Polity 4 - The Technician (28 page)

Next the
download connection established to Amistad’s main processor, even as the large
lozenge of crystal began to disconnect. Consciousness began to fade and he
asked the question of himself that many a Human asked when loading to crystal,
to a new vessel: ‘Will I die?’

Utter
blankness, timeless.

Amistad
woke abruptly, now in a place so huge his mind almost diffused away in the
first second of consciousness. Also, in that second, he re-engaged his immune
system, autorepair and weapons even before his senses. His particle cannon and
close antipersonnel lasers briefly flared in response to a perceived attack
before he could shut them down, then his senses connected fully in time for him
to see the wreckage all around him: tools slagged or chopped into pieces,
glowing pools of molten metal, occasional secondary explosions and chunks of
hot metal raining down.

‘Damn,’
he said, then, ‘Er . . . sorry about that.’

‘Not
unexpected,’ said the tic robot, now climbing back up onto the platform from
where it had previously concealed itself. ‘You have sufficient control for me
to finish the job now?’

The
thing had dragged up with it a cable net bag containing Amistad’s armour, which
had yet to be replaced. Amistad grasped at once that in preparation for this
moment the upgrade unit had moved its entire mind into the tic robot, which had
been provided with the tools to complete its task. Something else occurred to
Amistad too: he still had no idea about the purpose of another tool that went
under the name of Jeremiah Tombs.

After his first trial runs with the specialist programs, Chanter realized
that all physical objects possessed congruent patterns if you broke them down
sufficiently for, in the end, they were all made of matter, which at its basis
was all the same and in the end broke down into nothingness. The programs here
stretched into the territory of various unification and chaos theories, whilst
also straying into the perpetual revisions of those theories and incorporating
AI solipsism. He found it far too easy to end up losing himself in speculations
about the meaning of it all. Perhaps this was because he was distracted. He
felt naked and without an escape route now his mudmarine and Mick, under the
control of Rodol, had returned to his base to collect his collection of
sculptures.

‘Any
joy?’ asked Clyde.

Chanter
looked up. The man was thoroughly sober now he had found something to interest
him. He had explained to Chanter that after his and Shardelle’s depressing
discoveries about the gabbleducks and hooders, and his orders to remain here on
Masada, he had allowed his addictive personality free rein. But now there was
some research he could get his teeth into he had allowed Rodol to suppress that
part of him, and the autodocs here to shave the fat from his liver and purge
the toxic build-up in his body.

‘I’ve
gained some understanding of why some choose the easy escape route called God,
but fail to understand how they can’t look beyond that construct.’

Chanter
returned his attention to the screens before him. Icons represented each of the
sculptures in his collection, whilst bar graphs detailed the performance of the
program he was using, each bar representing adjusted data inputs. Thus far he
knew that all the sculptures were made of animal bone, that parts of them had
been fashioned in shapes similar to structures in creatures on this world and
others, but no congruent pattern or order to that. Construction methods were
congruent: mortise-and-tenon joints, bone pegs and micro dovetails. One of the
searches related to Human woodworking and Human artisans of the past – Gibbons,
Boulle and Chippendale – but he doubted that would make anything clearer, for
the Technician’s use of such joints just represented the best physical methods
of accurately joining cut materials without glue or welding.

Clyde
pulled up a chair before the next console along and sat down, elbows on the
chair arms and fingers interlaced before his mouth. He then reached out and
waved a hand over the console and the screen before him came on to show the
kind of data maps Chanter just couldn’t read.

‘You’re
only searching for physical patterns or matches,’ Clyde said. ‘Perhaps you
should extend your search outside such limitations?’

‘To
where?’

‘Perhaps
your concentration on the artistic endeavours of Humans might be a dead end and
you should take a look at the Atheter databases and the fauna and flora of this
world.’

Chanter
repressed the urge to snap at the man. Maybe he was right about what would be
the original sources of inspiration, and from them Chanter could run new
comparisons with Human art and then find the Technician’s core.

‘Perhaps
this.’ Clyde leaned forward and reached out to the screen, directly
manipulating the data maps with his fingertips. A new search bar appeared on
Chanter’s screen.

‘What’s
that?’ he asked.

‘I’m
running a comparison program between the structures of your sculptures and the
gabble database.’

‘But the
gabble is gabble,’ said Chanter. ‘It’s nonsense – your own Shardelle has been
unable to make any sense of it.’

‘Let’s
just see what happens shall we?’

Chanter
was about to protest this foolish use of processing power, for the gabble
database was huge, when one of the icons before him flashed and his console
chimed. He concentrated fully on the screen and saw a sketch outline of that
sculpture descend towards a three-dimensional shape that had appeared on a
subscreen. The two shapes melded, turning and twisting, then flashed red and
another subscreen appeared. On this a shape slowly sketched out. Chanter could
make nothing of it.

‘What
have we got?’ he asked.

Clyde
stared hard at his data maps. ‘Could be a complete coincidence – the match is
not in the main gabble database but in a mindtech research—’

The
console made that sound again, another sculpture selected out for comparison
with another three-dimensional shape. Again a match was made.

‘Then
again, perhaps not,’ said Clyde.

‘Are you
going to make yourself clear?’

Clyde
pointed at his data maps. ‘The program is finding structures in your sculptures
that match the neural structures of a gabbleduck’s mind.’

The
console rang again.

‘Really
weird,’ Clyde added.

‘In its
art,’ said Chanter, feeling a moment of victory, ‘the Technician has been
trying to express the minds of its masters.’

Clyde
just continued staring at his screen, his expression blank.

‘I
rather think,’ he said, ‘that with the limited tools at its disposal, and
limited and wholly distorted understanding, it has been trying to rebuild
them.’

Jem struggled with the unfamiliar fastenings of the spacesuit, then
stopped and looked over his shoulder for expected help, and yet again realized
Sanders wasn’t standing there. The feeling of loss, and guilt, surged up again
and he just stood, unable to continue. Grant gazed at him for a moment, then
abruptly stepped over and helped him. Jem felt a sudden huge gratitude, his
throat tightening and tears pricking in his eyes as the soldier demonstrated
the simplicity of stick seams and the automatic seals. The suit clung over his
clothing, film-thin and terribly insubstantial, a bowl helmet covered his head
and just a few discrete packages decorated his belt. How could such a light
garment be sufficient to protect him from vacuum? The answer was always the
same here: Polity technology. ‘Okay, you’re done,’ said Grant.

Jem felt
this warranted some sort of reply, but for a moment didn’t trust himself to
speak.

‘You’re
ready?’ Grant enquired.

Jem
cleared his throat, turned to look at the airlock door so the soldier could not
see his face. ‘So . . . what is this monument I must see?’ he asked, not for
the first time.

‘You’ll
see soon enough,’ said Grant.

Jem
glanced at Shree, then away again. ‘Will you tell me?’

‘It
might spoil the effect, and effect is what I’m all about,’ she said. ‘But I’d
have thought you would have guessed by now.’

Grant
turned towards the airlock door – an arched contraption with segments that
opened like an iris, disappearing into the surrounding walls. After they
stepped inside, the iris closing behind them, Jem saw vaguely familiar text
appearing in the glass of his helmet and guessed it indicated pressure and
atmospheric readings within the airlock as it drained. About him the suit
gained a degree of rigidity, but still did not constrict movement.

‘We’ve
arrived on quite a day,’ said Grant. ‘They’ve finished repressurizing and are
starting to spin it up again.’

Shree
glanced at him sharply. ‘Interesting timing.’

‘Ain’t
it just,’ said the soldier. ‘Makes you realize how important the AIs consider
what’s rattling round in his skull – they were ready to repressurize over ten
years ago.’

‘All for
my benefit?’ said Jem, puzzling over why Polity AIs might have such interest in
him. Hadn’t Shree mentioned that the Technician had done something to his mind?
Hadn’t Sanders once said something . . .

Jem
winced, the heavy boot of guilt coming down hard on his chest again. It was
unbearable, but he couldn’t see what recompense he could make – beyond acceding
to their demands right now. But no one died – they all went to Heaven or Hell,
didn’t they? No comfort there either, for his own beliefs damned Sanders to
Hell.

The
outer door of the lock drew open to reveal a long framework tunnel extending to
something looming in the dark of space.

‘Perfect
timing right now too,’ said Grant, his voice as clear over suit radio as in the
air. ‘Sunrise in about three minutes.’

‘Sunrise?’
asked Shree.

‘When it
comes out from behind Calypse.’

Grant
stepped into the tunnel first and Jem followed, feeling as if he had stepped
from a cliff the moment he moved out of the airlock. Gravplates,
he realized, nausea rising in him. The Hierarch Amoloran had spent the entire
planetary budget on getting such things smuggled to Masada for his tower and
his own ship, yet aboard the Polity ship they were even inside the airlock. A
prick in the side of his neck made him jump and his nausea at once began to
fade. The suit had doctored him, he understood,
dispelled his nausea, looked after him, and that seemed to make the
undercurrent of guilt even harder to bear.

Down the
length of the tunnel handles were provided with which to propel themselves
along. Though clumsy at first, Jem soon got the hang of it, recalling his brief
stays offworld during his proctor training. Ahead, the massive object hanging
in vacuum was visible only as a blackness blotting out a large portion of the
starscape. Jem began to feel an odd familiarity about this thing, then a
growing fear of that familiarity.

‘Starting
to feel reluctant?’ Shree asked spitefully.

Realizing
he had been moving ever and ever slower, Jem picked up his pace, Grant having
moved some distance ahead of him. He caught up with the man in time to hear him
say, ‘Here it comes.’

Sunlight
lit the scene from behind, casting the Polity ship’s shadow directly ahead and
blotting out much of what lay there, but off to the right, truncated by
perspective, the light revealed a curved surface of bare metal, char, and
occasional areas of unburnt vacuum paint. Slowly this shadow slid leftwards,
exposing more of that surface and uncovering Theocracy script. When it revealed
a few letters Jem finally realized where they had brought him.

‘Faith,’ he said, his voice catching.

‘The
laser blast,’ Grant explained, ‘hit the Up Mirror and reflected up inside the
cylinder world. The mirror lasted about two seconds before evaporating, but
long enough to cause the firestorm that gutted this place.’ The soldier pointed
to where the shadow was now sliding aside to reveal the ring-shaped,
heat-distorted Down Mirror sitting above an oddly misplaced gothic tower at
this hub end of the cylinder, a concentric window around it through which
reflected sunlight shone into Faith itself.
‘Amoloran’s Tower has been restored. They found most of it drifting into a
decaying orbit around Calypse and towed it back. Some other stuff inside has
also been restored.’ Grant fixed Jem in his gaze. ‘The dead, or rather what’s
left of them, have not been removed.’

‘Why
have the dead remained unburied?’ Jem enquired, his voice at last steadying, a
fading and resentful part of himself wondering if the dead had been left
visible so the victors could gloat.

‘Effectively
they have been – this has been classified as a war grave.’ Grant continued on
down the docking tunnel.

‘The
Polity is above gloating,’ said Shree, almost as if she could see into Jem’s
mind.

He
glanced at her, then noted the look Grant flashed back at her. With a sudden
cold certainty Jem realized it would take the soldier a while, but eventually
he would see through her. Then, as he followed, Jem felt grief nibbling at the
edges of his own consciousness, but weak, more like sadness. It seemed for a
moment he had managed to step away from it into some other part of himself. He
wondered how actually seeing Faith twenty years
after the firestorm could be any stronger than feeling the tens of thousands
die here over his aug. It hurt him that they thought that whatever horrors
awaited beyond that distant airlock would give him ‘sufficient emotional
investment’. But that hurt stemmed from the soldier’s opinion of him. Did Grant
think Jem so shallow?

Soon
they reached the end of the docking tube, passed through the large outer door
into Amoloran’s Tower and propelled themselves inside an airlock large enough
to hold a Hierarch and his retinue. Jem eyed Satagent script running around the
wall, the snouts of two stun blasters peeking from their high alcoves, and
lower down the recesses from which tangle wire could be ejected. High security
here, this being direct access to the Hierarch’s abode, but it wasn’t lethal
security – Amoloran, and then his successor Loman, would certainly have wanted
to question any assassins who got this far, prior to sending them to the
steamers. Jem winced at the thought of the agony anyone caught here would have
endured, then immediately upon that felt surprised at his own empathy.