Polity 4 - The Technician (11 page)

–
From QUINCE  UIDE compiled by Humans

Present
Day

Sanders brought her foot down on a slab of rock covered with domed
transparent limpets that were direct relations to the penny molluscs whose
shell patterns Jeremiah Tombs drew so intently. Inside the shells she saw
writhing movement, peered at it for a moment noting single, spookily
Human-looking eyes gazing up at her from each shell, then waded ashore. She had
recorded and studied most biota like this around the island, and these were
nothing new to her.

She had
been swimming naked again, as had become her custom here, not so much because
she was an exhibitionist, but because it drew a reaction from Tombs, and such
reactions, she felt sure, slowed his steady retreat from reality. Picking up
her towel from the fluorescing sand she dried herself with sensual
deliberation, wondering what to do today. Maybe she should check data from
undersea probes she had scattered about the islands, or check new research
notes transmissions from Earth? Perhaps she could get back to writing her
history of the early development of scoles here on Masada? Contemplating these
options with a wry smile, realizing that her excitement of two years ago, when
Amistad had arrived, was now fading, she coyly looked up towards the terrace.

Surprisingly
there was no sign of Tombs. Usually he would be peering over the low wall at
her, then abruptly snatching his attention back to his sketch pad when she
looked in his direction. She slung the towel over her shoulder, pushed her toes
into her sandals and headed for the steps leading up.

Tombs
was nowhere on the terrace, and Sanders felt a frisson of excitement at this
change in behaviour. She walked over to the stone table he usually parked his
chair beside and gazed down at the latest sketches, all held down with a
paperweight of jade carved in the shape of a coiled hooder – Amis-tad’s idea,
that. The sketch on top was complete, and still in the pad, and the erstwhile
proctor’s electric pencil lay beside it. Usually, when Tombs finished a sketch
he abandoned it, then started at once on the next. Never before had he
abandoned both sketch pad and pencil, in fact he became hugely agitated if they
were taken away from him, then ended up smearing shit on his bathroom floor in
just the same way as he had begun his art career – something Sanders did not
want to encourage. She gazed at these items for a second, then turned and
strode over to pick up her loose dress and shrug it on over her head before
returning inside through the shimmer-shield that contained Human-normal air
inside the sanatorium.

Just in
from the terrace lay what had once, and briefly, been an occupational therapy
room. Tombs wasn’t here either. Sanders stepped over to a nearby pedestal
table, picked up the button of her comunit and stuck it to the material over
her collarbone.

‘Amistad,’
she said – the name gave instant access through the unit to the ever-watchful
war drone.

‘Here,’
the drone replied perfunctorily.

‘We’ve
got a behaviour change.’

‘Record
and detail – I’m busy.’

This
dismissive attitude from Amistad had been common two years ago after she’d
first met him, but less often of late. It had something to do with one of his
associates. Sanders got the distinct impression that the individual concerned might
be hard to handle on occasions, and dangerous, even to a drone of Amistad’s
capabilities.

She
moved on into the sanatorium, heading directly for Tombs’s room. Finally
stepping through the door she came to a dumbfounded halt. For a second or two
she was confused; trying to figure out what was wrong here. Then she saw it:
Tombs’s wheelchair stood empty in the middle of the floor. He wasn’t in the bed
and it seemed unlikely he was in the bathroom unless he had crawled there.

‘Jeremiah?’
she enquired.

‘Right
here,’ he said from behind her, his arm winding round her throat and the point
of an oyster knife pressing against her cheek just below her eye.

Sanders
made a sudden mental shift: she remembered that Tombs wasn’t just a pathetic
mental cripple confined to a wheelchair. He had been a proctor, one of the
brutal religious police of Masada. He had probably tortured, beaten and killed
people, and he had received military training prior to his induction into his
latter profession.

‘You’re
out of your chair,’ she said, trying to keep calm.

‘Did you
think you could keep me confined here forever?’ he murmured in her ear. ‘Did
you think your pathetic Polity techniques could break my faith?’

‘No one
has been trying to break your faith,’ she replied. ‘We’ve just been trying to
do our best here for you. Your mind and body were severely damaged by the
Technician and the process of repair has been . . . difficult.’

‘Your
experiment has failed – now you will show me the way to the surface and I will
return to my people.’

The
surface?

‘We’re
on Heretic’s Isle,’ she replied. ‘You know where we are – you’ve been living
here for the last twenty years.’

Tombs
turned her towards the door. ‘Show me the way out, woman, and understand that I
choose martyrdom over imprisonment, but that will only occur after you have
died.’

‘We
aren’t underground, Jeremiah – just search your memory.’

‘I have
searched my memory and, despite your drugs and your mind-breaking techniques, I
know the truth. You have tampered with my mind to create illusions. They are
powerful illusions but faith is the tool that unravels them, that and your own
foolish vanity.’

‘Vanity?
I don’t understand,’ she said as she walked slowly out into the corridor.

‘You
cover my face to conceal that I have not aged, yet you fail to cover your own
face and you flaunt your youthful body.’

So, her
looking young had further confirmed his delusion that very little time had
passed; his delusion that he had not been in this
place for twenty years. Ironic, since both her and his youthful looks were a
direct result of technology from the Polity now ruling this world – another
fact he constantly denied. And the covering of his face was another fiction.
She had replaced his head prosthetic two years ago, shortly after Amis-tad’s
‘associate’ replaced his mechanical arm and then surgically adapted him to
breathe the air of Masada. Though for reasons still opaque to her, Amistad did
not want him to know about either his adaptations or the loss of his
prosthetic.

Always
Tombs claimed that they created fictions for him, yet he lived in his own,
adjusting facts to suit his perception of how the world should be. He believed
he was still a captive of the Underground, still the subject in an experiment
in breaking religious faith, but holes were beginning to show. Her ‘flaunting’
of her youthful body was something that stuck in his mind from his last two
years out on the terrace pretending not to see her swimming naked, so he hadn’t
managed to bury everything from then, and perhaps from the eighteen years
before.

She
walked on towards the old occupational therapy room and the way out onto that
same terrace, but slowly, for she had no idea how he might react when reality
in the form of open sky and sea hit him in his face.
Hopefully Amistad would soon be focusing his attention back here and would
intervene.

‘You
were attacked by a hooder called the Technician,’ she said. ‘It did things to
you that even the Polity AIs that now control this world fail to understand,
and this is why full repair of the damage has not been allowed.’

‘Just
keep walking,’ he said.

She
noted that he wasn’t pushing her very hard and had begun leaning much of his
weight on her. Though his chair had been running muscle-tone programs through
his legs all the time he had been in it, they were still weak and wobbly. Where
was that fucking war drone?

In the
room beside the terrace he paused, and she was able to peer round at him. She
could read little in his expression, but he had grown very still now and his
gaze fixed on the view beyond the shimmer-shield.

‘Here is
the reality,’ she told him.

‘Projection,’
he said dismissively, and shoved her forward.

As they
approached the shimmer-shield he kept hesitating, his gaze straying to the
various items scattered about this room.

‘I can even
see where the projection begins,’ he said. ‘This had better be the way out,
woman, or I will have to spoil some of the source of your vanity.’

He
pressed the knife harder below her eye and she felt the sting of a cut. She
realized he was seeing the slight glimmer of the shield interface, that effect
seen in heat mirages caused by differences in air pressure. He shoved her again
and she stepped through, feeling the slight tugging on her body. He followed
her out onto the terrace, his gait abruptly turning into a stumble.

‘I . . .
cannot breathe . . . here,’ he said.

The
knife slid down, cutting her face, but she managed to grab his wrist and push
it away, turning and quickly stepping from him, slapping a hand to the wound.
He stumbled forward, slicing the knife through the air, once, twice, but he
seemed like someone trying to find an opponent in a darkened room. Then
something slapped against his shoulder and spun him, and with his mouth moving
spastically he reached back to feel that place, then toppled over like a felled
tree.

‘Interesting,’
said Amistad.

Sanders
snapped her gaze across as the drone suddenly materialized, crouching on the
terrace nearby, sting poised above its head glinting clear globules of fluid.
It had obviously stung him; knocked him out.

‘What
did you use?’ Sanders asked, heading over to pick up her towel and press it
against her bleeding face. The wound was superficial – just a minute’s work for
an autodoc.

‘There’s
no name for it,’ said Amistad, ‘but it blots out memory in the short time it
takes to work, which is just as required.’

‘What do
you mean?’

‘We let
this run.’ The drone moved forward with silent grace for something so heavy and
poised over Tombs, peering closely at him. ‘Nothing has been achieved by
keeping him here. We must let him claw his way to reality by experiencing it,
very directly – we let him discover the truth and, in the process, discover the
truth about him.’

‘Hopefully,’
said Sanders.

The
drone turned towards her, then after a moment acknowledged that with a dip of
its head.

Jem woke with a start, flat on his back on warm tiles, and tried to
collect the disconnected parts of his mind. Abruptly he remembered that at last
their security here had become lax: somehow the nerve blocker preventing him
from walking had been disconnected, and the guards, grown complacent having to
watch over someone confined to a wheelchair, had absented themselves. Only
Sanders stood in his way to the surface, the way out . . .

Jem
blinked, gazing up at open sky, then sat up and looked around. His thought
processes realigned and he realized he had been mistaken about the rebel base.
They really had moved him to an island, to another base actually on the
surface. This could mean only one thing: there were traitors in the Theocracy who
had somehow penetrated the scanning systems of the cameras up on the orbital
laser arrays. Somehow those cameras were simply not being directed towards this
place. Once he had made good his escape he must be careful who in the
Brotherhood he informed about this. Perhaps it would be best to try and get a
message directly to the Hierarch. Of course this wasn’t Heretic’s Isle, but
that the Underground had expended so much in resources to create this place,
this fiction, showed how important they considered their faith-breaking
project.

He
stood, gazing down at the bloody knife in his hand, vaguely remembering forcing
Sanders to take him to the surface . . . no, out here. His gaze strayed down,
then along to the edge of the terrace where she lay slumped in a pool of blood
against the low stone wall, a trail of blood leading across the tiles to her.
Somehow she had managed to strike him, to knock him unconscious, but in so
doing had ensured her own death. He felt a surge of grief, of regret, so much
stronger than seemed reasonable considering all they had done to him here. He
walked to stand over her. Her blond hair was stuck down in congealing blood
which, despite the air here, remained bright red.

‘I’ve been adapted to this world now – Polity technology,’
her voice muttered in his head. ‘I can breathe here.’

He
recollected her standing before him, arms spread, wearing only a blue bikini.
He shook his head to try and dispel the image, glimpsed the oyster knife still
in his hand and with one jerky motion sent it clattering away from him, then
stumbled to the steps leading down to the beach. He was gasping, labouring to
breathe.

Reaching
up he clawed at the covering over his head, seeking to tear it off, but the
thing was soft now and transmitted pain. They’d upgraded it, giving it a
realistic look and a realistic feel, but he wasn’t fooled. It wasn’t his face. Then, as further memory returned, he abruptly
snatched his hands away. Whether the thing was a prosthetic as Sanders had
claimed or just there to conceal from him his own face was irrelevant. However,
one of her other claims now surfacing in his mind was
relevant. She had said that, like a scole, it supplied him with breathable air,
though unlike a scole it would allow him to breathe for ten days, and here he was
outside and breathing without a mask.

He
raised his wrist, studying the hand of his artificial arm. They’d made that
more realistic too, even down to the hairs on the back of his hand. He
transferred his gaze to his wristwatch, reached out to set a timer: a countdown
of ten days. Unless they were lying about the extent of his oxygen supply,
which seemed highly likely, that was how long he had to get back to the
Theocracy.