Polity 4 - The Technician (16 page)

Gabbleducks
sometimes caught Human prey and just chewed them up, spitting out the remains.
They did other odd things too, like drowning their victim in mud, then carrying
the corpse back to some settlement. But they also sometimes chased those on the
ground but then did nothing, and on other occasions just ignored Humans
completely. And there were even stories of people being lost out in the flute
grasses and then guided back home by the creatures.

Jem
hoped that his case would be one of the last.

As he
walked, he caught glimpses of the creature’s hide through the grasses:
greyish-green with odd purplish swirls. The grasses stood three metres high and
he also caught the odd glimpse of its back, which meant it had to be a huge
example of its kind. Diverting his course outwards, he walked as near to the
sea and as far from the flute grasses as he could get without sinking into
sticky mud. However, sweat chilled on his back when ahead he saw an area where
the mud had been churned and torn up, and his only way through was a firm strip
only three or four metres wide between that and the grasses.

As he
drew closer to the churned-up area it seemed to him that the creature was
moving about with more eagerness, as if something prevented it coming out into
the open, but that it knew he would soon draw close enough to grab. He studied
the ground ahead more intently in the hope of seeing a way through, and it was
only then that he saw the area was not the result of some storm or land
slippage, but seemingly of battle.

What he
had at first taken to be a chunk of torn-up rhizome mat came abruptly into
focus and made clear everything beyond it. A tank lay there, its rear end sunk
in the mud, its turret half torn off and the blackened barrel of some kind of
gun pointing up towards the sky. Other wreckage lay scattered in the area, all
spattered with the mud that initially disguised it from him. He saw Satagent
script etched into a chunk of armour and only after studying other debris
around it did he realize he was seeing the remains of a Theocracy lander.

‘The Hierarch’s brother, Aberil Dorth,
brought the troops down from Hope to attack us,’ said Sanders. ‘He might even
have succeeded in flattening us, if it weren’t for the fact that our rebellion
was just a side show in a bigger and more lethal drama.’

Jem
looked round to see Sanders wading ashore, naked again. He averted his eyes for
a moment, but then could not help glancing at her once more, but she was gone.
Her spectre had been sent to taunt him, straight from Hell.

‘The
Devil came,’ he muttered to himself, not sure where the words came from, but an
image clear in his mind of Proctor Shaunus turning towards him, expression
dull, one eye reddened with blood, his augmentation, their Gift
from Behemoth, turned into something scraped from an ash pit. Terror
accompanied the vision, old remembered terror of something trying to take
control of him, and his need to flee. He felt his legs starting to give away, a
blankness spreading in his mind, but he fought it, straightened up and
struggled to breathe evenly air that should have killed him.

‘Lies,’
he said.

He was
like one of the prophets out in the wilderness being taunted by demons, haunted
by visions, going through a trial to arrive at the eventual truth. However,
when he again raised his gaze to the wreckage strewn before him, he could not
deny it. This was no vision, no illusion, nor could it be something that had
been staged just for him. A real battle had occurred here and he must accept
and integrate the fact of it. Now, abruptly, he did sink to his knees, but to
begin reciting the Satagents, to try and drown out that constant background
mutter and more importantly to find some inspiration in their truth, some
guidance. But the Satagents gave him no comfort and even as he started on the
second Satagent, the words felt empty. He stood up, paced forward. He would
find the truth in Godhead. Revelation would come, it had to.

Keeping
out near the shore, a feeling of unreality, emphasized by that odd muttering,
distancing him from the frightening reality of the gabbleduck over to his left.
He walked closer. There was definitely a hole in his mind. He did not remember
how the rebels got hold of him so perhaps just a small amount of truth lay in
the things Sanders had told him because, in the end, all the best lies were
laced with truth. Now closer, he noted something else. The wreckage looked old;
there were growths of moss on some of it, and webs of fungal mycelia.

Twenty years . . .

He shook
his head, trying to see all this clearer, and then he saw the machine.

It was
working out in the middle of the devastation, foamed-metal treads supporting it
on the soft mud, its cylinder body covered in dirt, mantis arms excavating the
ground before it and churned mud mounded up behind. Then he saw the next
machine – ovoid body on spider legs, the thing probing the ground with a
proboscis almost like the beak of a heroyne. Then another – this one scooping
soil with one flat arm into some kind of sieve and shaking it through,
advancing its metal body with a caterpillar humping motion. These, he realized,
were what had made this area impassable, not the battle that had been fought
here. He had never seen anything like them, could not integrate them into his
reality. Abruptly he headed inwards, towards that narrow strand between the
area they occupied and the flute grasses, his fear of the gabbleduck lost in
the sheer incomprehensibility of this scene.

Upon
reaching the narrow pass, Jem broke into a slow jog, determined to put this
behind him, to get somewhere he could straighten out his mind, but as he
rounded a jut of flute grass it seemed as if someone, or something, was
determined to stick things in his way. Ahead, across his path, a wide silvery
sheet lay pegged to the ground, glassy objects neatly arrayed across it. Coming
to the edge of this he peered at one of the objects, and realized he was seeing
a coffin. Inside lay the corpse of a Theocracy soldier, black-stained by mud,
wrinkled and partially preserved in an environment that did not provide the
means for Human decay. Every coffin here, and there were hundreds, contained a
similar black atomy.

‘Sapple
clogger,’ said the gabbleduck knowingly.

Jem
turned to stare at the mountainous pyramidal creature squatting less than ten
metres away from him. It seemed like some rotund jolly Buddha relaxing prior to
some enormous feast, the food laid out before it in glass coffins.

Jem ran,
hurdling coffins, a sound issuing from deep in his chest that might have been a
scream, and might have been laughter.

Squerm
Essence

The biggest export from Masada was and
still is squerm essence. Squerms, which are a genetic splicing of tubeworm, sea
louse and lobster, are capable of surviving in low-oxygen-content water. They
take five years to grow from egg to the aggressive and hard to handle adult
form. The whole process is fraught with problems, since just one dead squerm
decaying in a rearing pond will poison the water and kill all its fellows. Upon
reaching adulthood they are caught and placed in presses, the essence crushed
out of them and immediately bottled. Whilst sealed in the bottle it undergoes
an odd and highly complex fermentation and maturing process resulting in
long-chain protein molecules. Only very small amounts of squerm essence are
used in cooking and work as a flavour enhancer for sea foods and some other
dishes. The flavour is one that Epicureans claim cannot be reproduced
chemically and, despite numerous comparison trials in which said Epicureans
could not tell the difference, the more expensive essence shipped from worlds
like Masada remains a favourite. But then, this inability to accept that the
cheaper version of a food or drink is absolutely no different from the
expensive version, has a long and well documented history.

–
From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans

The mechanism stirred uneasily in a state that would have been called
slumber had it been a wholly conscious being. Its probes, strewn along the
interface between realspace and its own domain in underspace, were registering
input with a direct relationship to its function, but because of its confused
state of mind, this input only served to raise it to a higher level of inner
alertness and did not impel it to act.

Time
passed in realspace, marked by those probes, which in turn confirmed the
veracity of the new input. The mechanism became aware that certain patterns
were in evidence and they possessed a spacial relationship with the two
problems it had encountered before: the war machine and the black artificial
intelligence, both of which had tried to resurrect the Atheter by loading
ancient mind recordings of those creatures into the brains of their animal
descendants. The mechanism woke, increasing its capacity as it did so, but
still it could not act, for it had yet to detect clearly active Atheter thought
processes.

However,
preconditions for its main function evident, and something quite odd and
difficult to nail down about them, enabled it to bring online back-up
programming previously unused, and new processes woke in the mechanism’s
disrupted consciousness. It began to model reality in ways it had never done
before, began to extrapolate, began to use a mental function now available that
in another being might be called imagination. New data also became available,
and the mechanism understood, beyond automatic function, the ‘why’ of its
existence.

Jain
technology destroyed civilizations and, having taken up its poisoned chalice,
the Atheter had proceeded to the precursor to that destruction of internecine
war that had lasted for tens of thousands of years. In the end they decided to
free themselves of this technology by removing its target. That target being
civilization, it became necessary to remove the uttermost basic building blocks
of that: the minds that build it.

That the
Atheter had done Jain technology’s job by returning themselves to the level of
animals to avoid it, the mechanism did not question. Nor did its new
imagination have the sheer extent to contemplate the level of despair and
self-hate that led to such self-immolation. Nor did it see that as a product of
the Atheter their fear and madness were integral to its own systems. Deeply
ingrained in its programming lay its self-destruct. If it became infected by
Jain code it must destroy itself. No other option had been provided.

This
extra programming capacity, however, did not resolve the puzzle it was sensing
on the Atheter Homeworld. An Atheter mental pattern existed there, yet it seemed
to exist in a grey area between function and non-function.

There
was only one way to deal with this. Remaining in underspace so far from the
action, or potential action, was no longer an option. Within the mechanism,
components of matter, pseudomatter and patterned energy, which hadn’t been used
for nearly two millions years, powered up. They unzipped the fold that had
concealed the mechanism for that time, everted it into realspace where
relativity snatched it up, and the rules of existence hardened into
immutability.

Janice Golden, the interfaced captain of the Polity dreadnought Cheops, swore loudly and vehemently, scared for the first
time in eighty years. In that time she had always resided deep inside her ship,
which bore the shape of an Egyptian pyramid sitting over U-space nacelles like
two conjoined iron cathedrals. Here she commanded weapons which, though not
nearly as effective as those of newer Polity warships, could still trash a
planet. She had patrolled the Line, the Polity border, as it expanded towards
the inner galaxy where, thus far, nothing as nasty as the Prador had been found
nor had any lethal alien technologies crawled out from under a stone to spoil
her godlike insouciance. But that looked like it might have changed.

Something
had disrupted U-space in the Wizender system, and had done so with enough force
to slap Cheops back out into the real just seconds
after it had U-jumped. Janice at first thought a USER had been deployed here,
but the readings she was getting were nothing like the disruption caused by an
Underspace Interference Emitter. In fact the readings weren’t like anything
either she or the Cheops AI she was interfaced with
had ever seen. Something had certainly disrupted U-space, but why the massive
ensuing energy flash?

Anything? she asked, mind to mind, the question not even
really a word.

Patterned, Cheops said, the reply ghosting over a feed of
a five-dimensional shape far too regular to be anything but artificial. Cyclic point disruption into the real, here . . .

Image feed
from Cheops’s long-range receiver array gave her the
location close to a green gas giant, a Jovian planet yet to acquire anything
but a number. Only now it wasn’t the plain green orb it had been. A bruise much
the size and shape of Jupiter’s eye storm had appeared, striations spreading
out from it of storm-feeding atmosphere flows that Earth could float in.
However, unlike the storm on Jupiter, this phenomenon wasn’t confined to the
surface of the giant. From its centre a tail of gas extended hundreds of
thousands of kilometres out into space, there terminating at . . . something.

Not clear, she said.

Too much interference, Cheops replied, but I will try.

Close
imaging gave her something dark and blurred at the tip of that tail of gas.
Janice tracked the clear-up programme in her mind as EM emissions directly
attributable to the spiral were subtracted from the data and all that remained
gradually built into a clear image. The mass came through first – about that of
Mars, which made it perfectly understandable that its exit from U-space had
caused so much disruption. Then its shape came clear.

Janice
felt her spine crawling. The thing there looked woven, a horn of matter made
from evenly woven strips of a material whose density put it just a spit away from
being neutronium. It was sucking inside itself the gas from the giant below,
using an irised gravity field like a million-mile-long syringe. Within the horn
itself, where the gas arrived as plasma, conglomerations of dodecahedrons were
swirling and reordering in bewildering complexity, and fast, so very fast.