear not,” Master Faye said. He started to make more passes in front of her face, chanting in a language that seemed to bear no resemblance to the English-derived language used all over Darius. “Now. Where were you born?”

  Elyria’s mouth opened of its own accord. “Sunrise Ring, Greenland,” she said. She caught herself a moment later. “What?”

  Master Faye gave her an oddly superior smirk, although it was tinged with puzzlement. The words meant nothing to him; Greenland, a world seven thousand light years from Darius, wasn’t even a pinprick in his sky. And the Ring surrounding the planet, playing host to most of the population in that star system, would be utterly beyond his imagination. Elyria took some solace in that, even as she tried to figure out what he’d done to her. The words had just come out of her mouth, completely against her will.

  Joshua leaned forward. “Where is Greenland?”

  Elyria found herself answering his question, only to be greeted with a stare of absolute disbelief. The thought would have been amusing, if it hadn’t been so serious; they thought that she was somehow evading the truth spell, even though it was working perfectly. And they didn’t understand just what a light year was; at Darius’s general level of development, they were probably still convinced that light moved at infinite speed.

  Master Faye scowled down at her, making more passes in front of her face. “What are you doing here?”

  The answer – a full and complete answer – came out of Elyria’s mouth. This time, she felt something prodding at her mind, pushing it to give an answer. It felt rather like the emergency mental pattern scan she’d made back when she had been preparing for her first undercover operation on a primitive world, practising for when they might have had to back themselves up in a hurry. That had felt rather like a Thule mind-ripper. This wasn’t too different at all.

  “I don’t believe it,” Master Faye said, finally. “How can you live without magic?”

  ***

  Joshua was half-inclined to think that his master was right. Elyria had to be messing with them somehow, even though Master Faye’s increasingly frantic checks on the spells compelling her to speak the truth – and pushing her into speaking when she was reluctant to speak – proved that they were working perfectly. Any magician, even an untrained talent, would be able to struggle against the compulsion spell. Elyria seemed to have no defences at all.

  Either that or she’s a vastly more powerful magician than anyone else, he thought, shaking his head as he tried to understand what she’d told them. A society without magic, watching them to determine just how they did what they did? It made no sense. Magic was a universal force, dominating every part of the world... and yet they claimed to come from the sky. There were a handful of eccentrics who claimed that the stars were suns, just like the sun Darius orbited, but they hadn’t really proved anything. He looked at Elyria and shivered. The proof might be right in front of him.

  Master Faye didn’t believe her. In a desperate attempt to prove that she was lying, he was tapping into stronger and stronger compulsion spells, including several he’d told Joshua never to use unless there was no other choice. Some of them risked permanent side effects, from servitude to outright mental damage. He wanted to protest, but he couldn’t find the words. Master Faye’s desperation was alarming.

  “Master,” he said, finally. “She’s telling the truth.”

  His Master fixed him with a gimlet eye. “And how do you know that?”

  Joshua found himself floundering, and then the answer dawned on him. “Because if she was a spy for a Scion, or a Scion herself, she wouldn’t have come up with such an absurd story,” he pointed out. “They’d tell us that her family had found a hidden gold seam, or something believable, not a story that we must consider absurd. The more you poke and prod at her, the more likely it is that you’d identify her true nature.”

  “Scions are not always rational,” Master Faye said, coldly. He looked down at Elyria, dark eyes peering at her face. “And yet, I do not understand how one could come up with such a story.”

  “And there was the spell we did, intended to locate the spies,” Joshua added. “The spell doesn’t work so well if the target is far away. How far away would they be if they came from another star?”

  He found it hard to wrap his head around the concept, but if the stars were suns, just like the one that illuminated Darius, they had to be a very long way away, or the planet would overheat. They’d certainly be further away than anywhere on the planet’s surface – and the spell didn’t work so well when targeted on the other side of the world. No one was quite sure why.

  “And they’re spying on us,” Master Faye said. His gaze sharpened as he addressed Elyria. “Why are you spying on us?”

  Her voice was dulled, the effect of the spells. “We want to learn about how you manipulate the quantum foam,” she said. “We need to learn how to do it for ourselves.”

  Joshua blinked. “The quantum foam?”

  “Magic,” Elyria said. The dull hopelessness in her voice tore at Joshua’s heart. “You call it magic.”

  “We could trade,” Joshua said. He’d known the world was a sphere, but to see it from high overhead... he’d never even dreamed of the possibility. “We could teach you magic in exchange for what you know about the world.”

  “That might require an agreement with the other Pillars,” Master Faye said, before he could get too carried away. “Right now, we have to decide what do with our friend.”

  Joshua looked at Elyria. “What will happen if your friends discover that you’re missing?”

  “They’ll search for me,” Elyria said, still in a dulled voice. “And when they find me, they’ll take me back.”

  “I think we should at least talk to them,” Joshua said. He was still reeling inwardly from discovering that Elyria was over a hundred years old. “They could teach us a great deal.”

  “We could teach them a great deal,” Master Faye said, flatly. “Can you imagine a society without magic?”

  Joshua couldn’t. It was a basic fact of life that those with magic ruled those without. The strong ruled, the weak obeyed. If there was no magic... even the strongest muscle-bound idiot would have problems enforcing his orders outside the range of his fists. Besides, a bow and arrow would cut one down almost effortlessly. Or disease... how could one hope to maintain his rule? None of Elyria’s answers about how her society worked made sense. If everyone was involved in making decisions, how did anything get done?

  And yet the whole idea fascinated him.

  “Take her to a guest room and give her time to freshen up,” Master Faye ordered, finally. “And then we can decide how best to approach our visitors.”

  Joshua would have expected him to be relieved. They might be facing a completely unanticipated problem, but at least a Scion wasn’t about to walk into the city and demand that Master Faye face him in a formal duel. Besides, Elyria had made it clear that their society had no magic. They’d be able to use magic to defend themselves if necessary, with as much ease as Elyria herself had been captured. Master Faye should have been delighted to discover that there was no upstart young magician about to try to unseat him. />
  Instead, he looked worried, as if something else was nagging at him.

  “Yes, Master,” he said. “Perhaps we should just walk up to them and introduce ourselves.”

  He released most of the spells binding Elyria and invited her to walk upstairs in front of him, although the remaining spells would ensure that she couldn’t escape. It was unbelievable that she was over a hundred years old; his older sister was only twenty-five, the mother of four children, and she looked much older. And yet the alternative was believing that truth spells could be so easily deceived.

  This is an opportunity, he told himself firmly, as he opened the guest room. It wasn’t exactly a prison, but anyone who went inside would be under careful observation. We shall make the most of it.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  Dacron was bored.

  Boredom wasn’t really a concept the AIs understood. There was an endless stream of data flowing in through every sensor attached to their Gestalt, which was almost every sensor in the entire Confederation. They could and did tinker with technology in their endless quest for efficiency, simulate entire other realities inside their hyperspace fields or puzzle over the mysterious artefacts left behind by long-gone civilisations as they made the jump into the Sixth Age. And they watched humanity with a mixture of curiosity and amused contempt.

  But Dacron had none of those diversions as he watched Adam bargaining with a handful of merchants. They all wanted the goods Adam was selling and it was childishly simple to get them to bid openly against each other, even though three of them had planned to set up a cartel and freeze the others out. None of it made sense to Dacron; Darius’s society simply wasn’t very efficient, even if it did have magic. They weren’t even capable of taking care of their own population. In the Confederation, no one starved; Darius seemed to have too many people who couldn’t be sure of getting another meal. Why did they have so many children when their lives were so uncertain?

  Their distribution network is primitive, he reminded himself. It was a common pattern; worlds would develop modern transport and suddenly all sorts of luxury goods would become commonplace. Darius simply wasn’t advanced enough to allow easy transport of expensive spices, something that gave Adam a considerable amount of bargaining power. He used it ruthlessly and well; it helped that the simulations had been far tougher.

  Dacron frowned as his implant activated. “We may have a problem,” the AIs said. Normally, they never spoke directly to him if there was any other choice. “Elyria appears to be in trouble.”

  “Oh,” Dacron said, out loud. The merchants glanced at him sharply. As Adam’s apprentice, he had been offered several bribes for inside information. They had to think that he knew more about what his master was planning than anyone else, even his wife and daughters. Dacron subvocalised his next words more carefully. “What’s happening?”

  Adam spoke first. “You seem to be bored,” he said, in a droll sneering tone. “You can go back to your room and attend to your bookkeeping.”

  “Yes, Master,” Dacron said, silently impressed. Adam had just given him an excuse to leave the room – and the spies they’d noted earlier paid less attention to an apprentice. He started to subvocalise again the moment he was out of the inn’s meeting room. “What’s happening?”

  “She went into the library forty minutes ago, after reporting an encounter with a dimensionally transcendent bookstall,” the AIs said. A human would not have detected anything amiss in their tone, but Dacron could tell that they were badly shocked. “Two minutes ago, she was levitated out by the Pillar’s apprentice and the bookstall owner.”

  Dacron blinked in shock. “Levitated?”

  “Yes, as if an antigravity pod was being used,” the AIs said. Given how badly technology fared on Darius, it was unlikely that an antigravity pod would work long enough to be useful. “Elyria also appeared to be completely paralysed. We have no response from her implants at all.”

  “That isn’t good,” Jorlem said, from the base. “Do you know where she is?”

  “She was taken into Master Faye’s house,” the AIs said. “You will know, of course, that it is one of the places we cannot insert snoops.”

  “This is Thor,” the Captain said. “How do you propose... no, first things first. Where is Adana?”

  “Adana is currently purchasing samples of fruit and vegetables,” the AIs said. “So far, she appears to be in no danger, but we have analysed the takings from the snoops and have counted no less than five people watching her.”

  Dacron scowled as he stepped into the room. “Where did they come from?”

  “Three of them seem to work for local merchant factors,” the AIs said. They would have reviewed all of the data collected by the millions of snoops, using it to track the watchers back to their point of origin. “The fourth may be linked to the City Guard; the fifth is of unknown origin. Given his youth, he may simply be attracted to her.”

  “Or that’s what they want you to think,” Jorlem said. His tone darkened. “Can you recall her to the inn?”

  “Of course, but that might tip our hand,” the AIs said. “If we call her back, the timing will not seem coincidental.”

  There was a long pause. “In the absence of Professor Elyria, I am in command of the operation,” Jorlem said. “Order her to make her final purchases and head back to the inn. It should look like a coincidence.”

  He made a throat-clearing noise. “And what, exactly, do we do about Elyria?”

  “We need to find out what happened to her first,” the AIs said. There was a significant pause. “If you’d accepted our proposal for biological spies...”

  Dacron snorted. The AIs had concluded that biological technology was the only technology that worked on Darius’s surface – it had to work, or the effect that caused advanced technology to glitch would have killed the humans on the surface too. Unless it really was under the control of an intelligence with very strange priorities. The AIs had proposed, in all seriousness, designing enhanced birds and insects that would flit around Darius and return to upload their observations into modified computers. There were a number of problems with the scheme, but the greatest one was that it violated the taboo on modifying other forms of life. The Thule had done that, years ago. And the Thule had devastated a third of the galaxy.

  “Even if we had,” Jorlem pointed out tartly, “we would not have them now.”

  The AIs didn’t bother to respond directly. “We have diverted other snoops towards Master Faye’s house,” they said. “If they attempt to move her out of the house, we will know. However, we are unable to put together a plan for recovering her. There are simply too many unknown dangers.”

  Jorlem frowned. “How did they ever find her?”

  “We do not know,” the AIs said. “Elyria is an experienced infiltration agent who went through hundreds of simulations before landing. She would not have made a basic mistake, even without the personality routines within her implants. The only thing she did that might have puzzled the locals was expressing shock over the dimensionally transcendent bookstall.”

  “Hardly grounds for arresting her,” Jorlem pointed out. “Did we slip up, or are we caught up in something that doesn’t involve us?”

  “Dacron, I want you and the others to prepare to leave the city,” Thor ordered, breaking into the debate. “Should they start coming for you, the AIs should be able to warn you in time to escape.”

  “Running would be seen as a confession of guilt,” Jorlem pointed out. “Primitive societies are often very fond of assuming that flight equals guilt, even if the event is nothing more than a coincidence. The team might be better off doing nothing that attracts suspicion.”

  “Except we may already be exposed,” Thor snapped. “One of our members – the team leader, no less – is in local hands. The situation is out of control. Already.”

  He stressed the final word to remind them that he’d opposed going down to the planet so early in the operation. “I wi
ll inform the CSC of the change in status,” he added, “and start making preparations to retrieve Elyria. And then we can decide what to do next.”

  Jorlem had the last word. “Dacron, once Adana returns to the inn I want you to start hunting for Elyria in the streets,” he ordered. “We know where they have taken her – and we don’t want them to know that we know. I’ll call you back to the inn if something else happens.”

  “Understood,” Dacron said. “Let me know if they release her.”

  ***

  Elyria splashed water on her face, trying to come to terms with what had happened. To be caught so easily was humiliating, even though the infiltration teams had strict orders not to fight local law enforcement officials unless there was absolutely no other choice. And to be made to talk... she had no idea what they’d done to make her so truthful, but it had worked perfectly. The Confederation’s infiltration teams had never been so badly exposed before, even when they’d been caught up in the middle of a civil war, and she was the unlucky one who’d been trapped. She’d wanted to be famous. Once the news hit the datanet, she’d be famous for all the wrong reasons.

  She tested her technology again, but it was still dead. Joshua, who seemed to be fascinated by the whole concept of other worlds, had muttered something about security spells, followed by an apology for locking her in the guest room. Compared to the prison cells they’d seen elsewhere on the planet, it was luxury – but it was still a prison. A quick check had revealed that the window was immovable and the door was firmly locked. She could have unpicked the lock at any time, apart from the fact that there were other defences. No doubt trying to walk out of the house would prove impossible.