Polity 4 - The Technician (26 page)

This man
before her was a haiman. The crystal disc with its steel scallop-shell hub on
the left-hand side of his skull contained the artificial intelligence he
interfaced with. Such AIs were usually at the lower limits of the Turing band –
argued by some to be outside present definitions of AI – whilst his own heavily
augmented brain, with its cooling grids, its massive amount of implants
spilling from the right-hand side of his skull into a half-face augmentation,
its bio-electronics, and the whole array of physical supports from his also
heavily augmented body, stood at the upper limits of Human function – argued by
some to be outside any realistic definition of Humanity. Here, in this being,
the gap between AI and Human had been narrowed but, as yet, not closed.

‘I would
question your choice of the words “since its arrival here”,’ said the haiman
Drode. ‘Having studied your original data recordings before you ran, I see it
quite likely this object was concealed in an adjacent U-space fold within the
Wizender system.’

‘Position
is a rather debatable feast when talking about U-space,’ said Janice, not
liking his hectoring tone.

‘As you
are aware,’ Drode said, ‘the least energy an object in U-space uses to surface
into the real brings it out in its adjacent position
there.’ He waved a dismissive hand. ‘This is all semantics.’

Janice
blinked, glanced over to her viewing wall, now showing Egyptian tomb paintings,
dismissed them and replaced them with a view from her probe nearest the object.
Now they looked upon a spectacular view of this thing, still poised over the
gas giant but no longer sucking up gas. Below it the surface of that Jovian
world still roiled with the storms the thing had caused. They were beautiful,
the world striated with all the finely aged colours of the paintings previously
occupying the viewing wall. She grimaced to herself and decided not to point
out that it wasn’t his criticism of her wording about position in U-space that
had annoyed her, but his offhand comment about her running.

It seems that to attain a higher form of Humanity it was
necessary to sacrifice tact, Cheops commented, directly into her mind.

No, she replied, I think all aspects
of Humanity were upraised here, so if he was an arsehole before they started
screwing metal into his head, that means he’s an even bigger arsehole now.

‘So why
are you here?’ she asked.

He’d
requested a face-to-face talk, docked and boarded when she agreed, and first
asked about the current state of the mechanism out there. She couldn’t
understand why. Since she’d been instructed to come back here and watch over the
thing she’d sent regular reports, and the instrumentation aboard his own vessel
should have been quite sufficient to give him an answer to that question.

‘I’m
here to make an assessment of all available data and report back,’ the haiman
replied.

Ah, commented Cheops, a specialist . .
.

‘I still
don’t understand why we don’t have more of a presence here,’ said Janice.
‘Surely this thing warrants at least a couple of the newer dreadnoughts and a
science vessel?’

‘Calculated
risks. The object showed no reaction to Cheops,
which was why you got sent back. Bringing in anything bigger or making more
aggressive studies of it might result in precisely the kind of reaction we want
to avoid.’

It’s big, it might be dangerous, keep watch on it but leave it
alone, Cheops interpreted.

From her
throne Janice peered through a hull-mounted camera at the haiman’s docked
vessel. It was one of the new attack ships, a lethal-looking squid of a vessel
which she knew possessed the kind of firepower that ought to worry even Cheops.
Beneath notice? She thought not.

‘So tell
me,’ Drode continued, ‘in your own words, precisely what you have discovered.’

All her
data were available, but she understood he wanted more than that. He wanted the
opinion of the watcher on site, wanted to make his special assessment, to
process data in ways that might yield unforeseen results. Usual AI technique –
you throw diverse minds at the weird ones. She sighed, thought for a moment
about all that data, then said, ‘The tip of the iceberg.’ She paused. No, that
wasn’t right. ‘No, the body, the head of an octopus sticking its head above
water, its tentacles all splayed out with their tips peeking out of the same
surface some distance from it.’

‘Yes,’
he said, ‘it retains U-com to other transceivers scattered across a realspace
region estimated at over a thousand light years across.’ He paused. ‘I am,
however, interested to know more about your octopus analogy. You see whatever
lies at those other locations as the tips of octopus tentacles – as something less
than the object here.’

‘Perhaps
a bad analogy.’ Janice tried to see her way through it. ‘My feeling is that
this thing is the centre, and that those other transceivers are part of it,
part of a network of sensors or perhaps other devices spread out from it.’

‘It
does, however, lie on the edge of the region it covers, not at the centre.’

‘Metaphorical
centre.’

‘The
other objects could be exactly the same as it,’ he suggested.

‘No way
– that region you mention extends into Polity space and a large collection of
things of the same mass as the thing here, no matter how widely dispersed,
would have been picked up.’ She hesitated for a second. ‘Have they been
detected? Did the big-fuck AIs know all about this thing before it appeared?’

‘No,
they did not.’ He smiled, a twist of the mouth only, nothing reaching eyes
containing a scaly metallic glitter. ‘Their assessment of it is much the same
as your own: this object sits at the centre of a sensor net, those sensors
occupying U-space interfaces.’ He stopped there. Janice was sure he had been
about to add more. ‘What do you think its purpose is?’ he finally asked.

‘Some
kind of alien defence system, maybe left over by one of the dead races?’ she
suggested.

‘Employing
what manner of weaponry?’

She
shrugged, sending a ripple down her optics to her sarcophagus. ‘Could be
anything. It can suck up and remodel matter in just about any form as far as I
can see, and it can—’ She stopped dead, making a sudden intuitive leap. ‘You’ve
found one of the sensors haven’t you?’

He bowed
his head in acknowledgement. ‘It is being studied, passively, as we speak.’

‘What
can you tell me about it?’

‘It
scans, across the EM band, all material objects within its vicinity. However,
passive analysis of its scanning format reveals that it is tuned to recognize
precise bio-electrical patterns.’

‘Searching
for some long-dead aggressor?’

‘Perhaps
– it certainly shows no great interest in Polity activity within its scanning
area.’

‘What
else?’

‘It
draws energy from the realspace U-space interface.’

‘Then
it’s also an anchor.’

He
blinked, paused for internal calculations.

‘Yes, it
seems so.’

She
gestured to the screen wall. ‘Probably an efficient way of drawing this thing
to its location should it find that old aggressor, or perhaps so it can more
easily send something. With an anchor the thing out there could penetrate some
levels of U-space disruption.’

Again that
slight bow of the head.

‘So we
have some possible answers,’ she said, ‘but not the main one we want.’

‘Which
is?’

‘Why the
hell has it surfaced here, and now?’

‘Which
is precisely the question I was going to ask you.’

‘It
found something – it’s preparing to act.’ She studied him intently but could
read little from his expression. ‘Where is this sensor you found?’

‘In the
Graveyard.’

‘So
maybe the Prador?’

‘No –
they’ve been in the region for centuries.’

‘Then
what?’

‘We
don’t know.’

Why do I get the feeling, interjected Cheops, that shit and fan are moving into conjunction, and that we might
be in the way?

Probably because they are and we are, she replied.

‘I have
to question why the Polity isn’t taking this thing a little more seriously,’
she said to the haiman. ‘Is that a question you can answer?’

I think our answer is just arriving, said Cheops.

Janice
felt the disruption through her connection with the ship AI, like something
dragging at her skin, or a wrongness, a distortion seen through some extra eye
she had not possessed until then. The dreadnought that surfaced into the real
was instantly recognizable: a thing like a giant bracket fungus made of steel,
snapped from some titanic world-tree. They called it Scold
– an understated light-hearted label for something very dangerous. It seemed
the Polity had decided to take that thing out there very seriously indeed.

Jem opened his eyes to a bright comfortable place, and a feeling of utter
disjointed confusion. He remembered the agony, and so much more: the demon
falling upon him like a wave of writhing sharp-edged blackness, snatching away
his knife then sliding the bloody mess from his other hand, inserting wormish
tentacles into the ruin where his face had been. The demon took away the agony
in gradual stages, knitting ruination back together in a way that exactly
mirrored what had been done to him two decades ago, that mirror opening his
mind to clear slaughterhouse memories of the Technician, that time preceding it
and much that came after. He remembered seeming to float in the demon’s swirl
of darkness, up the Polity ship’s ramp, through internal spaces more like city
parks than any ship he had known, finally to this place, this garden.

But
though memories now lay clear in his mind, he felt utterly disconnected from a
reality seemingly wholly distorted. Gazing at the two nearby he recognized them
from outside the ship, yet some deeper part of him could not quite integrate
them. They were such an odd shape: small, simply jointed limbs, flat-faced and
just two eyes – almost like something put together by a child.

‘Earthnet,’
said one of them. ‘You’re working for Earthnet?’

The
words possessed a strange clarity and in a second he realized why. The
muttering was gone, that constant sound, as of a discussion being conducted one
room away, had disappeared. The man’s voice also brought him into focus for
Jem: Leif Grant, commander of the eastern forces of the rebellion, the first
Human face he had seen this side of the Technician’s punishment and that flow
of Euclidean shapes. He hadn’t remembered the man at the time, but now
recollected that Grant had been on the Theocracy hit list for some time. The
woman he didn’t recognize. Perhaps she was one of the crew of this Polity
spaceship – certainly she looked far too Human to be
one of the passengers.

‘I’d
perfectly understand if you told me to go away right now, Leif,’ she said. ‘But
since I was allowed to send a recording of what happened out there, the story
just became huge and, really, someone has to report it. If I provide that
story, Earthnet will be able to farm out portions of it to some of the other
Net News services, and that way you won’t be bothered by other reporters.’

Grant
gazed at her steadily. ‘Reporters ain’t no bother unless they’re allowed to be.
I just don’t get why it let you through.’

He
gestured off to one side at something black and sharp-edged in this colourful
paradise. Jem concentrated his attention on this thing, but wasn’t quite sure
what to make of the form the demon had taken now. It had reduced itself to a
flattened ovoid, hard angles, glinting protrusions, gutlike metallic and glassy
folds – almost like a metal brain with crystals of obsidian in the process of
breaking out from inside it. Yet, this strange thing seemed almost more logical than the two Humans. Movement off to the side of
it swung his attention that way.

Jem
gazed in puzzlement at the sight that met his eyes, simply failing to
understand it, feeling a niggling terror of the thing. Then, abruptly, he
realized what he was seeing. Datura, a datura tree – he’d seen them in his
Bishop’s garden. But it wasn’t movement of the long trumpet-like pink blossoms
that attracted his attention, but the zipping flight of the electric-blue
humming bird feeding on their nectar. Utterly fascinated he watched it proceed
from bloom to bloom, as if seeing something for the first time he knew he had
seen before.

‘Hasn’t
it told you?’

The two
were at one of a scattering of tables in the enclosed garden, close to Jem and
sitting higher, a bottle and two glasses on the tabletop between them. He lay
on some sort of lounger. This place in fact rather resembled a Bishop’s garden
with its collection of exotic plants and comfortable furniture, though he
couldn’t see any walls and the ceiling looked like a blue sky with a yellowish
sun burning in it – a sky some deep part of him recognized, though he had never
gazed upon one like it.

‘As you
can see, Penny Royal’s shut down,’ said Grant. ‘It don’t like to be aboard this
ship – don’t want the mind here takin’ a close look.’

The
woman now turned towards Jem, who quickly closed his eyes and pretended to
still be asleep, which was an easy pretence when lying in such ridiculously
luxurious comfort.

‘So what
the hell happened back there?’ she asked.

Hell indeed, thought Jem. He had tried to cut off his own
face. Yes, his own face – the prosthetic had been removed long ago and, using
Polity technology, Sanders had regrown his own flesh.

Jem’s
stomach tightened with deep gnawing guilt, and suddenly he no longer felt
comfortable, no longer felt either disconnected or confused. He clearly saw
Sanders lying in a pool of her own blood. He had cut the throat of the woman
who had looked after him for so long, and her being on the side of the enemy
did nothing to assuage his guilt. Even his madness seemed no excuse and the
suffering he had self-inflicted no recompense. So intense was the feeling he
felt the heaviness of tears behind his face, his repaired face. But to cry
seemed like self-indulgence, self-pity and childish denial of his
responsibility. He tried to step back from it; to be more analytical and
rediscover that earlier disconnect, but it just wouldn’t come.