Polity 4 - The Technician (31 page)

Jem
nodded, continuing the game. ‘Yet, with her wealth she brought her followers
here and established the Theocracy. Whether you believe or disbelieve her
teachings, her own faith in such an act cannot be doubted.’

‘She
funded it,’ said Grant, ‘but shaved enough corners it’s a wonder the cryoship
got here.’ He stared at Jem with puzzlement, perhaps sensing a lack of
sincerity. ‘Nearly a quarter of the passengers died during thaw-up. The death
rate then was pretty high for those taking the landers down to the surface to
establish a foothold there. Not so many died up here where the upper Theocrats
started asteroid mining and building their cylinder worlds.’

‘There
seems to be a hole in your logic,’ said Jem. ‘Why would she risk herself by
‘shaving corners’ as you put it?’

‘Probably,’
said Shree, ‘because she didn’t come here.’

‘Zelda
Smythe walked amidst the flute grasses and heard the music of angels mingled
with the raucous cries of demons,’ Jem quoted, tired of the game now.

‘Zelda
Smythe,’ said Shree, ‘died aged a hundred and eighty-six in her Antiguan
palace. The combinations of drugs she was using to control the AIDs VII she
suffered did not sit well with the other drugs she used for recreational
purposes.’

‘Lies,’
said Jem, the robot.

‘Why?’
asked Shree.

‘You are
just trying to break—’

The back
of Grant’s hand slammed into his mouth before he could finish. Jem fell and
skidded along the ashen ground, lights flashing behind his eyes. In a moment
Grant had him by the throat and dragged him up, slammed him back against the
charred wall.

‘Listen,
you little shit,’ he said. ‘If we wanted to “break your faith” by feeding you
lies we could have rigged you up to an aug just like that one I stopped Tinsch
from sticking into your skull. We could tear your mind apart and stick it back
together in any shape we chose. We could make you believe Zelda Smythe is a
transsexual orangutan living on bananas on Mars. We could make you believe
anything. But why should we? Do you really think you’re that fucking important,
that your belief is that fucking important we want to waste resources on it?’

‘Evidently
. . . you do,’ Jem choked.

Grant
stared at him, then abruptly released his hold. ‘You’re not important, your
damned religion isn’t important. What’s important is what a biomechanism may
have shoved inside your skull.’

Jem
rubbed at his throat. These two would never like him, never understand the long
journey he had made and was still making, never see him as anything more than
Proctor Jeremiah Tombs. Continuing that journey he would make what recompense
he could, for Sanders, not for them. But he would damned well have their
respect.

‘Only
extinction is real,’ he said, Euclidean shapes clamouring to escape the wells
of his consciousness, a cry of loss turning to sound that could not have issued
from a Human mouth. ‘But belief in a negative is incomplete, when the penny has
two sides.’

‘What’re
you talking about?’

‘I am
ready to hear the truth, soldier,’ Jem replied. ‘And maybe that will uncover
the truth of what the Technician branded into my mind.’

Its last inmate now no longer here, the sanatorium had taken on a
ghostly, almost doleful air. Sanders gazed up at it from the small landing
field cut into the mountain slope on the landward side, reluctant to return
there, because she was also reluctant to bring this part of her life to a
conclusion. Then, angrily, she stepped out of her rented gravan, walked to the
side loading door and thumped the lock plate.

Inside
rested two large plasmel trunks. Taking a remote from her pocket she selected
‘follow’ on the screen menu then turned and headed for the crushed-stone path
that led straight up, rather than taking the curving supply road – best get
this over with quickly. After a short while her anger waned, and she glanced
back at the two hover trunks dogging her footsteps, gratified to see that the
rough path seemed no problem to them despite their usual environment being
runcible terminals or space ports.

Soon she
reached the grapewood door into the rear courtyard. In Theocracy times this
door had been closely fitted and sealed and she would first have had to pass
through the outer door of an airlock to reach it. Now, what with the airlock
having been removed along with the roof of the courtyard within, the weather
had got to the old wood and it had shrunk, and its seals peeled away. Yanking
down the central handle she pushed it open and entered.

The
courtyard had once contained all sorts of exotica grown here by the Bishop of
Heretic’s Isle. The image of that man quietly tending his plants before heading
off to oversee the bloody games they had played here sat uncomfortably in her
mind. She noted that though native growths were sprouting from the pots and
raised beds within, some of that man’s plants had survived. It seemed significant
– some things could never be wholly erased. She crossed flagstones, the trunks
emitting a low whine as they followed, entered through the next grape-wood
door, the seals round this new and working, felt the puff of pressure
differential as she entered and noted the abrupt slowing of her breathing as
her adapted lungs themselves adapted to the extra oxygen here.

In from
the courtyard lay a long room containing all an enthusiastic botanist would
want, then beyond this the kitchens. Treading a familiar route, Sanders passed
old confinement cells, torture rooms stark and empty but for the occasional
fixture that once supported frames, manacles, gallows. Finally she entered the
modernized section of the sanatorium – redecoration here, no sign of the past
use of this place – then eventually came to the door into her quarters.

Gazing
around at the place she had slept in for two decades, she felt a surge of
nostalgia and old regret. She focused on a chair over the back of which her
nova wrap still cycled its hot display of a dying star, walked over and picked
that up, then took the remote control from her belt and pressed ‘packing’.

The two
hover trunks obliged by settling down on the whitegrass carpet and hinging open
their divided lids. Sanders tossed in the wrap first, then her clothing, a
small collection of items she’d found washed up on the shore, including the
much-eroded upper beak of a gabbleduck, then other items she considered
personal possessions. By the time she had finished she’d only filled one trunk.
Of course, before the arrival of the Polity she would have also packed a large
collection of books, memory crystals and other singular data-storage items, but
now all that just sat in her personal store somewhere in cyberspace, and she
could recall it wherever she settled. She eyed the laptop on her desk here.
Even that wasn’t really hers – just disposable and easily replaceable tech. She
walked over to it. Keyed into the offworld excursion site to check on her
booking, for with things not quite as functional here as in the rest of the
Polity, there could be problems.

Cancelled.

Sanders
stared at this a long moment, then keyed in a query. The laptop blanked, then
two words appeared on the screen: Disposal Confirm?

What the Hell?

Sanders
reached down to cancel the order, but now ‘Confirmed’ flashed up. The screen
blanked again, then rainbow faults spread and it began to crack. The keys
started to shrivel and the whole case of the thing distorted.

Her hand
instinctively strayed to the button of her comlink now on the lapel of her
jacket, then she hesitated. This could have just been some sort of glitch, or
it could be that the computer hardware here had been set to wipe itself anyway,
but she doubted it. She pressed her right forefinger to her comlink, which read
the whorls and activated.

‘What
the fuck is going on?’ she said out loud.

‘Sorry
about that,’ a familiar voice replied from her link. ‘But I wanted to get your
attention.’

‘Well
you have it now, Amistad. Why’ve you cancelled my booking?’

‘Jeremiah
Tombs still believes he murdered you,’ the drone replied. ‘It will be
necessary, quite probably in the near future, to apprise him of the reality.’

‘I
thought you wanted him to carry on believing that,’ she said bitterly. ‘I
thought his guilt over supposedly killing me was one of the driving factors to
enable you to get to what lies inside his mind?’

‘Not so
much for that, but rather to impel his cooperation over a limited time span.
However, since one of the main drivers in religious indoctrination is guilt for
which there can be no recompense, examples being original sin, guilt about
wholly natural sexual impulses, and the general guilt at being unable to live
up to deliberately unattainable ideals, those with that mindset tend to revel
in it, and for our purposes it could now become a hindrance, even destructive.’

‘Just
show him recordings of what you did – of me getting up afterwards and cleaning
off that artificial blood.’

‘Too
little drama,’ Amistad stated. ‘Humans always require drama when changing
underlying belief structures else they fall back into the old patterns. They
need an excess of pain, joy, strong emotion or new experience, to impress the
change upon the dull recording medium between their ears.’

‘Y’know,
Amistad, you can be really irritating sometimes.’ Sanders took out her remote
control again, hitting ‘follow’. The two trunks closed up, rose a few
centimetres off the floor, then trailed her as she headed out of the room. ‘So
what do you want of me?’

‘I
require you to remain available – preferably in the vicinity of Dragon Down,
which I calculate is where Tombs will be when he reaches his next mental
nexus.’

‘They’ve
got Human accommodation there, haven’t they?’

‘Of a
sort – dracowoman Blue has prepared for your arrival.’

‘You
seem pretty sure I’m going to do what you ask,’ said Sanders. ‘My opinion of
your methods and your aims has not changed. If you finally get to what the
Technician downloaded into Tombs, if there’s anything of value in his head at
all, that will also result in a sane individual and someone of no interest to
you whatsoever.’

‘Tombs
has returned to what you Humans classify as sanity,’ Amistad told her. ‘He has
even become, by your definition, more sane – his whole belief system collapsing
and reconfiguring.’

‘What?’
Sanders halted outside the door leading into the Bishop’s garden.

‘It’s
amusing really,’ the drone continued. ‘He maintained his own fiction by
believing your aim was to break his faith by feeding him false information.
That false information is the truth, yet the reality is that even the truth
cannot break faith – it is by its nature not dependent on truth.’

‘So what
returned him to sanity?’ Sanders opened the door and stepped into the garden,
her breathing now deeper and faster.

‘His
return to sanity was an acceptance of the truth, impelled by him trying to cut
off his own face, which he believed to be a Polity prosthetic.’

‘What!’
Sanders’s throat tightened with horror. What horrible grotesque games was this
drone playing with Tombs’s mind?

‘The
damage has been repaired,’ Amistad added.

‘He cut
off his face and lost his faith?’

‘No.’

‘You
just said—’

‘I just
said that truth does not destroy faith – exterior input does not change that
kind of indoctrination.’

‘So how
is he losing his faith?’

‘Something
internal – something that wasn’t there before.’

‘The
download.’

‘That
seems the most likely explanation.’

Once she
stood on the path outside the sanatorium, she turned and looked back. ‘What’s
going to happen to this place?’

‘There
was a proposal to turn it into a museum, but there are enough museums covering
the Theocracy’s distasteful rule here,’ the drone replied. ‘I believe another
proposal is being considered – turning the place into a holiday resort.’

For a
second Sanders felt that wrong and wanted to protest, then she reconsidered.
What a perfect denial of the island’s hideous past. How much better to move on
rather than revel in that past.

Finally
reaching her gravan she stowed the two hover trunks inside before climbing into
the driver’s seat.

‘So you
will be heading for Dragon Down?’

‘When
will he be there?’

‘I would
like you there, and ready, within the next two days,’ the drone replied. ‘Will
you go?’

‘I think
you know the answer to that.’

Sanders
set the van’s gravmotors running, grabbed the joystick and lifted the vehicle
from the ground. She still didn’t like what Amistad was doing, but for twenty
years she had conducted some utterly one-sided conversations with Tombs. Now,
it seemed, he had become a functional Human being. Neither Amistad’s requirements
nor the drone’s power to order her obedience informed her decision to go to the
place beside where the dragon sphere had come down and given birth to a new
race from its substance. She just wanted to talk to Tombs and have him talk
back to her.

As the ship ascended Grant watched Tombs taking a deep breath of Masadan
air he should not be able to breathe, then return his attention to his two
companions. Something had changed about the proctor, the man seemed somehow
more assured, yet sad. Even his speech patterns seemed to have changed, and not
once during the rest of their tour of Faith, then
the cylinder world Charity, had he mentioned his own
faith or resorted to mindless recitation of something by Zelda Smythe.

In Charity they’d walked The Aisles; the walls formed of
giant honeycomb structures, each one of their tens of thousands of cells
containing the brain-burnt body of a Theocrat, awaiting some future time when
Polity AIs had finished their investigations and deemed those bodies safe
enough to serve as vessels for the mind recordings of dead Polity citizens.
There Tombs had said nothing about decent burial, had not prayed, though his
reaction to the news that the Polity Soul Bank contained millions of mind
recordings had not been unexpected.