by Neal Asher
‘It’s yours,’ Cheller replied.
Jonas peered more closely. It looked like the platform he had bought and left here when he departed, but now old, with new rails and equipment. He put a finger up to the Chimetech augmentation behind his ear and turned it on with a touch. Third-eye vision gave him thousands of screen options and virtuality if he so chose, but with an inner mental touch he found the link to the platform and confirmed it was his.
‘Another not so subtle attempt to make me feel welcome,’ he said.
As they reached the platform and Cheller opened the gate, the Golem enquired, ‘Will you be staying?’
‘The reasons I left haven’t really changed, have they?’ He reached up and touched his aug, turning it off. He didn’t want access to the informational world to interfere with his experience of this place after so long away. Perhaps being here could make him feel something… real.
‘Those being?’
‘Well, Shardel, having made no further inroads into The Gabble, is no longer here and is unlikely to return…’
He remembered her frustration in trying to understand the nonsense language – if it could even be called a language – spoken by the gabbleducks of this world. The creatures – duck-billed things bearing some resemblance to a by-blow of a giant caterpillar and a bear, but with rather too many legs, had proven to be the devolved descendants of one of the ancient and arguably extinct ancient races – the atheter. Here on Masada, which had been identified with certainty as their home world, they lived like animals. But like mynah birds they spoke the phonetics and words of the Anglic of the inhabitants but jumbled up and without real meaning. Shardel, like millions of linguists across the Polity, had tried to find some meaning in it but ultimately her frustration drove her away. She had been his lover.
‘Shardel’s presence or otherwise is not the reason you left,’ said Cheller as they climbed onto the platform. ‘You stayed here for a further four years after she went.’
‘I had learned all I could about the hooders. It was time to move on.’
‘I disagree.’ Cheller moved over to the lectern and punched a control. The platform vibrated through Jonas’s feet. ‘There is still a great deal we can learn from them.’
Jonas felt a flash of annoyance, immediately followed by gratitude for the emotion. This was old ground and an old argument. His instinct was not to run with it, but the frustration that had driven him away rose up again. And any emotion being a rarity with him nowadays, he exercised it.
‘I studied hooders for ten years. I detailed everything about their physiognomy, genetics and habits, and even tracked down the evolutionary changes they had undergone over the two million years since they were… decommissioned.’ He considered saying more, but the frustrated anger guttered out like flame starved of oxygen.
‘There is still more to do,’ said Cheller, trying to probe the wound.
The platform rose up into the air and Jonas looked back at the tagreb. At the centre sat one dome while four more sat on the ‘petals’ of the thing that had folded out when it first landed. Foamstone had been injected underneath to protect the research station from the depredations of tricones in the muddy soil of Masada; that had been extended and now other buildings clustered around it. He wasn’t sure why, since personnel numbers were now way down from what they had been in his day. The thing gleamed with lights in the twilight – a small constellation in the darkness of this world.
They slid over the bushy growths of spring flute grasses, paths crushed down by ATVs from the tagreb. A moment later they passed over the outside fence and he watched a proton cannon, on one of the guard towers, briefly track their progress.
‘I studied hooders,’ Jonas continued, trying to feed the flame. ‘I found out that they, like the atheter, were devolved – deliberately devolved. They were once biomech war machines the atheter used, but were taken back to being animals with their one kink, which is to destroy completely the remains of a gabbleduck should it die – such did the atheter loath themselves. It was mine, and Shardel’s, discoveries that led to the accepted theory that the atheter committed a weird kind of racial suicide.’
‘All true,’ Cheller agreed.
‘I completely elucidated those parts of the hooder genome that are artefacts – remaining components of their war machine past, like that producing their armour, that producing their feeding apparatus, the superconductivity, the remnants of structure made to take grown devices.’ He felt the comforting warmth of anger and looked at Cheller carefully, but knew he would not read anything there the Golem did not want him to read. ‘It was me who also discovered the quantum storage crystals in that genome that might well contain their original genomic schematics.’
‘Original is a rather debatable term.’
Distraction, but Jonas continued to push. ‘Ah, you’re talking about the theory that they were supposedly natural organisms before they were turned into biomechs. I suppose I should not have used the term “devolved”. They were converted to animals to fit into the ecology here. That they were devolved to some original animal form is moot.’
‘But still worthy of study.’ Cheller looked round.
‘Yes, still worthy of study, but not by me.’ Emotion began sighing out of him.
‘Because the AIs won’t let you study those quantum crystals or the data they contain?’
‘Precisely.’
In the end it was that. Being one of the Polity’s leading taxonomists he had been given freedom to study whatever he wanted on Masada. He had chosen the hooders and done his job to the best of his abilities. He remembered the excitement of it all – the steady sketching out of a picture of the past. He remembered that excitement peaking when he discovered the quantum storage crystals in the genome, and his disappointment when he chose a new direction for his research and made requests for new analytical equipment to delve into those crystals, and the tagreb AI simply said no.
‘Dangerous technology,’ said Cheller. ‘The AIs wanted to assess it first.’
‘Yes, because humans like me are infants who must not be allowed dangerous toys.’
Cheller nodded and remained silent. Colour had begun to leach into the world and then the sun broke over the horizon with a mauve flash. Jonas could now see the rainbow colours of the flute grass flowers. A light wind sent the grasses rippling but Jonas only caught a hint of a mournful wail. Towards the end of the Masadan year the grasses would shed those flowered side shoots that presently gave them their bushy appearance and the central stems would dry. Holes, from the side shoots into those hollow stems, would have them singing the tunes from which their name had arisen. Now there was no music.
‘But neither Shardel’s absence nor your being unable to study all you want are why you won’t stay,’ said Cheller.
Jonas shrugged. ‘You know I have reached a certain age.’
‘One hundred and seventy two years,’ Cheller agreed. ‘Ennui.’
Jonas had never thought it would happen to him. His life was too interesting and he had enough to study in the universe for a thousand years, but it seemed he was not as unique as he thought. Ennui, or the ennui barrier, was a life stage many Polity citizens had to go through: a time when they had seen everything, when all patterns matched those from before, when life became simply too boring, emotional responses arid, and when the desperate search for novelty, for the new, began. Many didn’t get through that barrier because their search often led to lethal pursuits as in desperation they put aside everything, including sensible risk aversion.
‘So tell me about the hooder,’ he said abruptly, uncomfortable with this subject.
‘Of course you know that they normally take prey every couple of weeks. Their activity is tracked so I soon noticed this one feeding voraciously and paid closer attention to it,’ said Cheller, as if the previous conversation had not taken place. ‘It was taking prey every day and when I put a scanning drone on it I detected massive internal c
hanges – it was packing resources separately into each of its segments. When it lost its first leg I sent you that message.’
‘Exactly as predicted.’
‘Exactly as you predicted.’
‘Quite,’ said Jonas, pretty sure this was all part of the buttering up process. ‘And how do things stand now?’
‘I did send you imagery,’ Cheller noted.
Yes, the Golem did – regularly updated. But Jonas wanted to talk about this hooder now rather than try to elicit a response in himself to previous bitterness. Even so, he raised his hand to his aug, hesitated then lowered it. Not yet.
Cheller quickly continued when Jonas did not reply. ‘The creature has lost further legs and is beginning to undergo division. It ceased hunting yesterday and, judging by the internal changes, it won’t be much longer.’
Jonas nodded and surveyed his surroundings. Over to the right the mountains reared in a pinkish haze while in the flute grasses to his left he could see a heroyne striding along looking for mud snakes. Below, muddy channels cut through the grasses, still quite wet and gleaming like spilled mercury. Peering ahead he awaited his first sight of the hooder, since it wasn’t that far from the tagreb. Instead he first saw a derrick standing in the grasses.
‘I had a couple of locals transport that out with aerofans yesterday evening when it became apparent the creature wasn’t going anywhere,’ said Cheller. ‘I don’t know how long we’ll have to wait…’
Of course: the platform had a limited power supply and they could not hang in the air for longer than half a day.
As they drew closer to the derrick, Jonas spotted the long and slightly coiled dark form in the grasses. He felt a brief stab of excitement at his first actual sight of one of the creatures after so long, but as ever it waned. The thing was about two hundred feet long, its body only slightly slimmer than the monorail train he had travelled on a few days previously. It bore some resemblance to the spine of a terran vertebrate but with centipede legs protruding. Cheller brought the platform in over the derrick, which lay only a hundred feet from the creature, then hesitated.
Those legs shifted and, in doing so, revealed some missing while others fell away even as Jonas watched. Its front end – a spoon-shaped armoured head cupping the ground and resembling the body of a horseshoe crab – jerked to one side and then rose up. Fifty feet in the air it still faced away from them, but then it turned to reveal the nightmarish underside. Here rows of limbs like glass sickles pulsed in rhythmic waves either side of the upright slot of its mouth. Vertical rows of red eyes on both sides of the mouth and in from its feeding utensils, shone from within its shadowed cowl. Cheller had been right not to land the platform just yet. But then, as if the effort had been too much, the hood dropped down again. The creature writhed briefly as if in pain, then slumped. Cheller landed the platform with a clunk.
‘The signs of division are much more noticeable now,’ said Jonas.
He found comfort in being analytical – the machine of his mind just running and its engine action drowning out the reality of his condition. He concentrated on the creature. The hooders he had seen in the wild, though they resembled animal spines, had a smooth continuity. The body segments of this one now had gaps revealing yellowish flesh and they were leaking clear fluid. The thing in fact more resembled the drowned corpse of the one Jonas had studied to come to his conclusions. He stepped over to a device attached to the rail, quickly familiarising himself again with the controls. The wide front disc of the scanner used lased EMR across the spectrum and picked up radiations bounced back by various materials, and by ultra and infrasound pulses the lasers generated within the body. He turned on the screen, expecting little detail because hooder bodies were notoriously opaque to this kind of scan, and, just as before, that was the case.
‘Some overall loosening of structure,’ he commented.
‘I can give you a lot more detail than that,’ said Cheller.
Jonas looked round at him.
The Golem continued, ‘This is such a rare occurrence – the first we’ve seen since the Polity took over here – so we could not let it go unrecorded.’
‘How?’ Jonas asked.
‘We’ve been sinking scanners in the ground wherever it located itself and have attached a five-thousand pinhead array to its body.’
Jonas could not really object to that so nodded and turned on his aug again. Inner vision presented the double link to him. One was for the scanning and the other to include Cheller if he so wished. He initiated both and took control of the scan data, putting an overlay on the hooder
The scanning sketched out detail with options on depth and opacity. He linked it to blink control and secondary focus. The hooder shimmered briefly then its armour seemed to dissolve to reveal the internal organism he had become so familiar with. All was still in motion, however, so that was novel.
‘I should have used this twenty years ago,’ he said.
‘Quite,’ said Cheller.
The image he was now seeing and could manipulate worked in conjunction with the tagreb AI and his aug. When he had come here he decided on as little AI assistance as possible because he found that twisted his perspective, and he had wanted to get down and dirty in his examinations of the creatures, not sit in his room auging all the time.
He began looking for the differences. They weren’t hard to find.
‘See here,’He pointed with a virtual finger, highlighting rings of nodes in each segment.
‘Nutrient storage,’ Cheller replied. ‘Take a look at segment one.’
Jonas did so, zeroing in on the segment just behind the creature’s spoon head. Here the nodes were much smaller and ran a network of tubes in towards the centre into which they were draining. There, just visible, lay a spiral. He tried to focus in closer, managed to see some segmentation in the spiral but little else.
‘One of the babies,’ he said.
Hooder biology was odd. The creatures were incredibly long-lived, energy efficient and rugged, but even though they had been biomechs in their past they were animals now and subject to the usual rules. They did die though infrequently. Drowning was one way – if they got caught in the ferocious tides on the North coast – like the one Jonas had examined. One had apparently died of disease while Jonas had been away – its body overloaded with a wide variety of viruses and local microbes that finally brought it to collapse. These were rare occurrences, however, and the main cause of hooder deaths, since people had come to this world, had been them. Death being a factor, reproduction became a necessity for survival of the species. Jonas had found that they did possess organs for sexual reproduction but that had simply never been seen. Data from the pre-Polity inhabitants – the vicious theocracy that had ruled this world – indicated that the things broke into segments with new hooders growing inside each. These segments then sank into the mud of Masada out of which, after an indeterminate time, new young hooders arose. That seemed utterly apposite for ‘devolved’ war machine biomechs: the sowing of the dragon’s teeth.
And now at last they were seeing that happen.
‘Forming from the head end first,’ said Cheller, ‘though I’m not sure what that indicates.’
Jonas pulled back for a moment because the hooder had started moving again. It shed more of its legs and now some chunks of outer carapace. He dived back into the scan and saw the line of division. The thing would shed all its legs and the thick protrusions of carapace to leave an inner perfectly smooth and rounded segment – rather like a thick coin. He focused in closer to examine this and noted further nodes forming just inside that inner surface. He tried to zero in on these but scan lost coherence.
‘Can we redirect for close focus on one of those?’ he asked, mentally indicating one of the nodes. ‘Then after that on that head-end zygote?’ He posed it as a question but knew the AI could manage this.
‘Easily done,’ said Cheller.
A square framed just one of the
nodes and within it the image began to clear, meanwhile the rest of the hooder turned into a blur. Jonas now examined a tangled mass of fibres within the node, pores leading to the surface and a venous system leading in to where the zygote was to grow. He analysed detail and hypothesised. Again this was something he had expected.
‘Rather like the microfibers of a certain nasty alien technology,’ he opined.
‘All advanced technologies that glean materials from their environment have something similar, as do plants with roots and funguses with their mycelia.’
Jonas grunted agreement, studied the object for a little while longer until it went out of focus – the AI now transferring that to the spiral in the segment at the front end.
‘So the segments sink into the mud and put out roots or mycelia to collect nutrient for the new hooder’s growth, just as I predicted.’
‘Just as you extrapolated from the genetics,’ said Cheller, perhaps to quell his arrogance.
Jonas turned to the Golem, ‘Yes, I extrapolated from the genome some form of nutrient gathering whose nature remained obscure. I’ll give you an extrapolation right now too: the source of the code for building this nutrient gathering is not in the genome per se, but in those quantum storage crystals.’
Cheller blinked, doubtless getting something over the link from the tagreb AI.
Jonas continued, ‘I’ve no doubt that this is an artefact from the specialised environment hooders were grown in, and perhaps partially constructed in, when they were biomechs.’ The bitterness came back then: ‘It’s precisely because of stuff like this that I wanted to see the data in those quantum crystals – why I wanted to study them. Every facet of the hooder that I nailed as being related to that biomech past is, as such, in open-ended genetics. Yes, the armour is there in the genome, as are many others of those facets, but ready to become something more.’
‘Yes, we understand that,’ said Cheller.
