Polity 4 - The Technician (18 page)

‘Two
million years,’ Penny Royal had replied.

The sea
urchin AI, once classified as black but now, to Amistad’s mind, just a slightly
darker shade of grey than himself, clacked a tentacle against the platform
rail, then returned that tentacle to a process that seemed alarmingly like it
was sharpening its black spines, but which Amistad knew to be an odd way of
making dataport connections between its seven states of consciousness. Perhaps
it too was remembering that exchange.

Amistad’s
claw gripped the same platform rail, as if the drone was steadying himself
against the slight sway up here at the top of this stalk as its lower section,
a hundred metres below, cleaved through the rhizome mat. The observation tower
was still on the move – an underlying conveyor drive much like the one in
Chanter’s mudmarine driving it along. But soon it would be stationary again,
for their target now lay in sight.

They had
been inspecting that cave shortly after Chanter had relayed his news about the
ancient sculpture, and now Amistad replayed the rest of their brief exchange in
his mind, relaying it to Penny Royal so the AI would know what he was thinking
about:

‘Elaborate,’
he had said.

‘It was
made, and no makers here for two million years.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Surprising
that this wasn’t discovered before,’ Penny Royal had opined. ‘Unless knowledge
is being kept from you to prevent mental crippling.’

It was
often an AI technique: provide all the information to an investigator and that
individual would probably come to the same conclusions as you. Be sparing with
information and that same investigator might discover something you missed.

‘Not
something we should concern ourselves with.’

Penny
Royal had writhed, doubtless something surfacing from one of its states of
consciousness about its own past when it disagreed with AI research policy,
before going on to conduct research in its own violent and sadistic manner.

‘Mind
ungoverned by evolution,’ Penny Royal had stated. ‘And yet to be sized to
ultimate technological purpose.’

Amistad
had dipped his head in acknowledgement, and dipped it now, as the observation
tower drew to a halt and spread its nacelle anchors below, concentrated on the
creature lying just a couple of kilometres away.

The
Technician had brought down a big grazer, a thing resembling a six-legged water
buffalo with a tined lower jaw to fork up rhizomes, extended head to
accommodate the numerous grinding plates used to mash them up, and big flat feet
to stop it sinking into mud it exposed while feeding. The animal was so large
that the big hooder could not accommodate all of it, and so was working its way
along the creature section by section. The back half of the grazer had been
skinned, muscle and white fat removed with surgical precision and ingested,
whole unbroken guts, veins and layers of black fats flapping about grey-blue
bones in a loose shreddy mess. The thing was making a sound like a flock of
rooks being sucked into a combine harvester, as it continued to fight for
freedom.

‘A
prototype,’ said Amistad, repeating verbatim the observation he had made four
years ago, ‘made before the Atheter extinguished themselves.’

The
Technician was a leviathan albino centipede whose head had been squashed flat
then dished underneath; perhaps, as many had remarked, it was similar to a
giant Human spinal column. Though of course, those who made such comparisons
were usually at as safe a distance as Amistad and Penny Royal. Using his own
sensors and those within the platform, Amistad studied the creature, the
machine, on numerous levels, and made comparisons. It became evident, almost at
once, that it had changed further.

Since
the rebellion all the data the Theocracy had gathered on the Technician had
been collected and collated. This and all Chanter’s data had been added to that
gathered by the Polity researchers and stored in the Tagreb. Prior to the
rebellion, scans of the Technician did reveal all sorts of anomalies, but
within the recognizable structure of a hooder. The scanning methods used had
not been sophisticated enough to reveal what those anomalies were. After the
rebellion, Chanter’s intermittent scans of the creature yielded a steady
decrease in information, for it seemed evident it had started undergoing major
internal changes, which it was somehow shielding. Later scans by Tagreb
researchers revealed complex nano-structured materials, high-density energy
storage and that internal shielding. Now, even using state-of-the-art scanning
routines, data had become increasingly difficult to obtain, and large portions
of its body were completely opaque. Notable, Amistad felt, that this
transformation had accelerated after the Technician did what it did to Tombs.

‘Perhaps
the prototype,’ Penny Royal opined, flipping up its
two superfluous eye-stalks so as to gaze at Amistad with eyes like glowing
rubies.

‘Explain,’
since they were moving to new territory now.

‘Final
hooder form given limited lifespan and ability to breed,’ Penny Royal stated.
‘They were made to fit an environmental niche even if the environment is, in
essence, artificial.’

‘You
still haven’t explained why you think it might be the
prototype.’

‘At this
technological level only one would be required,’ Penny Royal explained. ‘All
the necessary data to make the current hooder form would be downloaded from
it.’

‘So is
that what we’ll find in Jeremiah Tombs’s head: hooder schematics?’

‘No.’

‘Why are
you so sure?’

‘Why,
when they made the final form of the hooder, didn’t the Atheter destroy the prototype?’

Amistad
had already wondered about that. ‘Maybe, just maybe, not all of the Atheter
agreed with racial suicide.’

Penny
Royal sharpened some more spines, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

Despite first using Theocracy medical technology to save their lives,
then Polity technology to heal up lung damage and the worst of their
progressive skin complaint, the Overlanders retained their scars. Or rather,
Grant noted as he entered the covered market, they retained those scars that
weren’t horribly disfiguring, usually on their arms and the backs of their
hands, with maybe the odd example on cheek or forehead. They said they wore
their scars with pride as a reminder of all they had gone through and as a
memoriam to all those who had not survived. Grant knew that their scars helped
them cling to their bitterness and hate, but how could he judge them when
still, as to a familiar lover, he clung to his own?

The
stalls sold locally manufactured goods, local produce and Polity goods shipped
down from the north or obtained from the occasional trader spaceships that
landed on the foam-stone rafts, once supporting worker huts outside the town.
Amidst these the Overlanders were easy to spot. As well as their scars, they
favoured black clothing often like a photo negative of a proctor’s uniform,
though the script running from armpit to ankle consisted of the kind of
Euclidean patterns found on the backs of penny molluscs. After the slaughter
the creatures had appeared in great numbers here, like poppies on some ancient
Earth battlefield.

All the
Overlanders had accepted other Polity medical technology and had their bodies
adapted so they could breathe the air outside. They didn’t need a breather mask
like Grant, and didn’t need the parasitic scoles. However, many of them carried
scoles – gutted out, preserved and lined and turned into shoulder bags. Grant
approached the first Overlander he saw, a woman inspecting the contents of an
upright glass cylinder standing before an enclosed surgical saucer that had to
have come in through the main market doors. The cylinder contained various
styles and makes of augmentation, excepting Dracocorp augs, which were now
banned from sale here on Masada. She turned towards him as he approached and
nodded cautiously – she recognized him.

‘I need
to find Edward Thracer,’ he said.

‘You’re
Commander Leif Grant.’

He felt
only a brief inclination to say that he was
Commander Leif Grant; that such titles were for the past. But it was not
something he really felt, and grabbing at the future was not something he yet
had any enthusiasm for.

‘Yeah,
that’s me,’ he replied.

‘I’ll
take you to him.’ She pointed across the market, and then led the way.

As he
walked, Grant noted a stall selling parboiled squerms and sprawns, a form of protein
it had been an offence for anyone outside of the Hierarchy to eat, and now
being sold in paper funnels for just one New Carth shilling or equivalent.
Other food and drink being vended here consisted of the big grapes harvested
from grape trees in the north, wine from the same source, preserved sausages of
all kinds, sliced and served up in pepper sauce between slices of pillow bread,
and other more exotic concoctions from offworld. His mouth started to water
until the woman spoke again, killing his appetite.

‘It’s an
honour to have you here,’ she said. ‘Have you come to join us?’

‘Nah,
not now,’ he said, wincing a little.

She led
him round a market corner where stallholders were selling Theocracy relics:
proctor uniforms, various forms of ecclesiastical clothing, badges, medals,
jewellery, daggers and other hand weapons – the various guns in a locked
chainglass case – numerous ornate paper books and standard electronic
Satagenials. It surprised him to see such stuff on sale.

He
gestured towards the stall. ‘Don’t it bother you?’

She had
been about to question him further, but now glanced at the goods on display.
‘No, it doesn’t bother me, nor does it bother any other Overlander or any with
allegiance to the Tidy Squad. We like it that all the Theocracy valued so
highly is being sold off as trinkets, collectors’ items or decorations. It puts
the Theocracy firmly in the past, where it should be.’

Grant
glanced at her. That really didn’t sound like the opinion of someone who wore
the negative of a proctor’s uniform and kept her money and make-up in a
hollowed-out scole. It occurred to him that they had been forewarned of his
arrival here, and that she had been waiting for him.

Beyond
the trinket stalls lay a carousel vending machine about which a collection of
tables and chairs had been set out. Such alfresco drinking and dining, albeit
undercover and sealed from the air of the world, was something that had never
been seen on the surface of Masada until after the rebellion. It was a novelty
Grant had noticed spreading, especially amongst those who could really eat and drink alfresco. He’d sat in such a place
actually outside and watched the diners and drinkers enjoying a freedom they
hadn’t imagined before; he still having to wear a breather mask.

Edward
Thracer, along with two other Overlanders and another individual in plainer
dress, sat at a table drinking white wine and sampling mezes from a varied
collection of bowls. The four seemed to be having a good time at their feast,
and Grant felt like the arriving skeleton.

‘Commander
Grant,’ the woman announced as they approached the table.

Grant
felt himself cringing as other people all around looked towards him, some
giving a rebel salute, others grinning and nodding. Chairs were shuffled aside
to leave a space and a new chair pulled over. Grant sat down, ignored the glass
of wine poured for him and gazed across at Edward Thracer. The man was a rock,
solid muscle, and a shaven head revealing a purple scar almost the shape of an
oak leaf.

‘So what
can we do for you, Commander?’ Thracer asked.

Grant
decided to play it gently at first, not to get too heavy-handed. Here he could
not be as terse and abrupt as was his wont, nor could he bark orders and expect
them to be obeyed. ‘You know where my sympathies lie, Edward, and I know where
yours are,’ he said carefully. ‘What I’m about to tell you, you’re probably
already getting set up for.’

Thracer
just folded his arms and sat back, waiting.

‘During
the rebellion I saved a proctor’s life – took him to our med unit in Triada
Compound.’ Grant flicked his gaze around all the other faces at the table.
‘Y’know the story; he survived an attack from the Technician, survived it
because the Technician replaced his breather mask.’

‘So you say,’ said Thracer.

Grant
felt a flash of annoyance at that. The fact that Tombs’s mask had been replaced
by the Technician after its attack on him had been in the public domain for
over a decade, but still there were those, like Thracer, who questioned Grant’s
word. But instead of arguing the point he nodded acceptance and continued.
‘We’ve always thought there was something odd about the gabbleducks, the
hooders, the siluroynes, heroynes and tricones. Now, with that stuff from the
Polity Tagreb and that Atheter AI, we know it: gabbleducks are the descendants
of the Atheter, hooders and tricones are artificial, and hooders were war
machines, either that or they were made from them.’

‘You’re
not exactly telling us anything new,’ said the woman who had guided him here,
now seated astride a chair behind Thracer.

‘Well I
didn’t know that bit about hooders once being war machines,’ said the man clad
in plain clothes.

‘That’s
because you weren’t paying attention, David,’ she shot back.

Thracer
held up a hand. ‘Let him continue – he at least deserves a hearing.’

‘Okay,’
Grant grated, ‘let me tell you something y’don’t know about Proctor Jeremiah
Tombs.’

‘We know
he’s heading in this direction,’ said Thracer. ‘And that it’s quite likely that
Greenport is going to be his final destination.’

Grant
shook his head. ‘No it ain’t, and here’s why.’ He took a deep breath, gazed at
them steadily. ‘All you know about Tombs is that he’s a proctor loon who can’t
accept his Theocracy is dead. He’s become an icon – represents all proctors to
some. He’s the prime target for the Tidy Squad, but until now stayed safe on
Heretic’s Isle. But he’s more than that, a lot more.’