Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (16 page)

And evaded taxes in the process, Joshua knew. “I think that isn’t really what I’m looking for,” he admitted. “Is there nothing else at all? No strangers? No rumours from across the borderline? No odd magic at all?”

The farmer hesitated, and then shook his head. “No, My Lord,” he said. “It has been a quiet month.”

Joshua thanked him and walked back to Filly, feeling the farmer’s eyes following him until he managed to climb back onto the horse and head out, past the borderline. Not that it was very clear; the boundary was really nothing more than a handful of charmed posts, creating a line that marked the edge of Master Faye’s jurisdiction. No one could enter without realising that they were now subject to a Pillar who determined the law in his bailiwick. Outside, there was a faint sense of freedom – and chaos. Joshua knew that there were people who liked living outside bailiwicks, but they were at the mercy of anyone stronger than themselves. It very rarely ended well.

The road managed to grow even worse as they cantered along, looking for anything unusual, but there was no sign of anything. Eventually, they reached the resting place and Joshua steered the horse inside. There were no wagons in the clearing, no travellers resting before heading down to Warlock’s Bane, yet Joshua couldn’t escape the sense that he was being watched. The dark forest looked utterly impassable. Anything could be hiding there, including a greedy Scion bent on conquest. Slowly, reluctantly, Joshua turned and pushed Filly out of the clearing, back to the road. It was something he would have to report to Master Faye...

... But if there was a Scion there, outside the borderline, who could object? It wasn’t as if he was living in Master Faye’s territory. He could do anything there.

Once they were back on the road, Joshua took the opportunity to use his mental voice to speak to Master Faye, to tell him what they’d learned, before he started to head along the borderline. He could ask the other farmers as he swept around the edge of the bailiwick, a task that would take most of the day. Irritating as it was, it was necessary – and besides, the alternative was more lectures from Master Faye. The trip was almost a break. Or it would have been, if he hadn’t had Filly.

The horse snickered again and Joshua sighed. When he was Pillar, he was going to hand Filly over to a breeder with strict orders never to let him into a field, let alone onto the roads. And he was never going to ride a horse again. Flying, with all its dangers, was much more pleasant than riding. He saw birds flying in the distance and smiled. Flying was a skill he needed to master. It gave him a sense of freedom that he’d never had while down on the ground.

“Behave yourself,” he told Filly. The horse made a rude noise and tried to bolt. Joshua pulled on the reins carefully, readying another charm. There had to be something that could allow a magician to control a horse directly. “We have a few more farms to visit before we can go home.”

CHAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

The snoop followed the rider as he headed away from the clearing and back towards the first set of farms. Dacron watched through its sensors as the rider turned westwards, taking a poorly-maintained road that led around where they believed the border to run. His arrival at the landing zone could not be a coincidence. Dacron lacked the sheer processing power he’d had as an AI, but he could still calculate the odds – and knew that they were staggeringly low that his arrival was a coincidence.

“We tracked him backwards,” the AIs said, through the radio link. The QCC links that would have allowed them to practically manifest on Darius were breaking down, suffering a series of inexplicable glitches. They were operating at one remove and
hated
it. “He set out from Warlock’s Bane as soon as the sun rose, heading out towards us. They must have detected our arrival.”

Elyria scowled. “But
how
?”

“Magic?” The AIs suggested. “Or maybe they are more aware of what happens in their world than we realised.”

Dacron scowled. The more he looked at the data, the more he was convinced that there was an intelligence behind Darius, even if it was one with very strange priorities. It disrupted – but it didn’t stop – surveillance programs. There had been no attempt to do more than interfere with the snoops, if the interference had been deliberate. And then the shuttle hadn’t suffered any major glitches until it was safely down on the ground, when there had been a glitch that had shocked the team, without actually killing anyone. Dacron’s best guess was that the glitches were warning shots, but why would anyone do that when they could just have hailed
Hamilton
and asked them to leave the star system?

“That isn’t the issue,” Jorlem said, calmly. “Do we move the shuttle?”

There was a long pause. A simple visual survey of the clearing would have revealed nothing; the diggers had been so precise that they’d actually rebuilt the wheel tracks left behind by previous visitors. But if the locals had some form of ESP that would allow them to locate the shuttle... the observation team might be dangerously exposed. There was nothing stopping the locals from simply digging it up with buckets and spades.

“That raises a separate issue,” Fred offered. “
Can
we move the shuttle?”

Dacron had his doubts. The antigravity units had been tested several times since the glitch and they all seemed to be in perfect condition, which proved nothing. They’d been in perfect condition before the shuttle had entered the atmosphere. Moving the shuttle might be simple, or it might be very dangerous. The next glitch might prove lethal.

“I do not believe that we should risk it unless we have no other choice,” he said, and outlined his reasoning. “If the locals do come here with a party, we stun them and move away.”

“Assuming that stun weapons work,” Adam pointed out. “Who knows
what
will glitch next?”

Adana glanced over at him. “Don’t you know anything from the Ancient worlds?”

“The glitches were always random,” Adam explained. “Sometimes pieces of technology would refuse to work – and then the next day they’d be working perfectly. The only common thread we found that bound them together was that the more advanced any given piece of technology was, the more likely it was to glitch. Some of those glitches proved fatal.”

Dacron nodded. The Confederation had practically reinvented the wheel to allow safe operations on Ancient worlds, using technology that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Second or Third Age world. Even so, the technology did have problems, which was why some researchers believed that the Ancients – or the Elders – were deliberately screwing with the lesser races attempting to explore their ruins.

“If the stunners don’t work,” Elyria asked, “what do we do then?”

“There are other weapons,” Jorlem pointed out. “We could use the gas, then scan their minds and...”

“Out of the question,” Elyria snapped. “There are ethical issues here.”

Dacron had to check his terminal before he understood her anger. The Confederation’s technology allowed it to do all sorts of things, including reading minds, editing memories, reprogramming minds and genetically-engineering slaves. But the Confederation, largely in memory of the atrocities committed by the Thule, also had strict laws governing the use of such technology. They weren’t put aside just because it would be useful to scan a local’s mind and find out what they knew of their world. Even with the chance to learn how to manipulate the quantum foam, those laws would remain in force.

But would Jorlem respect them? Or, for that matter, would the AIs? Dacron found himself caught between two different opinions, unable to decide which one was right. The AIs had little concept of mental privacy; indeed, it was hard to draw lines between the different AIs that made up the mental
Gestalt
. It would be very tempting to consider the option of kidnapping Master Faye or one of the other identified magicians and scanning his mind, hoping to see how he worked magic. Given the sheer immensity of the prize, Dacron wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t be considered acceptable after all.

And yet he knew that it would cause a rupture in the Confederation if the truth ever came out.

Other societies could and did talk about cruel necessity. Sometimes they were even right. When the food supplies ran short, they had to be rationed, even if that meant sentencing a part of the population to death. Or worse. There were societies that had had to destroy half their population to prevent the spread of a deadly virus that would have wiped them out. But the Confederation had no such excuse. Probing a mind without permission would horrify everyone. It would still worry them even if permission
were
granted.

“I think it should be considered,” Jorlem said. “The ability to manipulate the quantum foam...”

“Is not worth the risk of utter disgrace,” Elyria pointed out, sharply. “Just because they’re primitive doesn’t give us the right to treat them like animals.”

There was, Dacron noted, a certain amount of hypocrisy in her words. The Confederation didn’t hesitate to tear down primitive human societies it judged uncivilised, destroying their governments and incorporating their inhabitants into the Confederation. There was a strong school of thought that suggested the Confederation should do the same to alien races, particularly the ones still struggling through their First Age. And yet the cultural shock of encountering the Confederation would be vastly greater for a non-human race. They wouldn’t be able to realise that
humans
had built the towering Confederation.

But intervening in human societies was for their own good. Everyone agreed on that. However probing their minds, without permission... Elyria was right. They’d be treating them as animals.

“We stay here, then,” Elyria said, clapping her hands together. “And if they come back, we move,
without
being seen. I don’t want to have to wipe anyone’s memory.”

“Assuming we can do that here,” Adam pointed out. “What happens if the brain-probe suffers a glitch in the middle of the session?”

Dacron nodded. The likelihood of brain damage would be unacceptably high.

“Put out an extra shell of snoops,” Elyria added. “Make sure we monitor everyone leaving the city; try to tag them all with a snoop if possible. The AIs can draw it all together into a workable whole.”

“That leaves the other issue,” Adana said. “Are we still going to head down to the city?”

“If half of us were away from the shuttle,” Jorlem pointed out, “they could easily end up being stranded.”

“But we’d still know where they were,” Dacron countered, defending the honour of the AIs. “They could be warned and then picked up later.”

“True,” Elyria agreed. She looked from face to face, and then nodded. “We’ll wait an hour, see if anyone comes up here after us. If not, we will proceed with the plan.”

“There may be problems in discovering what they know,” Dacron warned. “The places we have identified as government buildings are places the snoops have been unable to go. We may not know if they are planning to move against us.”

“We’d see them coming,” Jorlem said. “Even if all the snoops fail, there’s orbital observation...”

“Unless the power that glitches our equipment can reach up to low orbit,” Adam pointed out.
Hamilton
was well away from the planet, although no one knew what actually constituted a safe distance. The network of microsatellites was expendable, if necessary. They could always make more. “What happens then?”

“We might be in trouble,” Jorlem said, dryly.

“Keep reviewing the data,” Elyria ordered, finally. “And then we can prepare to move the wagons out onto the surface.”

Dacron left the shuttle as the meeting broke up and stepped out into the cavern the diggers had created, hollowing out the ground under the clearing. Much of the earth and stone had been processed into building materials, allowing the base to expand at astonishing speed; they were already installing an elevator that would lift the wagons to the surface when the time came. Given enough time, and a suitable source of raw materials, the base would become large enough to house an entire research team, as well as hundreds of sensors devised by the AIs. One of them, Dacron had learned, attempted to measure changes in universal constants, something only possible by manipulating the quantum foam. The full potentials of the capability were rather terrifying. What if someone managed to cancel gravity all over the universe?

It seemed impossible; it
was
impossible, at least by conventional technology. One could manipulate gravity, even counteract it, but cancelling the force altogether? It was at least theoretically possible. One could do remarkable things in hyperspace, given enough processing power; the AIs had certainly proven that possible. What could one do if granted access to the quantum foam? The inhabitants of Darius might become gods.

But they weren’t gods. It was difficult to be sure, but there had to be limits to their powers, apart from their own self-restraint. Maybe they countered each other, or maybe there were other limits to what they could do. Human brains were slow and feeble, as Dacron well knew. What could an AI do with the power to manipulate the quantum foam?

It made a certain kind of sense. Everyone knew that races in their Sixth Age – transcendence, like the Elder Races – became beings of pure thought and energy. They probably had at least some connection to hyperspace, like the AIs, as well as a link to the quantum foam. Given enough power, they could presumably do far more using the quantum foam than any mere human. They’d certainly be more capable of comprehending their full potential.

And then they just... faded away.

It was another mystery, one that fuelled the Conservatives’ desire to hold the Confederation in an eternal state of stasis. Few Elders would talk to the Confederation – apparently, there had been one major contact, which had been hushed up – but it was clear that they eventually went... elsewhere. Did they burn out, the energies that supported them no longer sustainable, or did they ascend to a higher plane of existence? Or did the universe eventually erase them from existence, making room for other beings? No one had ever been able to figure out the answer.