The Golden Queen (14 page)

Avik took her hands, held them. “What you need,” he said softly, “is another human to help you cope with this change.”

Maggie glared at him and thought,
If there were another human in this room
,
I
would
do that
. She was painfully aware that Avik’s enhancements made him unlike other men. He had a dreamy look in his eyes, a soft-spoken nature, a predisposition to move his hands as he spoke. In every way he was a dronon technician, as distinct in his characteristics as a bloodhound would be among mongrels. Yet Maggie could not hate him for something he could not change.

“Set me free,” Maggie pleaded. “I can’t live the way you want me to.”

“Of course you can,” Avik said. “It takes time, but you can become dronon. In fact, you have no choice in the matter. Believe me, you will find peace among us.”

“I can’t,” Maggie said. “Don’t you see how different they are from us? We weren’t meant to live like the dronon.”

“The differences between us and the dronon are superficial,” Avik said. “They have chitin, we have skin. But we are both a species of conquerors, and both of us found the need to overwhelm nature, expand our domain to the stars. Do you realize how few sentient species have done this?”

“We are nothing like them!” Maggie shouted. “If we were, they wouldn’t need to force us into their castes.…”

Avik smiled, sat back smugly. “They are not forcing us into castes. Don’t you see what they are doing? They are merely enhancing the differences that already exist between us. Even in the natural state, some of your men are born to be warriors. The urge to compete in them is so overwhelming that they can hardly control it.” Maggie suddenly thought of Gallen. “And others of your men are like me, dreamers and creators. Some of your people are workers—unable to stop, unable to enjoy any other facet of life but the workplace. And some of you are nurturers, breeders who find comfort in sprawling families and take joy in raising children. And some of you are born to become leaders. In every age of humanity, it has been this way. The hive mind is within us, just as it is within the dronon. Believe me, once your people make the transition to our order, your children will enjoy greater peace and prosperity than they have ever known.”

It was disconcerting in a way to watch Avik, so human in form, talk about humans as if they were alien. But she could see the alienness in his eyes, in the hungry way he watched her.

“But you have no freedom. Our children will have no choice in their decisions,” Maggie shouted. She found herself shaking with rage, her muscles spasming.

“Perhaps we lose a little,” Avik countered, “but we gain much in return. We have no crime on dronon worlds, for the Guides do not allow it. We have no confusion over making simple choices. We don’t spend vast portions of our youth uselessly vacillating as we struggle to learn what we shall become. Among the hives, each child knows what he or she will do as an adult. We are bred to our positions, and we
do
find peace, a peace that is greater and more profound than any you can imagine. It may appear to be a contradiction, but though our laws seem restrictive to you, they free us to find that peace.” Avik spoke evenly, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. Maggie looked into his wild eyes, wanted to shout him down, yet he so obviously believed in the dronon order, she realized that to argue would be futile.

Still, she could not resist the temptation to say more. “Avik, don’t you see—your order doesn’t really free you, it merely limits you. You could choose to be more than an architect—you could become anything you want: a father, a leader, a warrior. The dronon haven’t freed you. They’ve merely made you comfortable. You have become content slaves, when you could be gods.”

Avik’s nostrils flared. Maggie could see that she’d struck a chord. He backed up in his chair, looked at her appraisingly. “You will never speak against the order again.”

Maggie tried to argue, but the Guide stopped her tongue and would not let her speak, so that his words seemed to carry the weight of a prophecy.

Avik got up from his chair, put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I will instruct your Guide to continue tutoring you in the ways of the dronon, and in your job. Each time you think of the order, your Guide will give you comfort, and perhaps in this way, over time, you will learn to love the order. Tomorrow you will begin working on the Adoration Project, and as you learn to love our order, you will in turn be teaching others to love it. Maggie, don’t fight us. You can’t win, and you might get hurt in the struggle.”

He cupped her chin in one hand, and her Guide sent her a spasm of lust that knotted her stomach and made her face burn. She tried to fight it, to give vent to her anger, but she realized that Avik was controlling her Guide, forcing this emotion on her. “You’re such a pretty thing. I like red hair. Lord Karthenor has asked me to give you physical companionship. You will find that having sex while wearing a Guide is more compelling than anything you have ever dreamed. No beast in heat will ever find greater satisfaction than you will find with me this night.”

Maggie locked her legs together and curled up in a ball on the bed. She knew that fighting would be no use. Her Guide could take control of her muscles at any moment, force her to open her legs and give herself to him. But she needed to do this, to commit one small act of defiance.

Avik grinned. “So, is that to be the way of it? Then I’ll leave you to this lust, and it shall keep you company tonight. Tomorrow, when I return and make the offer again, you will be grateful.”

Avik left the room. The lights dimmed as he exited, and Maggie was left in pain, screaming inside, aching for Gallen.

Gallen returned to the pidc that morning, put on the instruction hood. “Teach me about mankind,” he said. The teacher began with genetics and showed the path of evolution, including ancient species of mammals and dinosaurs whose DNA had been salvaged and reproduced on many worlds. The teacher taught him the genetic structure of man, showing how genetic engineers had developed mankind into over a thousand distinct subspecies, each bred to a specific purpose, to live in a specific environment.

He learned the schemes humans used to achieve life extension. Thousands of drugs and procedures had been developed to cheat death. Most who died had their consciousness transmitted to virtual heavens that existed within computers. Some had their memories downloaded to machines, like the artefs, which were simply colonies of self-replicating nanotech devices. The most ambitious plans to beat death involved life extensions coupled with downloading memories into clones. Such plans culminated in virtual immortality—a commodity that had once been reserved for the most deserving but now available only to the wealthiest.

Last of all, the teacher showed Gallen the crowning achievement of genetic manipulation, the Tharrin, a race fashioned to embody nobility and virtue, a race designed to integrate fully with personal intelligences without losing their humanity. The Tharrin were to be the leaders and judges of mankind, a subspecies that would control the naval fleets, the police forces, and the courts of a million worlds.

The Tharrin’s physical features embodied strength and perfection. Certain glands secreted pheromones that attracted other humans so that the Tharrin constantly found themselves at the center of attention. Yet the Tharrin seldom became conceited. They did not see themselves as leaders or judges, but as the servants of mankind.

Gallen was not surprised when an image of a Tharrin formed in his mind, and he recognized Everynne in a thousand details.

Yet the Tharrin represented only half of a human/machine intellect. The machine half, the planet-sized omni-minds, stored information on the societies, moral codes, and political factions of tens of thousands of worlds. All such information was used when debating criminal and civil suits, but the data was all considered to be obsolete when passing a judgment. When a Tharrin passed judgment, it did so based on information stored in its omni-mind, but human empathy and understanding were meant to vitiate judgment. In the end, the wise and compassionate Tharrin ruled from the heart.

In his lessons, Gallen learned the brief history of Fale, how here the Tharrin ruler Semarritte had been overthrown by the alien dronon. For decades, the dronon had presented a threat to mankind, but Semarritte and her Tharrin advisors refused to go to war. Semarritte had created more guardians to protect her realm—creatures who were as much nanotech machine as flesh, creatures who could be controlled only through her omni-mind. Yet always Semarritte and the Tharrin had hoped that the humans and dronon might someday learn to live together in peace. They could not reconcile themselves to the horrors that would result from an interspecies war.

But in a surprise attack, dronon technicians won control of Semarritte’s omni-mind, then manipulated her fleets and guardians, sending them to war against their human creators. Then the dronon killed Semarritte herself and murdered every Tharrin who fell into their hands.

Gallen had to rest and eat again, but he came back late that night and questioned his teacher on matters of law, hoping that he would find some legal means of freeing Maggie. Under the old Tharrin law, slave-taking had been criminal. But under dronon law, Lord Karthenor could capture or buy servants who were not claimed by more powerful lords. Since his work ranked as a top priority among the dronon, he was free to choose servants from ninety percent of the population.

Seeing that he had no legal recourse, Gallen sought information on current war and battle techniques, but the teacher let him study only some very basic self-defense. Obviously, the dronon controlled this teaching machine to some degree, and they would not let it teach tactics that might be used against them.

In his last session that evening, Gallen downloaded a map of Toohkansay. That night, he dragged himself back to the woods late. Orick had returned to the camp.

“I searched all around the spot where we entered,” Orick said. “I couldn’t smell Everynne anywhere. I couldn’t find any other cities.”

“I know.” Gallen sighed. “Toohkansay is the only city for—” he converted kilometers to miles in his head “—eighty miles.”

“I don’t understand,” Orick said heavily. “We all went in the same gate, but we didn’t come out at the same place.”

“The making of gate keys is hard,” Gallen said, “and our key was stolen from someone who may have fashioned an imperfect key. Obviously, it dropped us off in the wrong spot. Each gate leads to only one planet, so I’m certain we are on the right world, but Fale is a big place. We might be two miles from Everynne, or ten thousand. There is no way to tell.”

Orick studied Gallen. “You’re certain of this, are you?”

“Aye, very sure,” Gallen said.

“What else did you learn in the city?”

Gallen could not begin to answer. He had studied handwritten books in Tihrglas, but in only a few hours here on Fale, the equivalent of a thousand volumes of information had been dumped into his head. How could he explain it?

“I went to a library,” Gallen said. “I learned some things from a teaching machine, like a Guide—but this machine doesn’t control your actions. I learned so much that I can’t begin to tell you everything. But I can take you there tomorrow, if you have a mind to learn something.”

“I’ll not have one of their devices twisting my brain, thank you!” Orick growled. “I saw what it did to Maggie!”

“It’s not the same,” Gallen said. “This is a different kind of machine. It won’t hurt you.”

“Won’t hurt me, eh?” Orick said. “What have they done to you? There’s a new look in your eyes, Gallen O’Day. You’re not the same man who left here two days ago. You can’t tell me that you’re the same, can you?”

“No,” Gallen said. “I’m not the same.” He reflected for a moment. Only a few days before, Everynne had told him that she found the naiveté of his world to be refreshing. She’d wished that all worlds could be so innocent. And now Gallen lived in a much larger universe, a universe where there was no distinct boundary between man and machine, where immortals wielded vast power over entire worlds, where alien races battled the thousand subspecies of mankind for dominance in three separate galaxies.

Gallen could have described the situation to Orick, but he knew Orick wanted to be a priest. He wanted to sustain the faith of those in Tihrglas, ensure the continuation of the status quo, and Gallen saw that this too was a valuable thing. In one small corner of the galaxy there could be sweet, blissful ignorance. In one small corner of the galaxy, adults could remain children. Knowledge carries its own price.

“I have learned some of the lore of the sidhe,” Gallen said at last. “Not a lot, but perhaps enough. I’m going to try to steal Maggie back.”

In a darkened room in the city of Toohkansay, nine lords of Fale sat around a table in their black robes and boots. Their masked faces shone in shades of crimson starlight. Veriasse and Everynne sat with them, both masked and cloaked as lords, Everynne in a pale blue mask, Veriasse in aquamarine. Though they had been on the planet for less than an hour, Veriasse had set up this meeting nearly five years earlier, and as Everynne watched her guardian, she could see that he was tense to the snapping point. His back was rigidly straight, and his mask revealed his profound worry.

All their years of plotting came to this. If anyone down the long trail of freedom fighters had betrayed them, now was when they would be arrested. And everyone in the room expected to be arrested: one of their number had not been seen in two days. Surely, the dronon had captured him, wrung his secrets from him. Because of this, they had been forced to change the meeting place at the last moment.

One crimson lord, a woman whose name Everynne did not even know, pulled from the depths of her robe a small glass globe, a yellow sphere that could easily fit in Everynne’s palm or in a pocket. “As Lord of the Technicians of Fale, I freely give you this in behalf of my people,” the woman said. “Use it wisely, if you must use it at all.”

Everynne took the globe, held it in her palm. It was as heavy as lead. Inside, was a small dark cloud at the machine’s core—a housing where the nanotech components were stored, along with a small explosive charge designed to crack the globe and set its microscopic inhabitants free. In ages past, only a few weapons like this had ever been used. People called it “the Terror.” It seemed only right to Everynne that something which could destroy a world would be so gravid, so weighty.