by Ken MacLeod
Dunt let a quarter of a second drag out before he replied.
Whitten shrugged. In a frame, the gesture was so mechanical it looked parodic.
What the fuck was a sevagram? Dunt disdained to ask. The answer popped up in his internal dictionary anyway. Oh yes, a science fiction allusion. The trouble with Whitten, Dunt had often thought, was that he was a prick.
They glared at each other, their featureless oval heads mutually reflecting.
The others nodded solemnly. Sometimes Dunt wondered about his inner circle. Were they really this stupid, or were they just deferring to him?
Even the inner circle were taken aback. But in the end they came round, as they always did.
Whitten had put up a fiercer resistance at his last challenge, not many kiloseconds earlier. It had come up en route from the battle to the rock, over an issue that at first glance was of lesser moment than peace with the Direction: whether to accept the volunteering of a long-time veteran of the Rax, Harry Newton. True to his transhumanism, Whitten had argued that it made no difference that Newton, in his original life on Earth a thousand years earlier, had been black.
Fo
r Dunt there could be no compromise. Once he’d grasped that, Whitten had backed down. Ever since, Dunt had felt he had Whitten’s measure.
Now Whitten backed down again, but not without a final passive-aggressive plaint:
Dunt flung open his arms.
Dunt had never underestimated the power of baseless confidence. It had got him where he was, and it would get him further. The Infinite Wisdom would see to that.
All the same, it was a pity about the groid.
After all their losses, the New Confederacy could ill afford to turn down even one recruit. Dunt had no reason to doubt that Harry Newton was brave and competent. But needs must. It was all very well saying that race and colour were irrelevant now that they were all little black robots with superhuman minds and abilities. Each such superhuman mind had been derived from a human brain, a product of evolution.
Inevitably, all the deep differences between the races would still be there. Dunt didn’t care to gamble on their irrelevance. No, however much he wished Newton well, the man’s presence would have marred the clean white sheet of the New Confederacy.
Newton’s old nom de plume of “Carver_BSNFH” was itself a giveaway. Back in the day, it hadn’t taken Dunt long to decode the handle’s suffix: the black space Nazi from hell. It showed ambition, and the right attitude, but didn’t ring quite true. Defiant, but deniable—that was the problem: the turned throat, the appeasing grin. Say what you like about the principles of national socialism, they were only principles. In theory they could be endorsed even by a groid, albeit about as convincingly and wholeheartedly as Marxism by a goy.
Dunt had never called himself a Nazi. It wasn’t for any reason of expediency or embarrassment. He thought—and proclaimed—himself a Hitlerite, in the sense that he affirmed the rational core of Hitler’s thinking: the inevitability of struggles for existence, at every level—individual, spiritual, material, national, racial and species, and the celebration of that inevitability as the highest value of the highest authority. It was part of the order of Nature, the rational order of the universe. Hitler had ascribed it to the decrees of God. But it was better to think, as the ancient pagans had, of these laws as in themselves divine than to make even a rhetorical concession to the Abrahamic superstition of a God outside Nature.
The Infinite Wisdom was its laws; or the laws of Nature were the Infinite Wisdom.
Whichever way you put it—the infinite complexity and inflexible necessity of Nature could only be approached with awe.
And if the Infinite Wisdom offered the New Confederacy the chance to be pure from the start, who was Dunt to turn it down?
Pike, following the breadcrumb trail of comms and camera motes into the labyrinth, had left behind him his own trail of larger and more powerful transmitter relay beads. At the end of that line of dots was the local communications hub that bounced messages back and forth between and among the scooters and the frames. Down that line, now, came a call to Dunt.
The salutation was of course redundant—the trooper’s ID flashed up at once in Dunt’s vision—but it counted as a salute. Dunt was keen to distinguish the Rax style from that of the agencies that worked under the Direction, where the largest unit any individual could command was a squad. The only unit in which Dunt allowed that kind of informal relationship was the inner circle.
Dunt ordered the nearest guard squad on the outer surface to send a couple of men to await the freebot’s imminent emergence. Another call pinged. It was from a survey team, five hundred metres into the rock.
Dunt could hardly believe what he was looking at.
The cavity was about a hundred metres long, and twenty metres from floor to ceiling. Even in microgravity, these terms were apt: one side was flatter than the rest and like a factory floor, with rows of identical machinery. The curved walls around it were as if stacked with products, like barrels in a warehouse. Lights speckled surfaces and floated in the near-vacuum all around. Free-moving robots, small on this scale, darted and drifted. Some seemed to supervise the static machinery, others ferried the products to the growing stashes around the sides and up to the ceiling. The products looked like—
Fusion pods. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
Dunt summoned the inner circle and patched the images to them.
