Before They Were Giants (37 page)

"You're still set on going in?" asked the pod personna, an expert system that called itself Valentin Zero.

"Maybe." Nike stared into inner space, mirrored contact lenses turning her eyelids into projection screens for the video nodes in her optic nerves. "I may just go through with this. I may. Just."

She ground to a halt, thoughtfully, remembering what it had been like when she had been here before. A modified wasp buzzed to a six-point landing on her left arm, abdomen curved to inject. Its lance slid out and penetrated her skin, extending feathery biosensors into her peripheral circulation.

"Spying again, Valentin?" She opened her eyes and looked at the wasp. Its metallic carapace shone with black and red stripes, tiny alphanumerics embossed on its wings.

"I can never tell what you're thinking," said the program. "It makes me nervous."

Nike tried an experimental grin, her face twisting into a semblance of spontaneity.

"When you go like that," complained Valentin. "you're unreadable."

"If I do go," she said, "do you think I should continually signal my intentions with my anatomy?" This time the facial expression was more natural; heavy irony. Her face resembled her body; slim, pared-down, designed for an abstract aesthetic of speed rather than comfort. And she was obviously not at home in it.

"You ported into that brain badly if you think you can convince anyone you're human; you don't look spontaneous enough. You don't have to tell everyone what you're going to do; just make them think they know!"

She snorted. "How long is it since you were last human, Valentin?"

The pilot sounded genuinely surprised. "Me, human? What do you take me for? A potential defector?"

The wasp picked up traces of subtle neuropeptides that warned of danger. "Don't be alarmed," she said, "but if I thought that, I'd have to suspend you. I need you here behind me." Mirrors slid down across her eyeballs, a deliberate snub to conversation. The wasp took wing in a vindictive whine of chitin, leaving a bead of blood oozing from her skin. It flew to a nearby neuroplant with yellow tendrils as fat as fingers that dug their way into the hull of the pod, and offered biochemical homage.

"I've made up my mind," she said. "I'm going."

Valentin didn't reply. There was a gentle thumping from outside the pod, followed by the barely perceptible return of acceleration, unfelt for six weeks; the tug had latched on.

Nike returned to her customs video briefing.

~ * ~

"If we accept your application for citizenship you must accept our semiotics. If we accept your physiology you must accept our commensal bacteria. If we accept your psychodynamics you must accept our law."

The customs official stared at her with phased-array eyes, cruciform wings of black synthetic retinae. It was a robot, and not a well-maintained robot: it recited by rote, sounding extremely bored.

"Repeat after me: Death to the imperialist zionist ronin, the lackeys of neo-humanist cladisticians, and the discorporeate running-dog zaibatsu. I swear to follow the decree of the hezbollah and the shogunate in all things, to abide by the shari'a, to follow humility and modesty as a law for the rest of my natural life, and to refrain from acts of treason against the corporation ..."

Nike recited the oath expressionlessly, word-perfect from memory. The syllables were stale in her mouth; she'd memorized them during the two-day immigration check, startled at how far the original slogans had been deformed. Then she walked through the exit of the customs hall, feeling her feet ache from months of free-fall. The black cross of the robots' retinal array tracked her as far as the path into the forest before losing interest and swiveling back to the entry gates.

Mist swirling at ankle-level obscured roots that looped to catch unwary feet, pits of rotting vegetation hollowed out by subsidence, other unseen hazards. Videomice crouched in the boles of trees, grooming their paws, faces almost obscured by the black buttons of their eyes. Nike walked without guidance into the woods that blanketed the colony interior. There had been major changes unnoted by the immigrant processing module over the past two centuries. A faint rumble drifted from the distance, menacing in the twilight as the colony headed towards nightfall.

The videomice were the eyes and ears of the shogunate, but there were too many of them to monitor simultaneously. Nike ignored them, relying on the prickling of her neck to tell her when one of them was belching a coded data packet to the castle: her close-cropped hair was wired for microwaves. She guessed that there were other watchers in the forest, other eyes, and it worried her. System traffic control had confirmed that no-one had visited the colony for a good six years now, and no-one had left it for over two decades. If anyone human was left alive, Nike would be the subject of intense scrutiny. She stumbled occasionally and paused to brush branches out of her way as she followed the trail. She was right; other eyes were watching her.

~ * ~

Boys drifted like ghosts, moving in silence across the open spaces. Their choreography was uncanny, plotted by computer for a ballet corps of cyborgs. The ground beneath their feet was a bare surface of white ceramic that curved away to either side until it submerged beneath a layer of earth; it was the naked hull, exposed by erosion. Every ten metres a grey pole stood, festooned with branching sensors and small pumps, a trellis left over from the soil-support system. Ecological vandalism had stripped it bare in this area, a kilometer-wide strip of sterility near the equator. Darkness had fallen across it an hour ago and the people of the night were rising.

The Hunter watched them on a screen in the safety of the castle. Reclining in a throne of skulls festooned with nutrient tubes and neural jacks, she looked superficially akin to those she observed; pale, with the fleshlessness of a rapidly-growing child and the synthetic skin of the ageless. The resemblance was due purely to design convergence. The Hunter -- her title was as good as her name -- was not a boy. To be a boy was to be a warrior, and the Hunter was hardly a warrior. She was a Hunter -- of boys.

"What are they doing now?" The voice came from above and behind her head. She watched the screen with the intensity of a sniper.

"They appear to be constructing something ..." The Hunter paused to consult her throne of brains. "A gallows."

"Why?"

The Hunter thought for a while. "It's an archaic device used for punitive purposes. The victim is suspended by a rope for some time -- it looks uncomfortable. Possibly dangerous if no spinal bypass is installed."

"Who is the subject of this device?" The voice sounded bored. It probably knew already and was testing her.

"That's not clear, yet."

"Keep me informed." The voice vanished as rapidly as it had manifested itself, and the Hunter shuddered. She had a morbid fear of that voice, conditioned by a century of ignorance. No-one had met the Shogun face to face and told the tale within living memory. Her memory. The Shogun was an enigma. It might not even exist, and what could be more terrible than that? To serve a fiction for a century ...

The twilight ritual of the boys played itself out. One of their own, out on the white plain, was stripped of his exoskeleton; they bound his hands behind his back with a cord of red silk. It was impossible to tell if he struggled -- those who surrounded him were too strong for unamplified muscles to resist. Up went the rope, the prisoner on the polished teakwood scaffold, the drop ... the Hunter watched, fascinated. Centripetal acceleration dragged the twitching feet out. There's something nasty about this, she realized, as infrareds observed the body cooling. The boys left an hour before she admitted to herself that what she'd witnessed was not a punishment but an execution. The absolutism of age.
They cannibalized one of their own, she wondered; why? Have the boys become so jaded that they gamble with their own lives? And, dawning slowly in her mind: I don't understand this any more.

~ * ~

The house was so well camouflaged that Nike almost stumbled into it before she realized what it was. It slumbered among the trees, concealed by a dense thicket of ivy; its owner waited for her patiently outside.

"You're the immigrant," he said; "I'm Ben."

"Nike." She watched him closely, noted dark skin but no cranial hair.

"Winged victory? Or a missile?" When he spoke he held his head on one side. "Never mind. You'll be wanting somewhere to stay while you find out what it's like here. You'll be wondering why I'm offering that. I'll tell you; we don't see many strangers."

"How many of you are there?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Maybe five hundred, maybe less. Nobody counts. There's the boys, the servants of the Shogunate, a few civilians who keep quiet. And the neuroplants; about six million posthumans." For a moment Ben looked like something else; infinitely weary, lines engraved on his face like tribal scars concealing eyeball-tracked weapons systems. It passed; Nike concentrated on the smell of his skin, the pheromones he exuded. They smelt so perfectly natural that he might have been a prehistoric subsistence farmer or a test pilot. There was a sense of archaic simplicity about him.

"Do you eat?" she asked.

~ * ~

The Hunter dug through her collection of spare skulls in search of an appropriate memory, in response to a desperate urge to understand. She found one, long-jawed with the baroque horns of an extinct fashion. The motions were instinctive by now; she plugged it into her throne by a fat nerve trunk and felt the alien emotions expand her perceptions into something that felt more complete. The skull had been poorly maintained, isolated in sensory deprivation for the better part of a century; it's personality had ablated away to a core of memories and a vague, gnawing loneliness.

She remembered being a he: experienced at first hand the sea of stars beyond the window of a cramped cargo drifter between worlds, the waves of vapour churning at the edges of the red spot as mining drones scooped up megatons of methane from the Jovian atmosphere. That wasn't right; she carried on searching. Later she remembered arriving at TransLunar Seven shortly before the revolution. Being caught up in the confusion and arrested by the hezbollah, undergoing the terror of forcible decapitation. This was too recent; she wanted somewhere in between. Tried to remember. What had it been like in Troy-Jupiter two hundred years ago?

The agonies this brain had been squeezed through made her wince. It was easy for a Hunter to fall into the fatal trap of thinking of her memories as something more than a very cunning source of information, of trying to relate to the dead minds in the boneyard. She hunted and eventually found what she was looking for, partially obscured by the pain of a bizarre and self-destructive marriage.

A memory of what it was like before the revolution, before she had become a Hunter.

~ * ~

The house vomited pre-digested morsels into the feeding trough. As Nike and Ben ate, she tried to assess the situation. It was worse than she'd expected; the place wasn't far from dead. An unseen ruler who might not even exist, a dissident faction with unspeakable habits, and a dying periphery of humans.

"They shut down half the farms a century ago," said Ben, "and most of the rest forty years later. There wasn't enough demand on the manufacturing capacity to justify running them all. Nobody needs anything -- the die- backs left a vast overcapacity. The city's a playground for the boys so nobody lives there anymore."

He shoveled in another handful of food without looking up. "You came at the wrong time."

Nike watched him silently for a while, fascinated. She wondered if she'd met him before, years ago; so many of her memories from the early days had been wiped to make room for new experiences that she couldn't be sure.

He finished eating and finally looked up.

"Just what
did
you come here for, anway?" he asked with an elaborate shrug.

"To take over," she said. "We need this space. What's your interest?"

He grinned, face in a shadow cast by the sunduct in the roof. "I'm a neutral. I have no interest in conflict."