The Engineer Reconditioned (13 page)

"Which one are you?" she asked.

Its soft outer covering had been burned away and what remained was a seared metal skeleton containing the sealed mechanisms of its existence. It regarded her with brown lidless eyes set in its blackened skull. Its white teeth were stained, and because its lips were gone it seemed to be grinning.

"I am Judd," it rasped at her, black flakes shooting from its mouth.

"What happened to them, Judd? The other Golem, Chapra and Abaron?"

"Died. All died."

"Chapra and Abaron are dead?"

"No."

"You said they died."

"Yes."

Obviously screwed, thought Diana. They might get something from its memory.

"What about the Jain? We know it wasn't killed in the ship." As she said this Diana surveyed the devastation and focused on the bloated creatures floating in the shallows. The neutron bursts had almost certainly done for the alien. It was now as much part of history as the rest of its kind. Perhaps Smith could excavate it. She returned her attention to Judd as the Golem raised a hand missing three fingers and pointed with the remaining one out to sea.

"Here. Soon."

Diana stared down at the sea. Abruptly she stood. Movement out there. She glanced at her soldiers as they nervously fingered their weapons. Something was coming out of the sea.

"Let's not have any more incidents," she said loudly.

It was red, whatever it was, and huge. It broke the surface like the back of a whale and ploughed in to the shore. A giant red worm, thought Diana, then remembered the description of the Jain machine.

"No shooting!" She turned on Alexion. "What the hell is that?" It heaved up onto the beach, sending a wave of sea water that washed to Diana's boots. The mouth was three metres wide, speckled at the lips and iridescent white inside. The mouth of a long and impossible shell. The water drained away and Diana could see nothing deep inside but a gradual thickening of shadow.

"Christ knows," said Alexion.

Movement. Two shapes walking out — human shapes. Chapra and Abaron strode out of the Jain machine, the remains of their environment suits hanging on them in tatters, visors discarded, hoods pulled back. But were they Chapra and Abaron? How could they be alive? They were standing in temperatures that should take off their skins.

"You'd best come to the shuttle," said Diana, watching them intently. Chapra stood before Diana. "We are human. He repaired us, rebuilt us." Abaron said, "I guess he found it easier to alter us to survive here than to repair our suits." Chapra turned to Alexion. "Alex, it's good to see you." She smiled and Diana saw Smith's strange look of yearning.

"It's good to see you. New body?"

A weak joke.

"I'm me," she said, that smile still there. "The Jain is very good at what it does. If anything I've been improved. So much is clear now. And this body ... "

"What have you learnt?"

"A fraction. Some figure after the point. There's so much ... I cannot explain ... "

"Try."

"It will take time. Have you a century or so free?"

Alexion stepped forward, impulsively Diana thought. She caught his shoulder and halted him. He turned to her. "I have to do this. In my research the questions always outnumber the answers. Always. You can't stop me. I'm not security."

"Come along," said Diana. "I should think you want to get home."

"No."

She released her hold. His choice. Alexion went to stand with Chapra and Abaron. Chapra grinned at him then returned her attention to Diana.

"We're staying here. There's so much to learn. You understand?" Diana felt she might.

"Here, a gift." Chapra held out her fist to Diana.

With reluctance Diana held out the flat of her gloved hand. Chapra dropped something into it then turned back to the tunnel. Alexion followed, eagerly. As the three of them walked into the Jain machine, Diana saw through a tear in Abaron's suit a triangle at the base of his spine. She shuddered, and just stood there until they were gone. Eventually the tube filled with sea water and drew back into the sea. She opened her hand to look at the small red shell Chapra had given her. It was shaped like a worm cast; a small coral of convolute tubes. She'd seen recordings; she knew what it was — knew it was the future. There was not much Diana feared. She feared this.

SNAIRLS

The other passengers went to their cabins and cowered there like the limp city dwellers they were. The cabins were shell-walled dead stuff, braced by shock-absorbing muscle, and internally free of slime. Janer was no city man and there was so much more he wanted to see and experience. He had yet to walk Upper Shell and look from the Spire, and it was not in his nature to give up so easily. Besides, now might be his only chance before his freedom of movement was once again curtailed.

"It means a storm is coming or we are coming to a storm," the CG told him before casually stripping off his uniform and sealing it in a plastic bag. Embarrassed by the man's nakedness Janer looked around the CG's cabin. The walls glistened. When he glanced back, the CG was watching him analytically. Janer tried to keep his eyes level with the man's. Crew were different, he had known that, but seeing one naked was ... disconcerting. On the front of the CG's body was a diamond of white flesh extending from his white genitalia to the base of his throat. It was segmented like the body of some worm, each segment a couple of inches wide, and there were other differences he tried not to observe too closely.

"You'd best do the same," said the CG, wryly noting his discomfiture. "Clothing becomes crusted and stiff if it dries, or takes on a heavy build up. Only skin sheds it well."

"As you say."

Janer left the Chief Geneticist in his cabin — a cyst in the body of the Graaf — and headed down the glistening artery of a corridor, half-lit by bioluminescent globes clinging to the fleshy walls and sucking their juice. Everywhere these things. Janer had not realised they were alive until he saw one detach its tick mouth and scuttle along the wall to a new feeding spot. For a day after that the skin on his back crawled whenever he walked underneath one. But in the end one must get used to the presence of life: it was everything around him.

Soon he saw that many of the crew of the Graaf had dispensed with their clothes. Eller, naked on a hyaline strut bone, rested her chin on her knee and grinned at him. She slowly and deliberately parted her other leg to one side as he slowed to make some passing greeting or wry comment. He found he had no words and quickened his pace, aware of the flush rising in his face. The diamond of white wormflesh on the front of her body included her hairless genitalia and ended at a narrow point by her anus. There was something incredibly erotic about it. Behind him he heard her chuckle. Damn. He would have to do something about her. There were stories about what went on inside a snairl when the walls slimed. The creators of holofiction became quite sweaty-palmed about the subject. Janer wanted to find out. He wanted to find out a lot of things — for himself for a change.

In his dry and civilized cabin Janer stripped off his clothing and pulled on the rubber trunks of his surfsuit. He didn't want to wander about the Graaf with a permanent erection waving about in front of him. That kind of thing delimited serious conversation. Admittedly, he did intend to screw Eller at the first opportunity. Finally into his trunks and considering what else he might take out with him he turned to the sudden buzz from beside his compscreen. Jumpy today — very jumpy.

The hornet rose into the air above the antique plastic keyboard — a blur of wings suspending a severed-thumb body and dangly mosquito legs. Faceted eyes glittering. All over its body the hornet was painted with intricate designs in red and yellow-green fluorescent paint.

"I thought you were exploring," said Janer. The hivelink behind his ear buzzed for a moment before the mind replied.

"The slime could kill this unit and I only have five on the Graaf."

"Where are the others?"

"They are in Upper Shell, but even there the conditions are inimical."

"How come? There's no slime there."

"No, but there are rooks."

"How inconvenient."

"They require instruction."

"Are they intelligent enough to learn?"

"You were."

Janer sighed. The 'you' in this case was the human race. It wasn't having another dig at him, for a change. It had come as one shock in many when arrogant humanity had discovered it wasn't the only sentient race on Earth. It was just the loudest and most destructive. Dolphins and whales had always been candidates because of their aesthetic appeal and stories of rescued swimmers. Research in that area had soon cleared things up. Dolphins couldn't tell the difference between a human swimmer and a sick fellow, and were substantially more stupid than the animal humans had been turning into pork on a regular basis. Whales had the intelligence of the average cow. When a hornet built its nest in a VR suit and lodged its protests on the Internet it had taken a long time for anyone to believe. They were stinging things, creepy crawlies, how could they possibly be intelligent? At ten thousand years of age the youngest hivemind showed them. People believed.

"You want to come out in the box, I take it?"

The buzzing of the hivemind seemed contemplative. Thoughts that once took the time of a hornet's flight between nests flicked at the speed of light between hivelinks. Janer held out his hand and the hornet settled on it, vibrating, its legs pressing into his skin like blunt pins. His flesh rebelled but he controlled the urge to shudder and fling the insect away from him. He was getting better at it now: his payment, his service to this mind, for killing a hornet that had tried to settle on his shoulder in a crowded ringball stadium. It had been tired that hornet; searching for somewhere to land and rest, tempted by the beaker of coke Janer had been drinking. His reaction had been instinctive; the phobic horror of insects had risen up inside him and he had knocked the hornet to the ground and stamped on it. The police had come for him the next day. Killing a hornet was not precisely murder, as each creature was just one very small part of the mind. There were stiff penalties, though.

"It would be interesting to observe the interior during the storm. Yes, the box," the mind eventually told him. The hornet launched itself from his hand and hovered above his bed. The box was there: a shaped perspex container with one skinstick surface. It landed by this and crawled inside. Janer picked the box up and pressed it against his shoulder where it stuck.

"There are no phobes on this ship," the mind observed, as if picking up on what Janer had been thinking. He wasn't the only one who had trouble with the idea of allowing huge stinging insects to fly around them unmolested. There were others whose service to a mind had to be without contact with its hornets, who became hysterical in their presence, some who just paid over a large amount of money, and some who required ... adjustments.

"Not surprising," Janer replied casually. "Spend your life inside a floating mollusc and you're sure to lose some of your aversions."

The mind replied to this with something like a snort as its hornet rattled around in the box and settled itself down in the shaped pedestal provided for it. Like this was better for Janer. Now the hornet was no more to him than a camera for the remote and disperse mind, and the voice a disembodied thing. If he didn't look at it he could convince himself that there was only a machine perched on his shoulder. That anus-clenching shudder left him and he could concentrate on other matters. He stooped and picked up a pair of grip shoes, then discarded them. The crew did not wear them so he would try to do without as well. He stepped out of his cabin into a slime-coated artery.

"Why does it produce it?" he wondered loudly.

"A defensive measure for molluscs. It senses the storm and prepares itself."

"How does the slime help?"

"Retroactive reaction. It would have helped if it was being attacked by a predator."

"So the Geneticists didn't straighten every kink in the helix."

"Never say that here," the link hornet warned.

"Would I be so foolish," said Janer dryly.

There was no reply but Janer seemed to get the impression of a feeling something akin to a raised eyebrow. Yes, so I stepped on a hornet in a moment of panic. It won't happen again. In ten years when my service contract is finished I should be well inured to them. Cunning bastards those minds. Under his bare feet the floor was rough and sticky, not at all slippery as he had expected. When he lifted his foot it was still attached by a thousand hair-thin strands.

"They got part of the way there ... the Geneticists," he said.

"What do you mean?"

Janer bowed his shoulder down so the link hornet could see his feet and the tacky mess on the scaled floor.

The hornet said, "Partial adaptation. Unable to get rid of the slime they convert it into a more acceptable form."

"On the floors anyway," said Janer. "Elsewhere it's just as thick and slippery as your usual mucous.

"Of course, they may have made the floors the slime absorption points and what you are encountering here is the residue. The moisture would go first."

"Yes," said Janer, without much interest. Ten paces from his door and he turned to study what was revealed of his cabin between the ceiling and floor of flesh. It was an oblate bone-yellow sphere from which extended organic-looking struts to pierce the flesh, these in turn held by ropes of grey muscle. How like parasites were humans in the uterine living spaces of the Graaf snairl — squirming endoparasites, gall wasps. A little way further along he could see some of the next cabin and a face at a plastiglass portal. That would be Asharn the merchant. Somewhere in this snairl was stored his cargo of exotic organics — synaptic chips, non-specific human augmentations like eyes to see in the dark, guaranteed multiple orgasm vaginas, cetacean capacity lungs, and other things the merchant had hinted at with nods and winks and meaningful looks at the hornet. Crime, if it was to be committed successfully, had to be done so away from prying eyes, especially if they were faceted. Janer had displayed his lack of interest in anything the merchant might have, well aware of a feeling of huge amusement coming through the hivelink.