Polity 4 - The Technician (10 page)

Again
that claw gesture, and Chanter turned to look at the sea-urchin thing with
renewed horror. But even as he felt that, Penny Royal gently eased him upright
and withdrew its tentacles. Feeling abruptly returned, but just that, no pain.
He looked at the AI with suspicion as it nonchalantly continued to stack
rhizomes and added greater and greater complexity to its cubic sculpture of
flute-grass stalks.

With
care, Chanter eased himself to his feet and more closely studied his surroundings,
his attention drawn at once to the object standing on the rhizome mat behind
the drone. The sculpture was here, still in its glass tube and still mounted on
that slab of rock. He gazed at it for a long moment, then swung his attention
back towards what Penny Royal was doing, and felt a sudden intimation that he
was being told something, but it lay just off the edge of perception,
ephemeral, fading when he groped for it.

‘I want
detail,’ he said.

‘I have
transmitted all the relevant files to your mudmarine computer,’ said the drone.
‘And I have just summoned your robot, Mick, to collect this Technician’s
sculpture.’

Chanter
gazed at the machine steadily. ‘You’ve told me stories, but I don’t see where
your interest lies.’

‘I study
insanity.’

Chanter
glanced back at Penny Royal. Its presence here made more sense now.

‘Did you
know that there is a living Human survivor of a hooder attack?’ the drone
enquired.

‘No, but
it was sure to happen one day.’

‘This
Human was severely damaged, tampered with – the hooder concerned even did
things to his mind, actually downloaded something to his mind.’

Chanter
felt the skin on his back crawling. ‘Downloaded?’ He looked over to the edge of
the clearing to see Mick delicately paddling across the rhizome mat in this
direction.

‘The
hooder concerned was the Technician.’

The
shivering sensation spread out from his back along his arms and down his legs.
He realized that this was a return of further sensation, blocked until now. If
he’d experienced all this in a fully conscious state, he’d have been screaming
by now.

‘We will
share information,’ the drone added, and it wasn’t a request. ‘Go back to your
vehicle now and hurry, another gas venting is due in twenty minutes. Study the
information I’ve given you and give me your conclusions – my address is in your
communicator.’

Chanter
set off, but when pausing to watch Mick undoing the bolts around the base of
the container and then deftly flip it aside, he came to a decision. Before he
moved on towards what appeared to be the crater rim, he turned back.

‘You
know, Dragon gave me the coordinates of this sculpture,’ he said.

‘Which
is why I’ve chosen to involve you rather than just seize all the information
and artefacts you hold.’

Chanter
nodded and headed on towards the safety of his vehicle, and the depths.

Heretic’s
Isle (Solstan 2455 – 18 Years after the Rebellion)

One of Amistad’s associates occupied the adjoining control room. Sanders
could hear some odd sounds and noted computer displays in the theatre flicking
on and running code she did not recognize. Also, the autodocs in the tank were
behaving oddly, scuttling around on glass as if anxious to escape something
unbearable. Amistad had denied her any kind of access to this entity, even
seemed nervous about letting her get close. The whole situation had begun to
creep her out until she found out what it was all about. Then she just got
angry.

‘An
essential part of his acceptance of reality,’ said the big drone, ‘is him being
able to go outside without wearing a breather mask.’

‘With
his prosthetic he doesn’t need one.’

‘Quite.’

Sanders
tried to contain her anger; to keep to the facts. ‘So you won’t allow any kind
of intervention inside his skull, but you’re quite prepared, without his
permission, to commit him to major surgery elsewhere?’

‘You
yourself have experienced that same major surgery, you know what freedom it
gives you here on Masada. To be able to breathe the air here makes you a true
Masadan and not a dispossessed immigrant.’

‘Bullshit.’

The
drone continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘Once the lung and bloodwork is
finished and, incidentally, once we’ve replaced his mechanical arm with a
tank-grown version that’s been on the shelf for years, regrowth of his facial
nerves and the outer tissues can commence, and he will be returned to your
care.’

‘You’re
going to let me give him back his face?’ Sanders was eager for that, but aware
that in some way the scorpion drone had offered her a bribe.

‘Yes, we
understand now that the damage about his skull, caused during the Technician’s
downloading process, is irrelevant – repairing it does not in itself have any
effect on the download.’

‘So
you’ve got all you can get from the scanners in his prosthetic. This is still
bullshit, Amistad.’

‘Perhaps
you would like to explain?’

‘Him
being able to go outside is not essential to his acceptance of reality,’ she
said, trying to order her thoughts. ‘In fact, him being able to go outside
distances him from his life before – makes his present experiences more unreal
to him. If you wanted to rub his nose in reality you’d stick him in a breather
mask and dump him out in the flute grasses next to the nearest hooder.’

‘I see
that you understand.’

‘Damn
right I do. You’re up to something and I’m not sure it’s okay with those above
you.’

‘I have
full competence here.’

‘Why,
Amistad? Why?’

‘It’s
complicated.’

‘I’m
used to complexity.’

‘Integration
of elements of the download will reach a crucial nexus, whereupon he will drive
himself to face surfacing memory.’

‘He’ll
be going on a journey of discovery?’

‘Yes.’

‘He
can’t even walk.’

‘As you
said: his failure to walk is not a physical problem.’

Sanders
turned away from the drone to gaze across at Tombs, now floating in the amniote
within this newly installed tank, the autodocs scuttling all around him, but
not yet beginning their work. He’d rendered himself unconscious again after
accessing the Atheter database through his computer. She’d cleaned him up and
moved him to his bed and left him there while going to hers, but then strange
scrapings and spooky noises in the sanatorium had brought her here, just
glimpsing something big and sinister shooting out of sight at the end of a
darkened corridor – that ‘associate’ – before finding Amistad and her charge.

‘Do you
know when this journey will begin?’ she asked.

‘I have
absolutely no idea,’ the drone replied. ‘You need to watch him, take note of
any changes in his behaviour patterns and notify me the moment such changes
occur.’

The
autodocs all froze for a second, then abruptly launched themselves from the
sides of the tank to fall onto Tombs’s body, some of them trailing various
tubes, optics and other attachments from ports positioned around the inside.
They started to cut, and even though this surgery was very precisely
controlled, the tank fluid still turned cloudy with blood and other debris.

‘Let me
know when I can get to work on his face,’ said Sanders, and walked away.

Chanter’s
Base (Solstan 2453 – 16 Years after the Rebellion)

As Chanter brought his mudmarine to the surface, he reached out without
thinking to engage the chameleonware, then with irritation snatched his webbed
hand away from the controls. Only then did he actually add things up and
realize that this was his first time home in almost a hundred Masadan days.
Whilst the automatic dock engaged he spun his chair to observe Mick, upright
and clamped to the inner hull, the old sculpture cradled delicately against its
back. He reached into his pocket and fingered the sample bottle for a moment,
then said, ‘The museum.’

Mick
detached from the hull, sliding down flat, sculpture still supported on its
back. The mudmarine’s door slid open into its cleaner compartment as the robot
approached. After a contemplative pause, Chanter swung his chair back to his
console and without the usual security checks, sent the data here aboard his
vessel to the main database in his home. No point in running checks for worms
or viruses – if Polity AIs wanted to fuck with him there wasn’t much he could
do about it. Then he stood and followed Mick out.

The
rebels weren’t the only ones to discover the numerous cave systems underneath
the mountains of Masada. Chanter had mapped many of them from the smuggler’s
ship that transported his mudmarine and other supplies to this place, and even
as he descended to the surface on an antigravity platform, he had already
chosen his base. He’d worked in a rush, because he had needed to get to the
surface before the Theocracy finished setting up its planetary grid of laser
satellites and high-definition cameras, but he remained satisfied with his
choice.

The
marine sat in a sticky pond twenty metres long by ten wide, nearly occupying it
completely. Below this pond a pipe curved for two hundred metres out into the
main soil of the planet and within it a specially adapted shimmer-shield kept
the tricones out. The pond itself occupied a cavern that was a
fifty-metre-diameter cylinder over a hundred metres long, though shortened now
by twenty or so metres with the foamstone construction that was both his home
and the housing for his collection – a construction he’d have to extend if he
was ever to find any more of the Technician’s sculptures, which seemed
increasingly unlikely now.

He
stomped out across his dock, turned right and trailed Mick across the worn
basalt. Mick entered a lower door in the foamstone to install the new exhibit,
whilst Chanter climbed a stair to the door to his accommodation. He was curious
to look at the data Amistad had supplied, and wanted to run tests on the
contents of the sample bottle in his pocket. However, so as not to turn into a
complete introvert slob, he always followed set rules when back here: first a
long soak in his large bath, followed by skin-oil balancing and a medical scan;
plenty of food next, which would include those vitamins and minerals the
medical scan always told him he was lacking; then a long and contemplative
study of his collection.

The bath
leached out all sorts of nasty stuff and when, after a brief analysis, his oil
machine provided him with the right mix and he sprayed himself, his skin
started tightening up and losing its pouchy feel. As well as noting
deficiencies of the usual vitamins, the medical scan warned him of a
dangerously high deficiency in magnesium, and when he ate fat cherub beetles
laced with the required additives, they were nectar, and he soon put away two
large platefuls of the fat insects before heading downstairs to his collection.

Mick had
already installed the new sculpture in its inert gas case, but had yet to
position it in the collection. Using precise isotope-dating techniques Chanter
had arrayed the twenty-three sculptures in chronological order, covering a
period of nearly a century because, like this latest one, they weren’t all
sculptures he had seized shortly after the Technician made them. Studying this
order he could see steady transitions and occasional abrupt changes as the
artist sought perfection, found inspiration, and sometimes abandoned it. This
new addition should fit in at the very start, yet it seemed so utterly
different in style from the others here. It occurred to him that perhaps some
longish time gap – perhaps some artistic block – lay between it and the others.

Further
contemplation did not dispel his puzzlement, but then he was used to being
puzzled by the work of the Technician. Eventually he made his way through to
the small laboratory he maintained next to his collection, and ran his usual
battery of tests on the samples from the bottle. Puzzlement returned when only
one of the dating techniques seemed to work, but rendered erroneous data. He
checked his system then, wondering if Amistad had used something to trash his
computers here, but everything seemed to be working. He ran further tests on
the mineral content of the bone, and got some odd results there too. Suddenly
he grew angry, feeling he had been duped. This wasn’t a sculpture by his
Technician; it was a carving from some sort of rock!

Chanter
nearly abandoned testing at that point, but a micro-scan of the surface bone
revealed the familiar marks, the familiar signature of the Technician, only
much much smaller. Widening parameters and trying other dating techniques
available to him but never used before, he began to get an intimation of what
he had here. This sculpture had been buried in that cave, probably only
revealed when early rebels dug out the cave as a hide. Statistical analysis of
mineral leaching from bone in this environment – the complex chemical processes
of petrification here – finally revealed the truth, and it terrified him.

Since
the Technician had made that sculpture squatting in its case out there, quite
some time had passed. The artistic gap between it and the other twenty-three
was a wide one – about a million years wide.

Sealuroynes

Whilst the study of the land forms of
Masada progressed quickly, study of the oceans of Masada was put on hold.
Further delays ensued when it became evident that the ecology of the land was a
constructed one; that hooders were based on war biomechs created by the Atheter
which might or might not have been first based on creatures of that world, or
might even have no original evolutionary basis at all; that gabbleducks were
the (deliberately) devolved descendants of the Atheter; and that the whole
tricone basis of that ecology was manufactured. However, a proper taxonomic
survey of the sea-life has now begun, with the sealuroynes, and already
oddities are being found. These creatures bear some resemblance to the
gabbleducks in that their brains are just too large and contain too many
complexities for their marine predatory lifestyle. They show the same tendency
to play odd games with their prey. For a brief while philologists speculated
that the noises sealuroynes make to each other were actually a language, but
they were unable to translate it, for it seems that – like the devolved Atheter
– they gabble too.