Polity 2 - Hilldiggers (47 page)

“I have requested as much, since I'm curious to see inside one of those things. I never got a chance during the War.”

“I want to go with you.”

“And so you shall.”

Duras gestured with his cane towards the back of the control room, and slowly led the way. Following the Chairman, Orduval checked some of the screens about him and there saw views of launchers swivelling into position, and he picked up snatches of conversation from the crews controlling the weapons: “Target acquired...warhead load prepared...Combine link-up confirmed...satellite masers ...”

As they entered the lift and descended, Orduval's stomach churned with a variety of twisted emotions including joy at the prospect of meeting his sisters again. Had they changed much? How would they react to the changes in him? The lift finally shuddered to a halt and revolved to access the opening. They stepped out into the rear of a bay in which some GDS troops were scrambling aboard two balloon-wheeled armoured cars. A door ramp had been lowered onto the desert sand, and distantly the rising sun was etching the horizon distinct from the sky. Reyshank was standing ready by one of the vehicles, and waved them over. Soon the pair were crammed aboard, surrounded by ten heavily armed GDS wardens, and the car lurched out of the bay into the nascent morning. It was far too noisy to speak while travelling, but the journey was thankfully short. Soon the vehicle drew to a halt and the wardens swarmed out onto the sand ahead of them.

Following Duras outside, Orduval gazed around at the perimeter set up by GDS armoured cars, then up at the ship. Perhaps it was the lack of light, but what struck him most about the vessel was not its strange appearance, but the smell. It reminded him of the kind of odours found at the coasts of Sudoria's small briny seas and somewhat of the smell encountered in the cooled underground buildings where Sudorian farmers raised their less heat-tolerant livestock. He knew, at once, that he was in the presence of some immense living creature.

The ship creaked and groaned constantly, but not with the familiar sound of cooling metal. This was more like that heard from a settling woodpile. Orduval could feel heat on his face from the rocket-burned sands, and the occasional waft of smoke blew across. They had advanced to within fifty yards of the ship when, with a liquid crunch, a thirty-foot-wide hemisphere blistered out from the organic hull. A hole appeared at the centre of this extrusion, widening into an entranceway from which spilled out a segmented tongue that after a moment ridged up into steps.

Reyshank and his men reached the steps first, and clambered up inside the ship through a draught of chill air. Without hesitation, Duras entered next, followed closely by Orduval. Within was an oblately spherical chamber, where an interstation shuttle rested bound to one wall with vine-like growths. Here awaited the GDS soldiers, spread out and at their guard, some of them shivering violently. Orduval also felt the extreme cold in here, but noted a breeze against his legs as the cold air from the interior poured out into the desert morning, and glancing up saw a warm fog materialising about the ceiling as the hot desert air slid in.

In the centre of the chamber stood Yishna and Rhodane. With them were the Polity man McCrooger and two quofarl clad in bulky cooling suits, who stood guard over a prosaic-looking chest. Despite the nervously anticipated presence of his two sisters, Orduval found his attention immediately fixed on McCrooger. The man looked very different indeed from how he had appeared in those early broadcasts from the ship that transported him insystem. Now he was rail-thin, sickly-pale, and hardly able to support his own weight. Obviously he had suffered wounds, judging by the dressings covering his arm and one shoulder. Could the Brumallians have tortured him?

Orduval finally turned his attention to his two siblings. He wanted to go over and greet them, but something about Rhodane checked him and his grin disappeared as suddenly he felt a deep and puzzling distrust of her.

“Would that be the evidence you have brought us?” Duras indicated the chest with a wave of his cane.

“It is,” said McCrooger, stepping forward with an invalid's care.

“Then,” announced Duras, “after I have taken a look around this ship here, we must take it across to the incident vehicle, where you can present it to Parliament.”

Abruptly the floor juddered, and behind them the hatch shut with a huffing sound. Recovering his balance, Orduval looked up to see that a projection hovered in the air immediately over their heads. It looked familiar, like some kind of animal, though seemed unable to hold its shape for long and kept collapsing formlessly like a blob of mercury floating in zero gravity.

“Orduval, I was wrong,” said a mechanistic voice. Amber eyes blinked within the metallic mass, then faded. “You caused your own fits...to escape ...” The shape disappeared.

The news hardened something inside Orduval. Into the stunned silence that followed he said, “That was Tigger telling me ...” but somehow he could not go on.

Duras turned to gaze at him curiously. “Telling you what?”

“Telling him how he escaped the grip of the Shadowman,” said David McCrooger. “And why he is once more in its grip.”

McCrooger

I glanced round at Rhodane and Yishna, and saw that both of them looked slightly ill. Well they might feel so, since their superb intellects were in conflict with something they registered unconsciously but could not allow themselves to know. Of course they probably did not feel quite as bad as I did. It seemed to take all my will to prevent my legs from shaking and I felt ready to vomit. I even wondered if I was about to bring up that mutualite I'd swallowed earlier. Also the temperature inside the ship was rising, and though the Sudorians here seemed to be enjoying this and the two quofarl were protected from it, I was sweating heavily. And if that wasn't enough discomfort, there was that continuous weird distortion of my perception, and hints of dark figures lurking at the periphery of my vision.

“Once more in the grip of the Shadowman?” Duras repeated. “An interesting conjecture.”

“Do you dream of the Shadowman?” I asked him. “Do all of you?” I turned to the soldiers in the room. They all looked slightly unnerved by my question.

“I have nightmares,” admitted Duras, “which get worse if I don't take my medication. It is a common complaint.”

“Yes, very common, I gather. So many of you are now on medication, aren't you? Or in asylums? You're all drowning so deep in this that you cannot see the surface.” I then wondered if the distortion I was aware of all the time was what they had come to view as normality, the younger of them having grown up with it and the older having lived with it for thirty years.

“What do you mean by that?” Duras huffed.

I held up a hand, but snatched it back down when I noticed it shaking. “Please, bear with me,” I said, and turned to Yishna. “Yishna, what exactly is an information fumarole breach?”

“I beg your pardon?”

I didn't reply, since she'd heard me plain enough. As I awaited her reply, she smoothed her hands down her body—something she usually did when aiming to be seductive, but now just a nervous reaction. Realising this unconscious gesture, she snapped her hands down by her sides. They too were shaking.

“I cannot discuss such critical Combine research so publicly,” she reproached me.

“A fumarole breach is more than just a power surge,” Orduval intervened blandly. “I know that now. Why else did Fleet ships take the equipment damaged by fumarole breaches and drop it into the sun?”

I glanced at him, saw his thoughtful and pained look. He nodded to me as if he knew where I was going but found it difficult to help me. Turning back to Yishna, I began, “Let me guess. An information fumarole breach is when, somehow, equipment is infected by informational viruses or by nanotechnology. And you and your three siblings were apparently conceived during such a breach.”

There had to be more to it than the coincidental timing—something I didn't know.

Orduval came to my rescue with, “We were actually conceived inside the Ozark Cylinder in which the breach took place.” So, that was how the Worm's nanotech got to Elsever's womb. I watched Orduval for a moment, hoping he would add something more, but it seemed as if just saying that had required a huge amount of effort, and he now looked utterly weary.

Yishna looked pained, but remained silent.

I went on, “Perhaps then you can tell me about bleed-over? That's much more in the public domain, and there seems less secrecy about it.”

“Bleed-over is a U-space effect generated by the Worm,” she finally replied.

“And those experiencing bleed-over, what do they feel?”

Almost with gratitude, since it took them away from the other subject, Yishna explained about the feelings of anger and other emotions that had quite possibly resulted in the Exhibitionists and other strange cults developing aboard Corisanthe Main. I waited for her to understand the most obvious implication of what she was telling me, but it seemed to have completely passed her by.

I tried again: “There's things you need to understand about U-space, Yishna,” I began. “It requires a huge amount of energy to actually penetrate that continuum but, once there, small amounts of energy to cover huge distances relative to realspace. If bleed-over is a U-space effect generated by the Worm, it could just as easily also be present anywhere within a few light years of here as on Corisanthe Main itself.” I spread my hands to encompass the group. “You are all suffering from bleed-over. I am suffering from bleed-over.”

“I had thought something ...” Yishna began, then trailed off.

She still wasn't getting it. She, and it seemed all the scientists on Corisanthe Main, had been assiduously measuring and cataloguing bleed-over and fumarole breaches, yet utterly failing to understand what they were. As far as I gathered from the research I had managed to conduct while here in the Sudorian system—mostly through the console Yishna had given me—only the cultish elements of the major station had come close to understanding, with their concept of telepathic inductance.

“What does this all mean?” Duras interrupted.

“It means that you are feeling what the Worm feels, it having been broken into four and held confined for decades. It means that an alien entity utterly incomprehensible to you is attempting to influence you, maybe even manipulate you, and the Shadowman is just one aspect of that influence. Is it any surprise your asylums are so packed?”

Yishna made a sound that seemed to begin as a denial then just trailed away.

“Why is this so important now?” asked Duras, getting right to the point.

I replied, “Because quite evidently it has increased its influence. Somehow, through an information fumarole breach, it has fashioned four instruments to do its bidding. They are called Yishna, Rhodane, Orduval and Harald.”

“This is preposterous.”

Orduval and Yishna were now each watching me with the intensity of a cat observing a caged hamster. Rhodane's gaze was less unnerving, just.

“Really?” I said. “All four of them, as you know, have been functioning well beyond human norms to push themselves into positions of power. Rhodane came near to raising the Brumallians against Sudoria, but for the Consensus interfering with the signal or with her programming.” Duras stood straighter on hearing that, his gaze sliding to Rhodane then to the two quofarl. “Yishna is now second only to Director Gneiss on Corisanthe Main. Orduval...” I paused, having no idea what he had been up to, though he had obviously been in communication with Tigger and he was here.

“I tried,” he himself supplied, “but I could not do very much.”

Duras gave him an irritated look. “The writer Uskaron did enough,” he said, then turned to me. “Yes, perhaps you have something, though I've yet to see it clearly.”

Orduval was Uskaron—I wasn't sure how that fit the theory that was even then developing in my mind. For I did not see the Worm's intentions as peaceful, and only by following a twisted logic could his books be contrived as anything like as destructive as what Rhodane had intended to do and what Harald was already doing.

“So Orduval wrote books that changed the whole attitude of a planet,” I said.

Orduval held his hands out to either side. “Perhaps.”

Yishna and Rhodane stood gazing at their brother with new-found respect.

“There was always something familiar—” began Yishna.

“And then there's Harald,” I interrupted.

“It seems a very convoluted way for the Worm to gain its freedom,” challenged Duras.

I paused before replying, as I wasn't entirely sure that freedom was the motive here. With whatever it had already done to Elsever Strone and her unborn children, I felt it had ably demonstrated how it could break out of containment at will.

I continued, “You must understand how its influence on all of you is huge, especially on the four children of Elsever Strone. They alone don't dream of the Shadowman—the Worm's attempt to create a human face for itself—and they don't need to, since its control over them is so much more direct.”

“This is all conjecture,” argued Duras, but I could see the fear in his expression.

I turned back to Orduval, looking for more information, some way to convince them. “What did Tigger tell you originally, about your fits?”

He looked somewhat bitter as he replied. “He decided that I am sensitive to U-space, and that it was disruptions in the U-space continuum that caused my fits.”

“Yet Tigger changed that argument just now, told you that you caused your own fits to escape.”

“Yes, he did.”

It occurred to me then that his books might also have been a way to escape that pervasive influence—they might have been the antithesis to the Worm's manipulation of him.

“To escape what, though? To escape the influence of the Worm, the control it held over you through U-space, control that it is reasserting now, as is evident from your current reaction to Rhodane who is mostly free of it. It's a similar reaction I observed in Yishna once she boarded this ship. You see, it made you, and it made you all more able to receive its signal.”