Polity 4 - The Technician (50 page)

The
moment Tombs reached a pace away from Ripple-John the Overlander stepped
forwards and lashed the flack gun across his face. The impact was hard,
vicious, and should have immediately dropped the erstwhile proctor. All it did
was turn his head, his body still as immobile as a rock. Then it seemed Tombs
remembered he was supposed to be Human and stumbled, going down onto his knees.
Grant saw the confusion in Ripple-John’s expression. The man stepped in and
drove a boot into Tombs’s gut, and Tombs going down on his side, coughing and
hacking, seemed to satisfy his attacker.

‘Where’s
Amistad?’ asked Sanders. ‘Where’s Penny Royal?’

‘Not
here.’ Grant eyed two of Ripple-John’s boys as they stepped out from the flute
grasses.

Ripple-John
dragged his attention away from Tombs and concentrated on Grant. ‘Get out of
here now. If I don’t see your vehicle leaving within the next few minutes, you
won’t be leaving at all.’

Grant
caught Sanders’s arm and turned her, forcing her to keep up with him as he
marched her back towards the gravan.

‘We
can’t leave him – they’ll kill him!’

‘Nothing
we can do,’ said Grant. ‘It’s not safe here, not safe at all.’

But the
source of the danger here, he felt, was not the men with guns.

Gabbleduck’s
Brain

Three times the meat and five times the
number of convolutions of a Human brain, along with four times the number of
white-matter connections – just too much brain for a simple predatory animal.
This was the limit of the knowledge of the gabbleduck’s brain prior to the
rebellion on Masada, because studying them was hindered by the fact that they
emit a hooder-attracting hormone when they die and when dead, hooders fall on
them like famine victims on a roast chicken and there’s never much left to
study. After the rebellion, studies were further hindered by the
reclassification of gabbleducks higher up the sentience scale. All studies in
recent years have been limited to scan data only, but have been revealing. In
its animal state a gabbleduck uses just a third of its brain entire and just 10
per cent of its triple-lobed cerebrum. Among the many highly complex structures
to have been identified is one that relates to language. Other structures
appear to be organic modems capable of picking up a range of frequencies, and
some cite these as reasons for their often odd behaviour – reception of
Human-generated signals causing neuronal firing that their simplified brains
don’t know how to deal with. The bottom line, however, is this: these creatures
are animals, but they also have unused mental watts far in excess of those of
an unaugmented Human being. Let’s just hope they never start using them.

–
From HOW IT IS by Gordon

Jem lay utterly still. The only damage his assailant had caused was the
cut on his temple, which leaked salty stinging blood into his right eye. This
was irritating since, having a mere two eyes, it did impede his function. He
reached up carefully and wiped his eye. It blurred, further dulling the senses
of his inadequate body, so he reached out for further sensory data – data he
had always known, but never truly acknowledged, would be available to him.

He had
been aware of it ever since escaping the sanatorium on Heretic’s Isle, that
constant low mutter as of something stirring in uncomfortable slumber. Now as
he touched it, the mutter turned to a mumble, then a panicked retreat from
coherence. He reassured it, calmed it by opening his consciousness to it, then
demanded a response; and the Atheter AI woke up to the presence of one of its
masters. The history loaded in a second, he analysed it in that same second,
began to understand more.

Jem
realized that he had been wrong about why the AI had shut itself down. Having
been transported here twenty years ago and making an assessment of what had
once been the Homeworld of its masters, he had assumed it must have quickly
worked out what had happened and felt itself in danger from the mechanism. Not
so. It seemed that the AI’s mind was as much like an Atheter’s mind as a Polity
AI’s mind was like a Human’s, which is to say, nothing like it. No, its reason
for concealment was much closer, and altogether ironic.

The
Atheter AI dated from a few Human centuries before the final racial extinction,
from the time of the retreat. As the Atheter pulled back towards their
Homeworld they obliterated their technology behind them so as to leave nothing
Jain technology could hijack and, unlike in the Human Polity, their AIs had not
climbed to dominance. There had been no Atheter Quiet War. This AI along with
many others had been scheduled for destruction and so concealed itself. And the
destroyers it had concealed itself from were Atheter war machines, just like
the Technician. The AI had shut itself down out of fear of the Technician – a
both amusing and tragic situation.

‘On your
feet, proctor,’ Ripple-John spat.

Jem rose
to his feet in one smooth motion, but then at once adjusted his pose, slumping
a little and bowing his head. He required more sensory data and got it at once
as the AI relayed a feed from the sensors in the barrier, which it had seized
control of long ago as a possible defence against the Technician. Visualizing
further coding – a three-dimensional pattern only hinted at on penny mollusc
shells – he made a link. The AI rebelled, briefly, but as the link hardened and
it received data from that other source, it understood, and using the borrowed
languages of Humanity offered up a few prized expletives. Now it realized it
had been hiding for no reason. Now it knew the Technician’s purpose, for that
other source was the war machine itself, and the AI realized it had been
sleeping towards another unexpected source of oblivion.

‘I know this Dragon,’ the AI noted.

‘You were not included in the original calculations,’ Jem
replied. ‘Though you can be of assistance. Call them – you
have the capability.’

‘It is done – they come.’

‘So how
do we do it?’ asked the young man with the scoped assault rifle.

‘Should
we waste time?’ asked another. ‘A bullet through the head should be enough,
surely?’

‘It’s
not enough for me, Blitz,’ said Ripple-John with a smile. Jem understood that
his cheerful demeanour concealed hate that had congealed solid. ‘Something
spectacular and extremely painful, I think.’

‘We
don’t want to hang around here too long,’ said Blitz. He looked up, tracking
the gravan as it rose into the sky and began to move away.

‘Then we
take him to our aerofan cache, then somewhere private,’ said Ripple-John. ‘We
should be able to get to the Greenport underground quickly enough and then we
disappear.’

‘Greenport’s
been evacuated – you know that,’ said Blitz.

‘You
misunderstand me,’ said Ripple-John. ‘I mean the real underground – there’s a
small cave system underneath Green-port and an escape tunnel leading down the
coast. It’s not something generally known.’ He stepped closer to Jem,
provocatively, hoping Jem would react in some way so he could respond
violently.

Now,
linked into the Atheter AI like Humans, drones and Polity AIs interlinked, Jem
began processing more data. But he felt a strange disquiet, difficult to nail
down only for a moment, after which he understood its source. This was so like
using the Gift – the Dracocorp augs Dragon had
provided for the Brotherhood, the chunk of semiorganic technology the
Technician had ripped from him as it took off his face. He shuddered, then
watched through the Technician’s upper eyes as it hurtled along through flute
grasses, a heroyne rapidly striding out of its path. Then out of the chaotic
montage of images threatening to flood his brain, he selected one, close, and
gazed through eyes that seemed more comfortable to him; ones giving panoramic
vision extending further into the light spectrum than did Human eyes. He could
feel the curiosity of the owner of those eyes, its potential intelligence
disrupted into mentally self-destructive paths, its response to a microwave
frequency picked up by a nearly atrophied organ in its brain. He saw what it saw
as it raised its head above the flute grasses and gazed to where it somehow
felt it had been summoned. He smiled to himself upon seeing the ATV, himself
and his captors standing nearby.

‘What
the fuck are you grinning at?’ Ripple-John asked.

Jem
raised his head and gazed straight into the man’s eyes. Ripple-John stepped
back, registering shock.

‘If you
leave now,’ said Jem, ‘you might survive. You just might.’

Another
now, drawing closer. He could hear them in the flute grasses, but the four
Humans here holding him captive could not. How, with such dull senses, had this
race created a space-borne civilization?

‘You’re
threatening us?’ Ripple-John asked, viciously amused.

There
was no way to control them – the best thing to do would be to get out of the
way. Jem tensed up his body, tested the softness of the ground below his feet,
scanned about himself for the best route.

‘I don’t
need to be the threat,’ he replied. ‘They are.’ He pointed.

‘Vrabbit
fobbish,’ intoned a voice from where he pointed.

It
weighed in at about three tonnes and came out of the flute grasses in one great
lolloping bound, landing with a heavy thump that shook the ground underneath
their feet. As four Human gazes snapped away from him, Jem launched himself
sideways, shouldered the ground and rolled underneath the ATV. He glanced back
to see the gabbleduck – a young adult yet to attain full massive growth – stand
there for a moment like a great bear, then abruptly roll back on its haunches.
Kalash chose that moment to open fire on it, which was a mistake.

The
shots from his pulse rifle thudded into its chest, burning deep painful wounds.
The brainless descendants of a once star-spanning civilization gabbleducks
might have been, but they still possessed intelligence enough to know when they
were being hurt, and who by.

‘Where
the fuck did he—’ Ripple-John shouted, further words drowned out by the
gabbleduck’s multi-tone shriek.

Jem
rolled out of the other side of the vehicle, got partway to his feet and hurled
himself into the flute grasses beyond. He began pushing his way through, partly
concentrating on what he was doing, but otherwise looking through many familiar
eyes. The gabbleduck charged towards the four, Kalash firing again and putting
out two of its eyes.

‘Robnacker!’
another voice cried, and a huge shape reared up right beside Jem.

This
thing was a fully grown adult and squatting formed a massive pyramid of flesh
and bone. He froze, gazing up at it. The thing dipped its head to peer down at
him, shuddered like an arachnophobe seeing a tarantula and heaved its bulk a
long pace away, where it hunched down and swung its attention away from him.
Jem got up and got away just as fast as he could.

Someone
screaming now. Kalash, suspended off the ground in a big black claw. The first
gabbleduck had now lost all feelings of curiosity, and any playfulness that
might have inhabited it earlier. It shoved one of Kalash’s legs into its bill,
closing teeth like white holly leaves down on it, then ripped it off. Next a
crack and whoosh – the missile launcher. Through his link to the gabbleduck Jem
felt the impact like a cramp in his own chest. Fire filled his vision through
the creature’s eyes then the view gyrated for a few seconds before shuddering
to a halt, and now through his own eyes he peered across the clearing to where
the creature’s headless body began to topple.

‘Where
is that fucking proctor!’ Ripple-John exclaimed. The man thought it was all
over, because more than one gabbleduck in any location was no common sight.

Having
cut a circular course through the flute grasses, Jem eased as quietly as he
could to the grasses at the edge of the clearing and peered out. Ripple-John’s
other two sons had gone over to their brother. One was trying and failing to
apply a tourniquet to ripped flesh and a protruding thigh bone, the other
opening a field medical kit. Ripple-John did not seem concerned about them as
he walked the length of the ATV, flack gun held out to one side. Surely they
could hear it now?

‘What is
that?’ One of the sons looked up.

Yes, they
could hear.

‘God
help us,’ said the other one.

Two
domed heads rose up out of the grasses on the other side of the clearing, then
they both turned to each other.

‘Stigger
stig,’ said one.

‘Romble,’
the other agreed.

Ripple-John
turned, now seeing what his sons were seeing. ‘Get him into the ATV, quickly
now,’ he said with studied calm.

The two
helped their brother up onto his remaining foot, but he seemed to be either
unconscious or in a drugged stupor, for they all but dragged him towards the
vehicle. They took him inside, Ripple-John walking slowly backwards behind them
as yet another gabbleduck, a small one, pushed into the clearing then lolloped
over to the remains of its fellow and began sniffing at them. Ripple-John
slammed the door shut just as the ATV’s motors whined into life.

Jem
eased himself to his knees, still keeping concealed, and waited. Now he was
getting used to the visual melange he realized that seven gabbleducks,
excluding the dead one, were in the vicinity. No knowing what they would do now
and, whilst they had provided the distraction he needed, they could now be a
danger to him.

‘We need a gabbleduck,’ he noted.

‘There are gabbleducks within the barrier,’ the Atheter AI
replied.

‘Close the barrier behind me when I’m
through.’

‘As you will.’

Did he
notice a hint of resentment in the communication. Was the AI remembering that
its own masters had scheduled it for destruction? He would have to be very
careful with this entity. He must ensure it understood its perilous situation
now, and that only Jem held the key to its survival for, without any doubt, it
would be subject to the mechanism’s secondary function of annihilating Atheter
technology when it arrived here. He told it, briefly, what he intended.