Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (17 page)

His implanted communicator buzzed. “Dacron, it’s time to get dressed,” Elyria said. “Can you report to the dressing room?”

“On my way,” Dacron said.

He walked back into the shuttle. The AIs didn’t even begin to comprehend humanity’s fascination with clothing, although Dacron was starting to suspect that it actually served a functional purpose. Several weeks as a human had taught him that looking at nude attractive females was very distracting. Oddly, he didn’t seem to have any yen for human males, which surprised him. Perhaps it was a biological desire to procreate buried inside his new body that drove him towards females. But the Confederation could easily turn a male into a female.

Local clothing, at least that deemed suitable for apprentices, was grey and uncomfortable. AIs did not have a sense of aesthetics, at least as humans understood the term, and Dacron found it hard to care what he wore, but the humans had said it was ugly. Looking at himself in the reflector field, Dacron was inclined to agree. The outfit didn’t show his body to his best advantage. On the other hand, as he was supposed to be a lowly apprentice, that was probably a good thing.

Adam, as the merchantman, enjoyed a far more spectacular set of clothes. A bright red and orange suit, with a green sash and leather belt, ensured that everyone would know him for a rich and prosperous merchant. He carried a cane in one hand – careful study of the snoop records had informed them that the canes were normally concealed swords – and a large bag in the other, which held notebooks, quill pens and a small amount of gold, silver and bronze coins. The hat he wore completed his disguise; Jorlem, who wasn’t allowed to join the first exploration mission, had snidely pointed out that it made an excellent target. Elyria had suggested that might be the point.

His wife – played by Gigot – had an outfit similar to her husband, although hers had a long dress instead of trousers. It was also very loose, concealing the shape of her breasts; she wore no hat, nor was she allowed to carry a sword. The weapons she did carry would have to be kept hidden from the locals, as only a small number of women had been observed carrying any weapons at all. Until the exact nature of the local taboos were figured out, none of the women could carry weapons openly.

The daughters – Elyria and Adana – were dressed in drab black robes. Analysis had suggested that the black robes signified unmarried women, but there was no way to know for sure, at least until they had a chance to ask. It wasn’t unusual to see girls accompanying their parents on business trips and a number had been observed helping with the sales, or keeping the accounts. In cities, women seemed to live more restricted lives, although there were a number of female-owned business. Or so they thought. Dacron reminded himself, again, that they were seeing everything at one remove and they might not fully understand what was going on.

Finally, the bodyguards wore leather armour and carried swords. They’d been lucky; a snoop had seen one of the City Guardsmen demanding a weapons permit and one had been handed over, allowing the fabricator to produce a forged copy. Adana had pointed out that primitive societies often tried to restrict weapons ownership, knowing that it might lead to rebellion if the lower classes got ideas. They hadn’t picked up many people owning weapons other than the City Guards and those wealthy enough to pay the fees.

“We have been through the procedure seven times,” Elyria said. She might have been playing a submissive daughter, but she was definitely in charge. “We say little about where we come from; if pressed, give them the cover story and little else. Ideally, we say nothing while buying items from their shops, particularly books. Keep an eye open for anyone selling them.”

Dacron nodded. Apart from the libraries, which were proving worryingly closed to the snoops, there were travelling booksellers, who moved from city to city selling books. One of them was heading to Warlock’s Bane, which was another reason to start their operations there. A few dozen books could tell them more about the society on Darius than anything else. Quite where the books came from was something of a mystery, although he had no doubt the AIs would solve it soon enough. Making paper wasn’t difficult and printing presses would be relatively simple, even for Darius’s level of technology. And perhaps they could use magic to speed it up.

“We will take an inn inside the city” – all of the other travelling merchants had done the same, no doubt because they felt cramped inside their tiny caverns – “and assume that we will be watched at all times,” Elyria continued. “Just because these people are primitive doesn’t mean that they are stupid. We’ve seen them spying on each other just to try to get better deals. Use the implants for any communications outside our roles, or to stay in touch with the
Hamilton.
Alert us at once if you run into trouble of any sort.”

She smiled. “It will be hard for some of you to stay in character,” she concluded. “Remember that there is no other choice – and that you volunteered for it.”

Dacron
hadn’t
volunteered – or perhaps the AI that had spawned him had volunteered in his place. But it wasn’t what Elyria meant and he knew it. Everyone would have to play their roles, including the women – and they were playing second-class citizens at best. The Confederation had no real concept of gender discrimination – being able to change sex at will had eliminated it completely – but Darius didn’t seem to have anything of the sort, unless it was done by magic. Elyria had stepped into primitive worlds before, as had Adana. Gigot... hadn’t.

Two hours later, the drones helped move the wagons to the surface. The horses weren’t happy at all – they’d been bred on a Ring and they found Darius a little unnatural – but Fred and Plax handled them perfectly. Indeed, it was possible that the locals would want them both for breeding stock. They’d had their genetic code improved, although they hadn’t been uplifted to intelligence. Uplift procedures were banned, another legacy of the Thule War. No one would easily forget uplifted gorillas rampaging across human worlds.

“Here we go,” Elyria said, as she climbed into a carriage. “Next stop, Warlock’s Bane.”

Despite himself, Dacron couldn’t resist a thrill. This was going to be something
new
.

CHAPTER
F
OURTEEN

They smelt the city a long time before they drew near to it.

Elyria took a breath, silently grateful for the enhancements in her sense of smell. Most primitive societies lived in filth, literally, unaware that it was dangerously unhealthy. Only a handful of human colony worlds that had lost technology had remembered germs and how diseases spread from person to person. Darius didn’t seem to be any different. The unholy combination of smells reached out towards them as they finally headed down towards the city.

Warlock’s Bane was laughably small by the standards of the Confederation, or even by the standards of a Second Age society. The snoops had revealed no more than a few thousand people living in the city, mainly workers, merchants and a handful of governors and City Guardsmen. That too wasn’t untypical; the majority of Darius’s population would still live on the land, producing food for their masters. They’d seen enough farms from orbit to conclude that the yields were very low, barely average for a First Age society. The locals had no way of countering crop pests, diseases and other problems that plagued comparable societies.

The city was surrounded by a high stone wall, topped with battlements that suggested the main threat to the city was an invading army trying to climb over the defences and into the city. Elyria knew that such walls would become obsolete very quickly once the locals developed gunpowder; indeed, given the power of some of their magicians, the walls might be already useless. Maybe they just marked the limits of the city, although they’d seen several cities where the walls were surrounded by shacks on both sides. An enemy with nothing more than swords and spears could use the ramshackle hovels for cover and advance against the city. It wasn’t very secure.

Warlock’s Bane seemed to avoid having any habitations on the wrong side of the wall. Someone had cleared away everything that could provide cover to an invading army, leaving them exposed to arrows fired from the walls – assuming that the City Guards had enough manpower to hold back an army. Their snoops couldn’t go everywhere, so it was impossible to be sure, but it looked very much as if they
didn’t
have enough trained men to hold the walls. The real protection of the city rested in the power and reputation of Master Faye.
That
was strange, almost an inverse of every other First Age society Elyria had studied; there was no way to know what it meant for the development of society at large.

Unless it’s another Kahn
, she told herself, silently.
Some animals are just more equal than others
.

The road, never very good outside the borderlines, grew better as they headed down towards the main gates. Elyria felt the carriage rocking as the horses started to slow down, waiting for the gates to open and allow them to enter. A heavy portcullis barred their way until it rattled upwards, powered by a pair of slaves who were chained to the pulley. It was a killing ground for unwary invaders, she’d been told; inside the gatehouse, they’d be bottled up and very vulnerable to anything from swordsmen to boiling oil. Dropping hot oil on enemy heads was a standard tactic in medieval societies, even though it inflicted injuries that were very much beyond their ability to mend. That might have been the point.

“Here we go,” Adana said, as they rattled into the gatehouse. There was a long, almost pregnant pause, and then the inner portcullis slowly rose up into the air, allowing the horses to pull the carriages forward, into the courtyard. It was a barren space, smelling of the wastes of countless horses, with a handful of low gates that barred access into the city beyond. “Just keep our mouths shut.”

Elyria nodded. Thankfully, the locals didn’t seem to be particularly corrupt, at least from what they’d picked up with the snoops. There might be a demand that some city taxes were paid, but they weren’t going to try to steal everything in the carriages. And yet they would just have to wait and see what happened. As far as they could tell, cities that had poor government, the type that would make it hard for merchants to operate, were simply excluded from the trading networks. It wasn’t an uncommon pattern when a world was developing the rudiments of a capitalist economy.

The carriages came to a halt and the guardsmen bellowed orders for the occupants to climb out. Elyria pasted a vaguely worried expression on her face and opened the door before the bodyguards could reach them, jumping down to the muddy – and smelly – ground and lifting up her skirt to ensure it didn’t get dirty. Adana followed her down; Elyria smiled inwardly as she saw the guards trying not to stare. They’d marred their skin slightly to match the local women – most people, it seemed, caught some kind of pox when they were growing up – but they were still cleaner than most. That, at least, wasn’t uncommon among local travelling merchants, for obvious reasons. They spent most of their time on the road rather than in disease-ridden cities.

“Over here,” Adam barked, playing the proud and dominant father. The guards had offered them a small hut in which to rest and wait, while the guards searched the carriages for smuggled goods. “And stop acting like children!”

Elyria concealed a smile and took a seat, waiting patiently for the guards to finish their search. It had been difficult to tell what was actually forbidden in Warlock’s Bane, but they’d been careful to only bring along duplications of items they’d seen other merchants taking into the city. The
real
secret was the concealed technology, items beyond local imagination. Even if they found them worked into the wood and iron that made up the carriages, they wouldn’t recognise them for what they were. Or so they hoped.

The chief guardsman entered the hut a moment later, checking the bodyguard papers with surprising attention to detail. Elyria scowled, inwardly, wondering if they’d made a mistake when forging them. They had such complete coverage of most primitive worlds that it was easy to forget that they might have missed something – and they
didn’t
have complete coverage of Darius. The papers should have been indistinguishable from other, perfectly valid papers, but the guard was hesitating. A moment later, he grunted his approval, stamped a note on each sheet of paper and handed them back to the owners. Elyria allowed herself a moment of relief before the interrogation began.

Being women, Gigot, Adana and herself were largely ignored, apart from glances the guardsman tossed in their direction when he thought their ‘father’ wasn’t paying attention. Adam took the brunt of the questioning, which he skilfully deflected after endless simulations on
Hamilton
based on what they’d overheard through the snoops. Yes, they were traders of no fixed abode; yes, they had links to the sea-folk; it was where they’d purchased their goods. And they’d come so far inland because they were looking for higher profits. A handful of questions made little sense. The guardsman wanted to know if they’d seen anything unusual on their trip. Lacking an idea of what was unusual on Darius, Adam could only say that they’d seen nothing and pray that was enough. It seemed to be, thankfully.

Another guardsman returned with a sheet of paper, which he’d used to list their trade goods. The guardsman read it quickly and then nodded, passing it to Adam for him to read and sign. Adam held it so the others could see it too, pretending to have difficulty reading it. The guards had done a thorough job of searching the carriages, to the point where they’d included a number of items as trade goods that were nothing of the sort. They’d certainly never intended to offer sleeping blankets for sale. That would definitely raise eyebrows.

“You will be expected to present them when you leave the city,” the guardsmen said, when Adam raised the issue. He made a mark on the paper before handing it back to Adam. “If they happen to be missing, you will be expected to pay import duty on them. For the moment, you will pay twenty gold; if you fail to sell all of your goods, you may claim a refund.”