Polity 2 - Hilldiggers (4 page)

“These gifts are purely ceremonial,” Duras explained, “but we would feel insulted if you did not wear them at all times.” He then reached up to undo some catches around the back of his skullcap, before removing it.

So, they felt the need to provide me with the means of defending myself, since it struck me as unlikely that any ceremonial weapons would require armour-piercing bullets. I grinned at him, then abruptly felt a surge of sadness upon noting his cropped white hair and the visible shape of his skull beneath the loose skin of his face. I'd been forgetting that people still actually died of old age here. Their medical science, though advanced, lay some centuries behind that of the Polity, and there were the harsh environmental factors to take into account. Duras was probably at most a hundred years old—a mere junior by the standards of my own world and not really very old by Polity standards. I wondered if I felt sad because death had become for me a very personal preoccupation.

“Orbital Combine also welcomes you to the Sudorian system,” announced Yishna, though the gifts from that political and economic force occupying the many satellite stations orbiting Sudoria were of a rather different nature. In one hand she proffered a palm screen incorporating audio, recording facilities, local netlink and terabyte processing and storage, and also a control baton which plugged into a slot along the bottom of the screen. Both these items had their equivalents in the Polity, but the control baton's construction was rather unique. It was a rod about four inches long and one inch thick, with twist controls and small buttons spaced along it, and a laser emitter at one end which could serve as torch, pointer, measuring and spectroscopic-analysis device. In all other respects this combined unit served as a multiple-function com device: phone, computer access, remote key, bank card—and much else besides. In her other hand Yishna held an old-fashioned paper book I'd already read: a history of the War by someone called Uskaron. I held it up to inspect its plain cover, maybe the safest choice considering its explosive contents.

“So this is the famous book,” I said. “The one Fleet wanted banned and the one that resulted in a planetwide search for its author.”

“Yes, that's the one,” agreed Duras, but he did not look too happy about this choice of gift.

“I understand he was never found...this Uskaron,” I glanced at him, “but proof of his claims was delivered to Parliament?”

“The veracity of that evidence has yet to be proven,” said Duras tightly.

“But I understand, nevertheless, that Sudorian opinion of both the Brumallians and Fleet has changed greatly in the last few years.”

He merely nodded, so I turned to Yishna. “I thank Orbital Combine for these gifts. Perhaps, when the time comes, I can conduct you through the intricacies of U-space mechanics, Calabi-Yau space extension matrices, and the like.” I winked at her, and she first looked startled, then realisation dawned: maybe I wasn't just a politician, and maybe Polity technology did not have to be something you could physically hold and inspect. Fleet could hardly place import restrictions on what I had brought here between my ears.

“Please be seated.” Duras gestured to one of the chairs. “I understand that none of our food is likely to be incompatible with your biochemistry?”

“That's so.” I gingerly lowered myself into a chair and, though it creaked loudly and sagged somewhat, it seemed to be holding. The smell of the food started distracting me, but I tried to pay it no attention while we got the social niceties out of the way.

Duras, lowering himself into another of the chairs, commented, “You're not entirely what we expected.”

Yishna seated herself too and, without any more ado, picked up a bowl with a series of rings on the underside into which she inserted her fingers, and began selecting items from the table and filling it. I decided to do the same, but found the finger holes weren't large enough.

“What did you expect?”

After chomping down something that looked like a deep-fried cockroach, Yishna replied, “Fleet has been making much of the effete products of a soft civilisation run by artificial intelligences. I think Inigis had started believing his own organisation's propaganda, so you came as rather a shock to him.” She raised an eyebrow and gestured to the empty chair. “The Captain, incidentally, will not be joining us.”

I couldn't help but grin, not about the missing Captain's shock but about those supposedly 'effete products'. I was loyal to the Polity but did not actually consider myself a fully paid-up member. Though born and grown to adulthood on Earth, and having spent many years there on later occasions, I still considered a world called Spatterjay to be my home. But I'd met Polity Agents and Earth Central Security personnel who were, quite frankly, frightening. I knew some who could have come out of that drop-sphere naked, gone through Inigis and his soldiers like they weren't there, and assumed total control of this ship in under an hour. Lucky for the Sudorians that the Polity chose to be more diplomatic nowadays, and therefore tended to keep its ECS attack dogs on a tight leash. They sent me instead—the warm and cuddly option.

“You are rather large and, as you demonstrated, uncommonly strong,” noted Duras, while breaking open an object like a razorfish.

After Captain Inigis's lieutenants had finally conducted me to my cabin, they then spent some time trying to locate some clothes that would fit me. Ever since that first leech bite, I had steadily grown in bulk and strength, and density—my body now packed tight with the viral fibres (some of which I could do without it has to be said). I stood nearly six foot six tall in bare feet, and carried the breadth and musculature of a fanatical bodybuilder, though I weighed about two and a half times as much as he would. I'd got used to it—you did, while the centuries stacked up.

I tried one of the cockroaches and studied the other food on the table. Some of it I recognised as adapted Earth foods: a bowl of miniature lemons like sweets, fried lumps that were probably some form of potato, kebabbed combinations of small vegetables—one looking like a carrot—and blocks of meat, pastries, even canapes—though ones filled with green flies in a clear aspic—and something like jellied eels which I suspected instead to be jellied snake since there wasn't a lot of open water on Sudoria. The cockroach tasted good, rather like glister meat in crunchy batter, and being raised on Spatterjay one tended not to be squeamish about what one ate. It was also rather nice to have it laid out prepared like this and not risk your food taking a bite out of you before you managed to cram it into the cooking pot.

“Just biology,” I explained in reply to Duras's observation.

“Then not some organic technology?” he suggested wryly.

“Certainly not.” I stared at him across the table. “We have a saying where I come from—'Softly softly catchy boxy'—which very very roughly translated means the Polity is not going to come crashing in here stamping on all your traditions and tearing up your social order. The ethos now on the Line—the Polity border with...well, everything—is to no longer 'subsume with prejudice' any populated worlds or civilisations we encounter. Too much chaos, too much death and destruction results from that, and afterwards, once that civilisation has been subsumed it is no longer unique, but just another homogenous addition. So we're playing this by your rules.”

“Which suggests to me that the Polity no longer considers those new worlds it encounters as a threat needing to be controlled.” Duras was undoubtedly sharp. “Back in the hold I suggested to Inigis that you possess ships capable of digging their own hills. Do you possess hilldiggers?”

I carefully considered my reply. On the one hand I did not want to appear boastful, yet on the other I needed to play this straight with people who, after all, wanted to initiate trade and greater contact. “You understand that on the whole the Polity is run by artificial intelligences?” Duras nodded. “Those AIs are everywhere. As far as the ships are concerned, they control them, captain them—for many AIs the ship is actually its own body.”

“But how large and how powerful are those bodies?” Duras pressed, staring at me piercingly. “I would not want us allying ourselves with a political entity that does not possess the will or capability to...perhaps have some bearing on future negotiations.”

Was Duras looking for Polity intervention, should Fleet react badly? It appeared so, for he seemed to be trying to gauge how much help he might expect, and whether we were actually capable of helping. Here it seemed lay a large fault in our policy of not revealing too much, of not wiring up a civilisation like this to too much of a culture shock.

I shrugged. “Quite some time ago the Polity was involved in a war with an alien species called the Prador. Whole worlds were burned down to bedrock and billions died. That war began about two centuries after your colony ship set out from the solar system.”

Yishna whistled past her canines.

“The Polity has moved on since then. Geronamid is an AI sited, mostly, inside one large vessel. That vessel is not allowed to orbit any worlds possessing oceans or crustal instabilities.”

They sat there looking puzzled, then the penny dropped.

“Fuck,” said Yishna. “Tides?”

“Perhaps now we can turn to my itinerary?” I suggested.

I know that the Procul Harum set out just before the Quiet War—that time when the AIs displaced humans as the rulers of humanity and took over in the Solar System, in a conflict surprisingly without resort to massive exterminations. The ship ran on a rather dodgy U-space drive and carried 6,000 passengers in hibernation mode, plus 50,000 frozen embryos and the requisite equipment to start building a civilisation. It arrived at the planet Sudoria a hundred years later, and then the passengers were revived—well, most of them, since hibernation technology wasn't that great back then.

The system they entered consisted of one ubiquitous gas giant, five cold worlds outside of it, two of which orbited each other while spinning round the sun, and one the size of Neptune bearing a large ring system. The inner system consisted of a Mercury clone and two Earth-like planets orbiting within the green belt. The hot world they named Sudoria, and the other one Brumal. Though cold and wet, Brumal seemed more accommodating to human life; however, these people were extremely taken with the adaptogenic technologies they'd brought along with them, so many wanted to change themselves to live on the hotter alternative, Sudoria. A schism developed, mutiny and fighting aboard. This could not be allowed to continue, else none of them would manage to reach planetfall, since space being a harsh and unforgiving environment at best, it became even more so when you were trying to kill each other in it.

Eventually the rival sides came to an agreement. Two and a half thousand colonists took their share of supplies and descended in the landing craft to Brumal. Subsequently the same craft were then supposed to return on automatic to the ship so the other faction could then descend to Sudoria. But the craft were sabotaged on the ground, leaving the prospective Sudoria residents stuck up in space. Eventually they took the only option remaining open to them, and did with the Procul Harum what it was emphatically not designed to do: they landed it. The landing on Sudoria was rough, and surviving thereafter was to be rougher still. They physically adapted to their new environment as best they could. They raised their embryos and began building, but during those harsh times lost U-space tech and much else. It took four and a half centuries for them to get back up into space. And they took their long-term bitterness towards the Brumallians with them.

On Brumal, another living planet like Sudoria, conditions were unexpectedly even more harsh. Orbital surveys, though picking up much life and activity, had failed to detect the acidity of the environment, or, the pioneers having arrived during a calm period, the subsequent out-gassing of chlorine trapped in rocky layers of the crust. The residents first resorted to a basic amphidaption to this watery world, but as conditions changed they were forced to use the adaptation technology again and again. The humans there became exceedingly strange, but their environment toughened them and their almost hive-like social structure and chemically linked mentalities enabled them to quickly rise. They were still at a pre-industrial stage when some Copernicus amongst them first noticed the satellites the Sudorians were putting up. Twenty years later, radio communications were established between the two worlds. Many mis-understandings followed, and public reaction on Sudoria to the first image of a Brumallian was not too brilliant. By the time the first Sudorian ship swung around Brumal there were satellites up in orbit to observe it. Sudorian historians would later insist that one of these satellites fired a missile that destroyed the innocent vessel—though the writer known as Uskaron had rather changed that view of late. A space arms race ensued, then, inevitably, war.

It lasted a hundred years. And the hilldiggers finished it.

The lack of intervening oceans on Sudoria allowed our civilisation to spread without fragmenting. There were still, however, attempts at forming independent states. The first was initiated by certain Sudorians espousing the ideology of the Blue Orchids—an ideology passed on over five generations by the surviving remnants of that party as it grew into a large secret organisation. They attempted to set up a bordered enclave on the coast of the Brak sea to the East of the Komarl but, having learnt the lessons of history, our political predecessors felt they could not allow this. The Sudorian army of the time was immediately dispatched to the area, with instructions to break up the enclave and forcibly relocate the Orchids. There was resistance and there was fighting, but nowhere near the scale of that seen back within the Sol system. We had yet to learn how to get really bloody.

—Uskaron

McCrooger

Crawling mind-numbing terror had turned my mouth dry and my guts rigid as stone. The sky ahead looked like a cataract eye, with the horizon folded up around it. Baroque old buildings rose to my right and left, leaning into each other like plotting courtiers. Having seen both visual effects before, I realised I was standing in a town within a cylinder world, but was too frightened to wonder how I'd come to be there. Heading towards the milky eye of the end-cap I found myself slipping and stumbling on some uneven hollow-sounding surface and, peering down, unreasonably knew that the street was cobbled with skulls, which had been laid over a compacted hogging of human bones. Ahead of me a figure stepped from a darkened alley and began to drift away up the street. I hurried to catch up, but just could not seem to move fast enough. Then I was abruptly right up behind the same figure and reaching out to grasp one shoulder. My father turned with his familiar bored 'What now?' expression. I glanced away for a moment, trying to remember what important news I had to give him. I should have kept my gaze fixed upon him instead, for he seized the opportunity to transform; rising up above the buildings to cast me into shadow, growing convoluted and complex, a tangled living spire of—