Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  Being vulnerable was a new experience, one she disliked. The enhancements to her body ensured that she couldn’t really feel pain, even if subjected to torture. A primitive mind-ripper should have been deflected by her implants. At worst, if they killed her, she would live again in a clone body, even if she did doubt that there was continuity between one body and the next. Her successor would think she was her, but would she really be her? She pushed the morbid thought aside with a groan. No one questioned continuity until they thought that they were going to die.

  Maybe I should just stay here, she thought, sourly. They’ll never let me near another intervention team for the rest of my life.

  She glanced around the room again, seeking distraction. There was nothing more than a bed, a table with a pair of drawers and a wash basin, complete with a jug of water. The walls were hard stone, without a single picture to brighten the room. It might as well have been a prison cell. Shaking her head, she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. There was nothing else to do and nowhere to go. If her implants failed inside Master Faye’s house – and the snoops still couldn’t get inside – the rest of the team would have problems trying to locate her. They might not even have realised that she’d been captured.

  There was a knock on the door, which opened a moment later to reveal a grim-faced servant. She carried a small plate of food, which she put on the table and then walked away. Joshua stepped inside, carrying his own plate, and gave her an apologetic look. If it had been up to him, Elyria knew, they would have made contact with the infiltration team at once. Joshua saw the opportunities where Master Faye saw the threats.

  We saw these people as primitive, she told herself. Perhaps we should have made open contact from the start.

  “My Master is still thinking about you,” Joshua explained, as the servant left, closing the door behind her. “I think he wants to discuss you with others before coming to any decision.”

  Elyria scowled as she took her plate of food. Wonderful. Normally, any breach of security could be contained, or at least left as nothing more than rumours. If Darius had a magical communications network, the news could be all over the world by now. Any hope of retreating and slipping back into another city-state would be lost. It was a nail in the coffin of their ambitions – and her career.

  She looked up at Joshua. At least she could ask the stupid questions now. “How did you catch me?”

  Joshua grinned. “The minted coins are marked to make it impossible to produce forged coins through magic,” he explained. “Your coins might have been proper gold, but they lacked the mark and the bookseller – the one who arrested you – discovered it. And then he thought that you’d fled and came after you.”

  “A magical mark, I assume,” Elyria said. She rolled her eyes as Joshua nodded. “I think we must have missed that.”

  “You should have slipped in with less money,” Joshua pointed out, snidely. “You might have escaped detection.”

  Elyria nodded, ruefully. It was unusual in primitive societies to have such precise dimensions for coins; they’d assumed that it was a way to prevent counterfeiting, nothing more. Given the local technological level, it was more than enough to make forging coins very difficult. A coin that weighed too much or too little would be easily noticeable on scales that used the same standardised weights. They hadn’t considered that there might be a more cunning trick hidden behind the first.

  We shouldn’t have sent an experienced team, she thought, angrily. The Interventionists were experienced in dealing with primitive planets, too experienced. They’d interpreted everything they’d seen through the lens of their prior experience, rather than starting from scratch. And it had exploded in their faces.

  She took a bite of her food – something that tasted a little like chicken – and looked at him studying her. Joshua seemed to be having problems reconciling her appearance with her declared age; she was old enough to be his great-grandmother, at least. The fact that there were people in the Confederation who could remember the Thule War and the slow integration of various post-scarcity societies into one great society would have stunned him, if he’d thought to ask. His planet couldn’t even imagine someone over three thousand years old.

  “Tell me something,” Joshua said, finally. “How do you live without magic?”

  Elyria hesitated, and then made the decision to be honest. It wasn’t as if she could get in worse trouble. “Through technology,” she said. It took several minutes to explain the concept of technology and, in the end, she suspected that Joshua didn’t fully understand. “How do you live with magic?”

  “I was picked out by Master Faye as his apprentice,” Joshua said, with obvious pride. “It was discovered that I had a talent for magic, so he took me in and taught me.”

  “I see,” Elyria said. “How did he discover that you had magic?”

  “He told me that he sensed my first accidental uses of magic,” Joshua explained. “After that, he gave me the chance to study under him or be banished from the city.”

  “Not much of a choice,” Elyria observed.

  “He didn’t have a choice,” Joshua admitted. “There are places that have been badly damaged by magicians who never learned to control their powers. They go mad, convinced they’re hearing voices telling them to destroy. Or so we are told.”

  Elyria considered it for a long thoughtful moment. Darius’s history had seemed more than a little vague, certainly past the last two hundred years or so. Maybe the development of an organised magic system was a comparatively recent event; previously, magicians had struggled to master their powers, often killing themselves or unwary bystanders. The AIs span off new AI matrixes in sealed cores for the same reason, only allowing them out when it was clear that they were stable and ready to join the Gestalt.

  And voices in a magician’s head suggested telepathy. Could telepathy – which was theoretically possible – and ‘magic’ be interlinked?

  It led back to the open question of just how long Darius had actually been settled. The surface surveys had turned up enough evidence to suggest at least a thousand years, yet there was nothing really conclusive. Sensors that might have detected something more useful simply didn’t work very well on Darius, frustrating the scientists who thought they could find the remains of a colony ship buried under the ground. Or maybe the original settlers had launched the ship into the local star once they were settled on the planet’s surface. It was unlikely that Darius had been settled after the first telepathic alien race had been discovered by the Confederation.

  “Good for him, then,” Elyria said, returning to the subject at hand. “Can... can you demonstrate a little magic for me?”

  Joshua grinned and flexed his fingers, muttering under his breath. A moment later, there was a shimmering wave of light and a small collection of purple and red flowers materialised in his hand. Elyria stared, shaking her head in disbelief. The Confederation could have fabricated the flowers from raw energy, if necessary, but never without a proper fabricator. There was no way a person could do it... but Joshua had. Carefully, she reached out for the flowers and took them in her hand. They felt light and insubstantial, as if they weren’t truly there at all. A solid light projection?

  “How do you do that?” she asked. Making matter from scratch, almost effortlessly? “How long will they remain intact?”

  “Not long,” Joshua admitted. He flushed. “Securing the spell takes a great deal more effort.”

  “Teach me the words,” Elyria said. What if she could use magic? “What did you say?”

  Joshua hesitated. “I really shouldn’t teach you anything until we know what we’re going to be doing in the future,” he said. “I...”

  He broke off, as if he were listening to something only he could hear. “Master Faye has decided to make contact with your people,” he said. He took one last bite of his food and then placed the plate on the dresser. “I think he’s rather relieved.”

  Elyria blinked. “Relieved?”
>
  “He picked up your spies,” Joshua explained. “You worried him badly.”

  Elyria swallowed another curse as she put her plate on top of the dresser and smoothed down her dress. Just how badly had they been exposed before landing? The mission had been screwed up from the start.

  “We really mean you no harm,” she said, and meant it. “We’re here to help.”

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  “You did what?”

  Elyria winced. The moment she’d stepped outside Master Faye’s house, her implants had started working again – and screaming at her, demanding that she report in to explain what had happened to her. Naturally, she’d called Captain Thor and Jorlem and made a complete report. They hadn’t taken it very well.

  “I told them about the Confederation and our mission here,” Elyria said, tiredly. “The locals didn’t give me much choice.”

  She expected them to have some difficulty believing her – and, once they grasped the truth, they would demand that she went under the scanner, both to confirm that she was actually telling the truth and to check that she had suffered no brain damage from the truth spells. And then they’d be furious; the entire mission had been blown wide open. The CSC might order them to back off completely and leave Darius alone for a few hundred years.

  “You are the leader of the operation,” Thor sputtered, finally. The Captain sounded utterly stunned. “You shouldn’t be making any bargains with the locals, let alone revealing our existence.”

  “Our existence was going to be revealed soon anyway,” Elyria pointed out. “We didn’t pick up on the mark all legal coins carried, did we? Sooner or later, we would have been caught, perhaps by someone less sympathetic than Master Faye and Joshua. This way, at least we get some locals who are willing to help us.”

  “In exchange for our help, no doubt,” Thor snapped. “You do know the laws on unregulated technological transfer to primitive cultures?”

  Elyria sighed. There were laws – strict laws – against it, with harsh sentences for those who deliberately broke them. If the CSC found her guilty, she would spend the rest of her life completely isolated from the rest of the Confederation, unless she could convince a jury to allow her some limited contact. It was deliberately intended to be harsh. Unregulated technological transfers could cause chaos.

  “We cannot claim that this society is primitive,” she said. “They can manipulate the quantum foam! How many Fifth Age societies can do that?”

  Thor had no answer. “And this is a wonderful opportunity to study them,” Elyria added, a moment later. “If they help us learn how to duplicate their trick, we might be able to carry out a proper intervention in their society...”

  “Or wind up being destroyed by their... magic,” Thor said. “It is my considered opinion as Captain of the Hamilton that this mission has failed. We should withdraw and consider what we have learned before attempting to sneak back onto Darius.”

  “And that may be impossible,” Elyria said. “Captain, they have a global communications network! This society may look primitive, but it isn’t. We will be unable to return to the planet without being discovered.”

  There was a long pause. “We should not forsake this opportunity,” the AIs said, finally. “It may never occur again.”

  Jorlem chuckled, harshly. “The prize is worth bending a few laws,” he agreed. “We can send an emergency request to the CSC, asking for permission to break them outright.”

  “See to it,” Elyria ordered. The request would be made under her name. Only her career would suffer if it went wrong. “And alert the others at the Inn that we’re coming to meet them.”

  She broke off contact and looked over at Joshua. “I’m afraid they wanted to talk to me,” she said. “I had to take the call.”

  Joshua smiled. “They weren’t happy?”

  “No,” Elyria agreed. “How could you tell?”

  “I know what people look like when they’re exchanging mental communications,” Joshua admitted. “You looked exactly the same. Is that more of your technology?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Elyria said. Mental communications? Magic... or telepathy? Or were they interlinked as she’d assumed? “Can you read thoughts?”

  Joshua gave her an odd look. “No,” he said, finally. “I can only pick up thoughts directed to me by others. There aren’t many magicians who want to talk to a lowly apprentice, so I don’t have much practice...”

  “You’ll have more in the future,” Master Faye growled. He had seemed unhappy ever since they’d left his house, as if there was something about the whole affair that weighed on him. “The other Pillars will expect you to serve as ambassador to these newcomers.”

  Elyria had to smile at Joshua’s expression. From what she’d seen of the world, the whole concept of ambassadors was a little odd. The small states tended to keep themselves to themselves, politically speaking, and rarely waged war on their neighbours. They just didn’t have the resources, or the magic.

  “Like trying to talk to a Scion,” Joshua said. He explained for Elyria’s benefit. “Scions are magicians who don’t have a state to rule. They hide out in the badlands and plot to take over the nearest city-state, before challenging the Pillar in charge. Sometimes, apprentices are sent out to talk with them, to trade for favours.”

  Elyria lifted an eyebrow. “If they saw a magician as powerful as themselves, their first inclination would be to attack,” Master Faye added, grudgingly. “An apprentice poses no threat and can be safely brought into camp.”

  “Not a pleasant task,” Joshua said. There was something dark in his voice, suggesting that the meetings were never fun. “I always hated it.”

  “I always hated it too,” Master Faye admitted. “At least this should be a simpler mission. Lady Elyria and her friends are not going to mess around with your body for fun, or play games with you.”

  Elyria frowned at him as they reached the Golden Arch. Just how much did she really know about Darius?

  ***

  Joshua winced at the memory of a brief meeting with a particularly unpleasant Scion before following Master Faye into the Golden Arch. Elyria had spoken to her friends and convinced them to hire the innkeeper’s best room for the meeting, rather than accept the hospitality of Master Faye’s home. Master Faye could have legitimately taken that as an insult, but he’d said nothing about it. Joshua suspected that he was privately glad to be meeting such strange and powerful newcomers away from home.

  The innkeeper had worked quickly and produced a small table of fresh meat, vegetables and bread for the meeting, along with a small selection of milk and juices. Offering alcohol to Master Faye would have been more than a minor insult, one that the Pillar wouldn’t let pass or people would start thinking that he was weak. The table was larger than he remembered, but the last time he’d been in the inn was when he’d been a child, following his father. There had been no need to go inside first.

  “You can order the listeners to go for a walk,” Master Faye said, to the innkeeper. The reason the Golden Arch was used for outsiders was because they could do very little without being seen, either through peepholes or though the observant senses of the innkeeper’s wife. “This meeting is private.”

  “Of course, My Pillar,” the innkeeper said, with a low bow. The news of the meeting itself would probably be all over town by now, but the actual content of the meeting would remain secret – or so Joshua hoped. Master Faye would take a dim view of anyone caught trying to spy on them. “Should I invite them down now?”

  “Yes,” Master Faye said, flatly.

  The innkeeper bustled away, to return several minutes later with four of the newcomers. One of them immediately ran to Elyria and gave her a hug; the other three took their seats and studied Master Faye with grim attention. Elyria had admitted that the whole operation was supposed to be covert, although their mistakes would have compromised them sooner or later. But their society lacked magic. They probably didn’t understand j
ust how many wrong signals they were sending to any reasonable observer.

  Joshua studied them with more attention than he’d used the last time he’d seen them, only a day ago. They were well-dressed, in the proper style, but something about them wasn’t quite right. It took him a moment to realise that the wife and daughter – and Elyria herself – were being treated as equals, rather than subordinate Minors. They weren’t making an effort to pretend so, he saw; they didn’t even think about it. And Elyria, who looked the youngest, was actually the one in charge! But if she was over a hundred years old, the others might actually be much younger than her.

  “Greetings,” Master Faye said. “I am Faye, Pillar of the Bailiwick of Warlock’s Bane.”

  It was the older man – Adam – who responded. “We greet you in the name of the Confederation,” he said, finally. Why was he, rather than Elyria, taking the lead? Could it be that they thought that Master Faye had done something to Elyria while she’d been his prisoner? “My name is Adam.”

  He took a moment to introduce the rest of his team and then leant forward. “We wish to apologise for approaching you covertly,” he added. His voice was so flat that it was hard to read emotion, but Joshua had the very definite feeling that Adam was unused to apologising for anything. “We believed that maintaining a distance from you and us was better for your society.”

  “And that you couldn’t be caught,” Master Faye said. His tone was equally flat. “What do you want from us?”

  There was a long pause, long enough for Joshua to be certain that they too had their own means of mental communication. “You have the ability to use magic,” Adam said, finally. It tallied with what Elyria had said, although she’d called it something more complicated. “We wish to learn how you do it.”

  “We also wish to study your society,” the younger girl – Adana – said. “Your society is unique; it is the only one we know where magic is prevalent, in a universe full of wonders. We want to know how your society works...”

  Master Faye smiled for the first time. “You could have just asked.”