Polity 2 - Hilldiggers (14 page)

“So my story been confirmed?” I signed.

“Sudorian individuality,” they decided, “from Earth. We are out of Consensus until update. Part of the job. You will not be shot. Go full speak—one individual.” What followed I could only assume to be some chemical debate in the air, then the one with the manacles spoke alone: “Why are you here?”

“To establish relations between the Polity and the humans living in this system,” I replied.

“All humans?”

“Yes.”

“But why are you here?”

“Because the ship taking me to Sudoria was hit by a missile. I landed in an escape-pod—incidentally one that was sabotaged.”

“Fleet?”

“Quite possibly.”

All four now said, “We must await the Consensus Speaker. An update is imperative for us. We cannot communicate with you while uninformed, since this encounter is too important.”

Four sets of mandibles snapped shut, then all four of these...individuals? Difficult to decide really... all four of them abruptly sat down cross-legged on the ground. I realised I would get nothing more from them and so sat down too. Tozzler edged his way over from the trees, came and paced around me stiff-legged, then abruptly sank down between me and his masters. Thus we remained for about an hour—the only sound being a rustling from the trees, the lapping of waves in the lake behind me, and the occasional thunderous rumbling of my stomach.

—RETROACT 9—

Director Gneiss

Gneiss sat in his chair gazing at a screen display which, divided into four, showed views through the diamond pane end-caps of each Ozark canister. The tangled complexity within appeared ever on the point of movement, like some simple optical illusion, and seemed to offer him answers to questions—but questions he did not know how to pose. He felt as if the images he saw pressed on his eyeballs, and sometimes wondered if that pressure lay within the skull behind them. But Gneiss had always been stubborn, and so resisted something he could not even identify.

The only child of parents who had remained desert nomads despite all pressures to join 'civilisation', he had inherited their pig-headedness and forever been a trial to them. He had in his early years learned all they taught him about desert survival, but then, before he even reached his teens, he decided their lifestyle was not one for him. Informing them of his decision had perhaps not been the brightest idea, because it developed into a contest of wills with them, often culminating in physical violence. They did not win in the end, for at the age of thirteen he packed up his meagre belongings and fled, taking himself off to the nearest city to acquire a 'proper' education. His parents came after him but, having rejected the society they now entered, they did not know how to fight the systems that would keep Gneiss from them. Despite having obtained what he had apparently wanted, Gneiss remained an outsider even within the Sudorian orphanage and schooling system. But ensuing years of conflict opened his eyes to the fact that his stubbornness, candour and uncommon intelligence would have made him an outsider in any society. Those same intransigent qualities finally secured him his promotion to the overall directorship of Corisanthe Main.

The view of the four canister end-caps was one Gneiss called up regularly to remind himself that he was only human and must never again become complacent about his charge. He gazed frequently at the mind-distorting patterns so as to accustom himself to them, to toughen his mind and harden himself against their influence. Leastways, this is what he assured himself when given time to distance himself from the hypnotic experience. For during it he felt himself to be pitting his will against that of the Worm. Sometimes, as on this occasion, he felt himself locked in a conflict he could not resolve but which, oddly, enabled him to remain obstinately himself.

Standing abruptly, Gneiss turned away from the images and walked over to a mirror inset in his apartment wall. He noted the even spokes radiating his irises, like two small wheels inset in his eyes, and remembered a time when they had not been like that—some months before Yishna Strone was born. Upon first noting this change, and suspecting some strange influence from the Worm, he had them medically checked but found that nothing else untoward could be detected. He reached out and palmed the carved head of the snake swallowing its own tail which formed the mirror frame, and stepped back while the mirror itself turned sideways into the wall to reveal the cavity of a small lift, into which he stepped.

As the lift carried him down, he opened a small hatch and took out a visored breather mask to place it over his face. The direction of the lift's acceleration changed, then changed again, and he clasped a handle beside him as he became weightless. Shortly afterwards the lift slowed to a halt, and then revolved partially to open into a gloomy chamber.

None of the sensors here in Ozark One would report his presence, since he had long ago instructed them to ignore him. He pushed himself down in an angled trajectory he was well accustomed to, and after a few moments of weightless flight closed his fists on the hand bar positioned before the transparent end-cap of the Ozark canister. Now, without an imaging system intervening between him and the Worm itself, the effect upon him was distinctly more powerful, as was the effect of that muttering madness called bleed-over. It almost felt as if something was reaching out physically from within the canister, to push the patterns shimmering before him through his eyes and deep into his head. His customary response was instant: a solid mulish stubborn resistance. This was his parents trying to shape him into what they envisaged was a more perfect version of themselves. This was his political teacher trying to impress on him some ideology obviously at variance from reality. This was the constant pressure of Sudorian society showing him the easy path to conformity. And it was Combine society trying to deform his mental shape to fit a particular niche. He resisted with the flat negativity of an iron wall.

Gneiss remained obstinately himself.

Gneiss accepted that this conflict prevented him from being anything else.

—Retroact 9 Ends—

McCrooger

While studying my erstwhile captors I remembered how their body chemistry was weirder than their appearance. They could breathe atmosphere such as once killed soldiers in the trenches of ancient Earth battlefields, and could eat bivalve molluscs and worms containing enough sulphuric acid to burn through hull plating. But, as I saw it, their main difference to 'normal humans' was a mental one, stemming from the hive-like set-up of their society and the consequent ways they had of communicating. It seemed as if, when together, their minds partially conjoined.

This sort of thing had happened back in the Polity once or twice, when certain groups using cerebral augmentations tried to set up gestalt societies, which never lasted since each individual had been originally raised an individual. Such societies would inevitably break apart, often with many of their members needing psychiatric help for a long time afterwards. I wondered if here the formation of a gestalt had been a matter of necessity, or just resulted from their severe genetic modifications. It may even have been planned by some or all of the original settlers, but I would probably never find out for sure.

After about an hour the sound of an engine alerted me to another fan-driven boat approaching across the lake. As it drew closer, I saw that it was another four-man vessel like the one waiting by the jetty, but with only three individuals aboard. Turning hard, it slowed by the beach and then drew up to the jetty. I noticed that the two in the front seats were very different from those waiting alongside me, and this difference became even more evident as they climbed out—one quickly securing the mooring rope to a bollard.

These were bigger, heavier, more stooped and apelike. Their heads seemed like boulders and what I at first took to be helmets I shortly realised were chitinous plates. Then I noticed similar growths extending over the rest of their bodies. The new arrivals were armoured, not by artifice but by biology, or rather by the artifice of genetic manipulation. Both of them lacked spur fingers, had eyes sunk into hollows, and were wearing green dungarees. They carried heavy carbines suspended across their stomachs, from which cables extended to packs resting on the near horizontal part of their backs just behind their shoulders. Their mandibles were huge and, upturned like tusks, were obviously intended for more than simply gustation.

Standing up, the four with me in unison announced, “Quofarl.” I glimpsed hand signals implying both trepidation and amusement.

Soldiers, I realised, created by a society dependent on genetic manipulation and under the intense pressure of war. I wondered if these two creatures had been fashioned back then, or if the Brumallians still created them.

One of the quofarl remained by the boat, while the other one, dropping down onto all fours in the disconcerting way of these people, accompanied the third figure as she headed towards us. She proved to be a Sudorian woman clad in some kind of tight-fitting envirosuit.

Halting within a pace of me she inspected me from head to foot from behind a flat visor, then said in Sudorian, “Remain standing right there until I come back for you.” At her beck my four companions followed her to the edge of the forest. I couldn't hear what was being said, nor could I see any sign language, for the quofarl stood directly in the way, glaring at me. Even when I tried to shuffle to one side to see more, he shuffled across to block my view.

“How are you?” I signed to him.

“I have a headache and it makes me tetchy,” he immediately replied.

“Is she a Consensus Speaker?”

“She is,” he replied.

“I couldn't help noticing she's Sudorian,” I signed.

“You got a problem with that?” he asked.

“Why should I have a problem?”

“Just checking.”

The woman returned, while the other four headed down to their boat and climbed in. Tozzler leapt in last, lying across the laps of the two sitting in the rear seats. The fan started and they pulled away. I raised a hand and four hands were raised in return. Strange people, these Brumallians, but I felt I could get along with them.

“Consul Assessor David McCrooger,” said the woman, “I am to take you to the ReconYork. Meanwhile I would like you to explain to me how you came to arrive on Brumal.”

“You're what they describe as a Consensus Speaker, yet you're Sudorian,” I countered.

A hint of a wry smile crossed her features. “My race has not prevented me becoming a member of Brumallian society. Are things very different in your Polity?”

“No,” I admitted.

She led the way down to the boat, the quofarl falling in behind us. “Perhaps if you would continue?”

“Well,” I began, “my intended destination was Sudoria ...” and then related to her the events resulting in my presence here on Brumal, though omitting Tigger's part in it all, merely saying that the escape-pod had washed into the shallows. As our boat pulled away, the fan became too noisy for me to be heard, so I then tried Brumallian signing, to which she responded easily. I had finished relating my story by the time we approached the far shore, where the quofarl at the helm shut off the fan, then turned on some grumbling electric motor within the boat's hull to chug us into the mouth of a canal.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Rhodane,” she replied.

“You already knew my name when you met me, so I'm presuming you know a fair amount more about me and where I come from. Perhaps you can tell me what you've learned so far, and I can fill in the gaps?” I suggested.

“We've known for some time that my former people have been communicating with the Polity, but we learnt only recently that a Consul Assessor was being sent. Only within the last day did we hear what you've now confirmed.”

“Your former people? Do you now consider yourself a Brumallian?”

“I do.”

“That's...unusual.”

“Not as much as you might think. Many Sudorians have come here, abandoning their old allegiances to join the Brumallians. This place is an oasis of sanity. Now, perhaps you could explain the exact purpose of a Consul Assessor?”

On considering my own experiences before arriving here, I wondered if 'oasis of sanity' might be more than just a throw-away comment.

The canal cut its way through land cloaked with tough thorny bushes of gnarled grey twigs laden with red and green spheroids which were either berries or something equivalent to leaves. Ahead squatted two pylons, rising either side of where the watercourse cut through a ridge. They were topped with elliptical structures rimmed with windows—likely either watchtowers or weapons platforms. To my right something suddenly rose squalling from the bushes. It looked like a huge headless bat with a whip tail and light blue skin. I briefly glimpsed a folded-in mouth pouting horribly from its forequarters, before it dropped from sight again.

“The title 'Consul Assessor',” I told Rhodane, “is an amalgam. I'm ostensibly here to set up a Consulate on Sudoria, though it is quite possible I won't manage that very quickly. During the interim I am to assess the situation here, and report on it back to the Polity.”

“How will you report to the Polity?”

“Through the comlink established on Sudoria.”

“You could have set up a Consulate here, so why there?”

It was a rather silly question, but I have known for longer than I care to think that even silly questions can elicit useful information. I decided to be brutally honest. “Because the Sudorians nearly bombed the Brumallians back into the Stone Age and”—I glanced at her—“your new compatriots are no longer a power in this planetary system. To establish a Consulate here, the Polity would need Sudorian permission, which we would not get.” I studied her for a reaction, but behind that visor her expression remained opaque to me. “Were we to establish a Consulate here without Sudorian permission, that would only lead to conflict.” I left it at that, not adding that conflict was something we wanted to avoid, because I did not want this conversation to lead to questions about what circumstances might provoke us not to avoid conflict.