Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  Vess nodded. It was called the Cloud Deck for a reason – even its very elevation was enough to ensure that clouds rolling down off the mountains could shroud it in minutes, but as well as that the vast bulk of water in the Great Basin somewhere below it created its own inversions. When it was almost full, as now, warm wet air rising from it met cool evening air from the mountains to make a sudden, short-lived layer of thick billowing mist that reduced visibility to an arm’s length.

  Or-Shls was watching him, looking half amused, half quizzical. Vess glanced away for a second, then shrugged to himself. Sometimes the simplest question was best.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  When the mist had come down Or-Shls had let his lenses slide away. Now he touched their runners and they flicked back. He blinked, then reached into the folds of his blouse and pulled out a thing like a round pebble with a spout. He put the spout in his mouth; there was a hissing noise, and then Or-Shls was blowing out a cloud of smoke that curled and melded with the mist. He did it again and then said, ‘When?’

  Vess felt a twitch of annoyance. He kept his voice level. ‘I was in … one place. Now I’m here.’

  Or-Shls shook his head. ‘I’m surprised,’ he said. ‘Did it not occur to you that one of those places was not real?’

  Vess stared at him for a moment. Then he felt his shoulders drooping. ‘Oh. I see. You are telling me that the – chamber was virtual?’

  Or-Shls smiled. ‘Are you recovered?’

  ‘I suppose. If it was virtual, perhaps there was less to recover from than I thought.’ He took a pace forward and stopped. Without looking at Or-Shls he said, ‘But what happened?’

  From behind him came the hissing, and the smell of the smoke jabbed at his palate.

  Then Or-Shls said, ‘You were implicated in an act of terrorism. Not by me, I should add. I don’t know exactly how you came to be involved; you may have made enemies as well as friends while you were in the Hive. I can tell you that the act itself was mine.’

  ‘You? Why?’

  ‘A pretext. Everything is, in the end. I needed to take certain decisions quickly, and the process of Board approval was becoming obstructive.’

  ‘Board approval? Oh …’ Vess stared into the mist for a moment. ‘So you have bypassed the Board?’

  ‘Yes. A State of Emergency and immediate executive powers, a rational response to an act of terror and assassination.’

  ‘So why was I put –’ He hesitated. ‘– in that chamber?’

  ‘It would have looked strange if you were not. I acted quickly, by the way – you were in there for only a few real minutes. It was not my desire to see you tortured to insanity, and given your considerable durability that would certainly have been your destination.’

  The smell of smoke was making Vess feel sick. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Does that mean that the Board no longer wishes to kill me?’

  There was a grating, wheezing rumble. For a moment Vess thought they had been joined by some strange animal, but then he realized that Or-Shls was laughing.

  ‘Did Vut tell you that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, our friends Vut are no longer, um, extant, and you should treat anything they said with caution. The wishes of the Board are less relevant than they used to be.’ He paused, and added in exactly the same tone of voice, ‘Of course, that may change.’

  Vess felt his lip twitching. He wanted very much to ask what had happened to Vut. Instead he said, ‘Of course. What will happen now?’

  ‘To you? Perhaps a medal. Perhaps death … I am not sure. Over the coming days you will be debriefed, and then we will see. There is a job you could do … Meanwhile there is someone I would like you to meet. Again, I should add. Ah – I think the mist is clearing.’

  It was. It cleared downwards; as Vess watched the sky above him it shifted from a featureless, softly luminescent grey to a troubled skyscape of high-built clouds with patches of turquoise between them. The guard rails of the walkway extended themselves from a few metres to a curving sweep along the edge of the Deck. And below him – he shifted his feet uneasily.

  Below him – a hundred metres directly below him, visible through the pierced metal floor of the walkway – the vast, almost overflowing ladle of the boat lift had slipped its catches and was dropping away from the Middle Basin.

  The depth and the movement added to his faint sickness. He shook his head. ‘You said there was someone you would like me to meet?’

  ‘I did. Follow me, if you can?’

  For a moment Vess didn’t understand. Then he smiled. ‘I may be surprised by heights, Chairman, but I’m not afraid of them.’

  ‘Indeed not. Nor apparently of pain, but insects trouble you greatly. And, who knows, perhaps there are other things? Ah … here we are.’

  Much of the walkway was over thin air. For those areas, slender bridges spanned the distance to solid ground every fifty metres or so. They had arrived at one of them and Or-Shls turned along it and padded towards the Deck. Vess followed him, his feet alert for any sign of the other man’s bulk troubling the walkway. There was none. Well built, then.

  Then they were on the Deck, and Or-Shls gestured landward. ‘Here you are.’

  Vess followed the gesture. At first there was nothing to see. Patches of mist still hung between them and the low bulk of the main house, fifty metres or so away. Then he felt a slight breeze chase past him and the last of the mist dipped and curled away like smoke.

  It took Vess a moment to process the sight. Then he felt his skin prickle.

  There were two men, dressed in the drab uniforms of the Board Pickets. The bulges at their hips and shoulders told him they were fully armed, something he had rarely seen, but even more unusual was the fact that they seemed to be leading a child, who in turn was carrying something held out in front of her. He looked again and corrected himself; not held. The thing, which was about the size of the girl’s head, was floating. And she wasn’t being led; the Pickets’ hands were clamped on her shoulders. And she was …

  Vess’s sickness had receded when they had left the walkway. Now it was back. He turned to Or-Shls. ‘Why?’

  The fat man shrugged. ‘Call it a gesture. Or a legacy, if you like – a gift from me to you. One in which you were instrumental, as I’m sure you realize.’

  Vess shook his head. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

  ‘Well, you were. You have been – still are – intensely monitored. You emerged from your first experience of the Mind Stack emotionally drained, with your body chemistry showing signs of major trauma, but you were alive, and that made you unique. So much so that our young friend over there was unwise enough to remark on it. That, plus your obvious attachment to her, suggested an idea.’

  Our young friend. Vess was still not ready to face that. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘You survived whatever happened to you in the Stack. I believe Vut asked you about it, and you said nothing. Following your extraction from the Hive you still said nothing even under considerable pressure.’

  ‘I still had nothing to say.’

  ‘And I still don’t believe you, which presents me with a choice. The easy option would have been to kill you.’

  ‘But you haven’t.’

  ‘Evidently. Therefore I have chosen another path. As I said, I may have a job for you. And you seem to be avoiding a certain subject.’

  There was nothing to say. From the corner of his vision Vess could see that the two guards and their captive were still walking towards them. It wasn’t the subject he was avoiding, he knew. It was the sight. Or, more truly, the eyes.

  For a second he thought he would turn away completely, for ever. The bridge back to the walkway was still close – if he sprinted he doubted Or-Shls could do anything about it. He imagined himself vaulting the guard rail, throwing himself well clear of any safety devices, and soaring down. His body would be found smeared over the floor of the empty Great Basin.

  He let himself imagine
it for a little longer. Then he sighed and turned the other way instead, to face the two Pickets and the girl between them. As he did so one of them pushed her forwards. She took a couple of steps and stopped, looking down. He saw her fingers tighten on the surface of the pod. Then she looked up at him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Hello, Dimollss.’ Then he turned back to Or-Shls. ‘Why?’ he asked again.

  The man shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  Vess said nothing. After a moment, Or-Shls grinned. ‘Very well. To punish, to begin with. You, mainly. Physical pain seems not to bother you, but this obviously does. And, I think there’s at least one thing that will bother you worse, but I’ll tell you about that in a while.’ So far he seemed hardly to have looked at the girl and her guards. Now he glanced at them and waved them away. ‘Remove that, please. I’ll tell you when it’s wanted again.’

  The Pickets reached for Dimollss’s shoulders but she had already turned and was walking back towards the house. Vess watched until they had gone into the house. Then he looked at Or-Shls. ‘Do you think that’s going to make me more cooperative?’

  The fat man laughed. ‘More? You weren’t cooperating at all in the first place. I wouldn’t expect that to change. No, Vess, I’ve thought of something much better: alignment of interests. You didn’t survive as long as you have without understanding that. Come along.’

  Or-Shls’s main house was curved nearly into a semicircle. The outside of the curve faced the grounds and the walkway; the inner formed one end of an enclosed garden that Vess assumed extended to the boundary of the estate. Assumed, because the boundary was hidden by trees: copses of conifers and palms and broad-leafs and a few strange-looking things that seemed to be upside-down – tall fronded stems with multiple root-struts reaching out sideways and then angling sharply into the ground.

  Vess had heard about the place, although he had never visited it. Had never wanted to, if he was honest. People of his rank who arrived here tended to do so on terms that weren’t theirs to write.

  And here he was. Somewhere, a part of him was angry. More than angry – but he knew how to keep it separate, like a lunatic in a locked room. He turned to Or-Shls. ‘Are we expecting anyone else?’

  ‘Yes. Do you like my trees?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well done. Do you know, sometimes I am almost inclined to trust you? Over here, in the Pump Trees.’

  From outside the copse looked impenetrable. Inside, it was hollow – a ring of dense woodland with a circle of stone seats in the clearing at its centre.

  Or-Shls waved him towards a seat, but Vess didn’t move. Or-Shls shrugged and took a place at the opposite end of the circle, giving a fuff of expelled breath as he sat. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Just one to go.’ He paused and looked around. ‘Gamer? Are you with us?’

  There was a quick rustle from overhead. Vess looked up in time to see something flicker across the tree canopy, and then Clo Fiffithiss dropped into the clearing, landing in a ball of legs and immediately popping itself upright.

  ‘Good. Let’s begin. This is the securest space on the planet, so we have a certain freedom here. Vess, we’re going on the offensive, against the external forces who are strangling us.’

  Vess laughed. ‘You can’t! They stole all the legacy ships, remember? You have nothing to offend with.’

  ‘In the first place, why do you think I can’t steal them back? And in the second, who said I was only going to use our own ships?’

  Something about the tone calmed Vess, but it was a chilly calm. He looked down at Clo Fiffithiss. ‘You know something about this, I assume?’

  ‘I know all about it.’ The tone was deadpan. ‘No one else does.’

  ‘And I don’t, yet. Before you tell me that, tell me something else. Why should I have a role? Because you’ve got me here for a reason. Alignment of interests – what interests?’

  Clo Fiffithiss said nothing. Or-Shls reached up and touched something behind his ear. The lenses slid round and clicked into place in front of his eyes. In the dim light of the copse Vess saw pinpoints of light flicking over their surfaces; Or-Shls seemed to focus on them for a moment. Then he nodded and the lenses slipped away again. ‘What do you know about our friends Vut?’

  Vess shrugged. ‘You said they are not extant.’

  ‘Apart from that.’

  Vess shook his head.

  ‘Nothing, I take that to mean. Very well. A biology lesson. Gamer, if you will?’

  Clo Fiffithiss hadn’t moved from its upright position. Now it spread its lower limbs and dropped into a crouch, its body suspended in a cradle of legs. It was a position Vess had never seen before; it was at the same time the most relaxed and the most dangerous he had ever seen the Gamer adopt.

  He shivered.

  Clo Fiffithiss was quite still for a second. Then it was gone. There was no sound this time. Have you ever Hunted, thought Vess.

  He had time to draw five breaths before it was back. One of its forelimbs was off the ground, and there was something at the end of it – a tiny bundle of something. Or-Shls reached down and took a fist-sized container out from under his seat. ‘In here, please.’

  Clo Fiffithiss dropped the little thing into the container. Or-Shls clapped a lid on to it and shook it. Then he flicked his lenses round and glared at it for a few seconds. ‘Suitably dead, I think,’ he said. ‘Catch.’

  He threw the container across the clearing. Vess caught it awkwardly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Vut’s ancestor, courtesy of the Gamer. They live wild in this copse. Take a look.’

  The light was poor. Vess raised the container and held it close to his face. Then he froze.

  He had never seen one of Vut’s components close up but this was like, and unlike, what he would have imagined – a body that looked stubby at first, until you realized that it was actually a short, slim form bulked out by layered bristles which partly hid six three-jointed legs. He assumed the bristles pointed towards the back; if that was right then there was something at the front that looked a bit more complicated than a mouth. It looked almost like a miniature flower with petals wrapped in a tight spiral. It was smaller than the Vut equivalent – he could have fitted several on the palm of his hand.

  He threw the container back to Or-Shls. ‘So what?’

  ‘It has an interesting life cycle. Stage one is a grub. Stage two is what you see here. Stage three I can best show you as an image. A moment …’

  Or-Shls reached under his seat again and brought out a small holo lamp. He tossed it into the middle of the circle. It landed, righted itself and pointed a narrow thread of light upwards. The light spread into a screen.

  It was showing a translucent scan of a human torso, with the flesh as a ghostly pink strung over white bones. The organs were darker shades of red, and the heart, frozen mid-beat, was almost purple.

  Vess looked from the image to Or-Shls. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Look closely. Start at the base of the spine.’ The voice was quiet.

  Vess shrugged and turned back to the image.

  There was something – he leaned in closer. Then his stomach jumped.

  There was a dark lump just to the left of the base of the spine. From it, a sinuous thread, almost black, twined up the spinal column almost as far as the neck. Every few centimetres it branched, throwing out lateral threads that curled around the ribs like a climbing plant. Each of the threads ended in something maybe a centimetre long, if the scale was right, but far slimmer.

  The lump would be a bit bigger than the insect-thing in the jar.

  He felt the blood drain from his face.

  Or-Shls spoke in the same quiet voice. ‘It’s elegant, isn’t it? The Stage Two form burrows into a host. It secretes an anaesthetic – the host doesn’t feel a thing. Then it grows that rather beautiful structure. The long threads are called the tap-root and the things at the end of it are grubs, obviously. At maturity the original invader dies an
d decomposes. The flesh around it becomes infected with pus, of course, which sends a chemical signal up the tap-root to activate the grubs. They tear themselves loose from the tap-root and eat their way out of the host.’ He paused. ‘The bit from the decomposition onwards isn’t painless, of course. Rather the opposite. From invasion to decomposition takes an unpredictable length of time – anywhere between five and around fifty days. It was once used as a form of torture. Infect someone, then promise them the infection would be removed if they were cooperative.’

  Vess felt his gorge rising. He swallowed. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Sometimes. The only problem is that with the original, you can’t remove the thing without killing the host, so they all died anyway.’ Or-Shls stared at nothing for a while. ‘Cruel times, Vess. Cruel times.’

  The urge to throw up was stronger now. Vess stared at the image. The quality was excellent; he could see a fine, irregular line zigzagging across one of the ribs low down on the right-hand side. His hand went reflexively to his own side and he swallowed. ‘When I was eight, someone hit …’ he began, and then started again. ‘When I was eight I broke a rib.’

  ‘Yes. And there it is.’ Or-Shls waved at the image. ‘You’re right; that’s you. I should probably have said at the start. And, obviously, the rest is a gift from our friends Vut.’

  Vess threw up.

  He spent most of the next couple of days walking in the forested parts of Or-Shls’s estate. Often he was alone – or felt himself alone; there was no way of being sure – but sometimes he took Clo Fiffithiss with him. The being was perfectly adapted to the trees. Occasionally, often without explanation, it would disappear for anything from a few seconds to a few minutes and then flit back to pick up the conversation as if nothing had happened. Once or twice Vess thought there were traces of blood, or fur, around its mandibles. He realized he had never asked what the being ate.