Polity 4 - The Technician (36 page)

They
made their way to the glass doors, following others out, just as something like
thunder rumbled above. Grant looked up to see an image similar to one recorded
in the past here – a hooder up there on the glass dome – only it wasn’t on its
way across, it had paused, its legs trying to scrape purchase and a blur under
its hood where it was scratching the glass to opacity. It rose up, a jointed
tower, gleaming red navigation lights at its top, then it came down like a
giant fist.

With the
impact, the floor of the way station seemed to drop half a metre. Grant
staggered, saw others falling over, noted Tombs squatting and retaining his
balance, head tilted upwards and eyes closed as if he was enjoying some sun. The
whole dome bowed inwards and with a sound like mountains clashing, shattered
and rained down, the hooder flowing down with it like black oil. It hit the
parking area hood first and the rest of it thundered down in a rain of armoured
glass like quartz boulders. Its hood came up again, crowned with wreckage, and
it shook itself. A mangled ATV, perhaps Grant’s vehicle, smashed into the
buildings to their right, just as Grant grabbed Tombs’s shoulder and pulled him
on.

‘We go
round!’ Grant shouted into the din of demolition and screaming. Shree moved
ahead of him even as he spoke. They ran round along the aisle between buildings
and gardens, partially shielded from falling wreckage by the spread of
grape-tree branches. They passed the fallen ATV and Grant saw that it actually
was his vehicle. Some people were here, staring stunned at the scene, others
with more purpose were running, and one group of three were down on their
knees, praying.

Even as
they reached the other side of the way station, a second hooder flowed in from
above. The first now speared into the apartment block and swung across, cutting
through the buildings like a finger drawn through soft cake. The second hooder,
a smaller version, slammed its hood down on something, then up again, spewing abattoir
wreckage across the foamstone. It looked like more than one person. Seemed the
hooders here weren’t slow-feeding, just obliterating.

Grant
kicked open a door ahead, followed emergency exit signs to where people clad in
armoured work clothes were already cramming through a door into a narrow tunnel
through the surrounding reinforced concrete. It seemed the work crew here had a
better idea of how they might survive this.

‘Why
would anyone do that?’ The woman ahead had been injured – blood all down her leg,
leaning for support on a co-worker Grant at first thought was an adapted Human,
until he recognized the birdlike legs and knew it to be a dracoman.

The
dracoman did not reply, but one of the others did. ‘Probably some Smythian.’

How wrong you are, thought Grant. This had Tidy Squad
written all over it. After attempting a straight hit the Squad had upscaled to
something more careless of casualties to get to Tombs. And how appropriate
those murderers must have thought it to set hooders on one who had once
survived an attack by such a creature – a tidy resolution to the existence of
Jeremiah Tombs that took no account of other consequences.

A door
stood open ahead through which the road crew were spilling out into Masadan
night, pastel-lit by the cabochon face of Calypse on the horizon. Grant pushed
out, slid down a concrete slope turned slick by crushed rhizome, regained his
balance on compacted flute grass and looked round for Tombs and Shree. Over to
his left, crouching, Shree with her thin-gun in her right hand and a handful of
Tombs’s jacket in her left.

‘Penny
Royal?’ Grant asked.

There
were creatures out here, three of them. Grazers? Something like that but lower
to the ground with odd protrusions from their backs. Then Grant realized he was
seeing mounts of some kind, single dracoman mahouts astride thick scaled necks,
the road crew scrambling up the flanks of the mounts to cling onto cargo
frames. Even as he saw this, one of the mounts turned and disappeared into
vegetation, its departure strangely musical as it disturbed old flute-grass
stems. Another sound then – the music of demons as a high-speed train arrived
at Hell’s way station. The hooder just appeared out of darkness like such a
train spearing from a tunnel, flicking one of the dracoman mounts onto its back
and going over it like a blunt saw over liver, then rising up into the night.

The
thing reared up and up, in silhouette against Calypse, some monstrous cobra,
but one fashioned of slick, hard black components moving with oiled smoothness
against each other. But as it surged forwards and down, the hollow machine
movement in its cowl became visible, then its columns of red eyes, as if some
power breaker had been switched on inside it at that moment. Almost certainly
its targets were the other dracoman mounts nearby, but it would come down
across where Grant, Shree, Tombs and other refugees crouched.

I’m dead, was all Grant could think, frozen to the spot.

Then the
hooder slammed to a halt against some invisible wall, which became visible at
that moment: Penny Royal, ten metres up, a curved face with inward-pointing
spikes, tentacles wound into a trunk rooting down into the ground and bowing
under the impact. The hooder itself arched with the strain, a terrible hissing
shrieking cutting the night, then came a sound as of a tank going over a glass
greenhouse. Lightning flashed, a single static electricity gunshot discharge.
Debris began to rain down as the two opponents swayed back and forth, and Grant
was horrified to see a single black spine spear down into the soft ground
beside him. Then an explosion between the two, blinding bright, and more
debris, flute grass flattened as if under some giant aerofan, dracoman mounts
and their Human cargo fleeing under it. The ground came out from underneath Grant
and when another explosion ensued, then another, he put his hands over his head
and fought the urge to pray.

‘Keep moving west,’ whispered Penny Royal.

Grant
peered out, saw the hooder, headless, writhing as it fell, Penny Royal bowed
over – some carnivorous plant suffering terminal indigestion.

‘Wesst,’ hissed the AI, a strange reverberating echo
behind its instruction.

Up on
his feet, Grant ran to the other two, pulled up Shree, Tombs following. He
couldn’t hear what they said, ears ringing, and perhaps they couldn’t hear his
instructions. But they followed him out into the wilderness, fleeing a writhing
destruction as hooders tore the station apart.

After the Quiet War, when art was no
longer supported by state funds or by those more interested in iconoclasm, the
grotesqueries of the previous centuries died a deserved death. People were no
longer satisfied or impressed by political messages in an age when politicians
and ideologues had become objects of ridicule. Higher general intelligence and
broader knowledge of the world, of the solar system, also enabled them to at
last see through the obfuscations and justifications of lazy but glib
pretenders to art. Something of a renaissance occurred when art returned at
last to its natural state of being beautiful objects or elegant design that
people are prepared to pay for. Thousands of artists, who previously would not
have considered producing objects of beauty, now started producing. Legions of
art critics whose greatest skill was analysis of non-existent meaning
discovered an urgent need to retrain. And the time had returned at last when a
gorgeous painting taking weeks of skill to produce might garner more praise
than a frozen pig’s penis in a glass of vodka.

–
From a speech by Jobsworth

Chanter slammed shut the door of the room provided for him, pack slung
over one shoulder containing both his special food and a copy of his research
notes – the latter because he didn’t trust Rodol to consider them as important
as he did, and so keep them safe. He felt a confused amalgam of excitement and
anger, and he didn’t know if he was angry at himself for doubting beliefs that
in the past had been firm, or angry at believing such stuff in the first place.

The Technician is on the move.

It had
been so easy to wrap himself up in his esoteric pursuits and deep analysis of
the wealth of data that had become available. He had convinced himself he was
forging a lot closer to understanding the Technician’s art, but now it was on
the move again and new data was flooding in from the observation tower, new
hypotheses were arising that threw his speculations into further doubt.

It’s a war machine.

When
Clyde told him that, Chanter had felt a deep offence, his instinctive reaction
being that nothing made for the specific purpose of delivering destruction and
death could have artistic sensibilities. He had argued with the man, even then
realizing how infantile his reaction was but unable to stop himself. Wartime
produced some of the greatest art, and only the exigencies of survival, and a
lack of excess wealth and spare time for those involved, limited its quantity.
Even so, when Clyde went on to inform him that the Technician might also be an
evolved creature adapted, genetically altered and augmented for the purpose of
battle, he had grasped at that as a man sinking into some quagmire would grasp
at overhanging flute grasses.

‘Then
there is the trauma from which the art arises,’ Chanter had said. ‘A natural
creature twisted to kill, destructive technologies sewn through its body, all
that it was repressed, crippled, broken.’

‘You’re
assuming it wasn’t a killer before. You’re assuming prior sentience and enough
of a mind to suffer.’ Clyde had gazed up at him from where he sat before his
screen, data maps cycling spookily like bone sculptures. ‘The organism from
which the Technician arose might have had no more mind than some Terran
arthropod – might have been no more than something programmed by evolution to
kill, eat and breed.’

‘The
sculptures tell me otherwise,’ said Chanter. ‘How appropriate that a creature
distorted for war should choose so bloody a medium for its art.’

‘What
analytical mind the Technician had, and might still have, could all be
additional, could all be the kind of add-ons you see in a haiman. Its mind could
be the most artificial thing about it.’

‘Artificial
intelligences produce art,’ Chanter responded, then realized he had just
contradicted something that had been a contention of his for most of his life,
from which his earlier offence had arisen. He believed
that machines did not produce art. He had always felt that only evolved
creatures could produce it, that AIs only copied, they did not have the soul. Then, out of that thought and all that dodgy word –
soul – implied, he felt a deep confusion. Clyde just looked at Chanter
pityingly, probably understanding, even from their brief association, that he
had just shot himself in the foot.

‘You
just don’t understand,’ said the amphidapt, hot anger purple-blushing his warty
skin.

‘On the
contrary,’ said Clyde. ‘I understand that your house of cards is collapsing,
Chanter, and that despite everything, you have the intelligence to see it.’

Chanter
just turned and left, feeling stupid and very annoyed with himself.

His
mudmarine was just where he had left it, still keeping pace with the slow
molluscan crawl of the Tagreb. He pointed his remote control at it as he
stomped wetly across ground churned up by the movement of the base, and its
door opened for him offering welcome retreat inside. Ensconced in his chair he
pulled across and fastened his safety straps. Grabbing the control column he
tilted it forward and down, the machinery responding with a comforting roar,
soon muffled as the marine speared down into the mud. Next checking the
location of the Technician’s beacon on his screen and the intervening seismic
maps, he changed course ten metres below the surface and headed for a nearby
undercurrent of slushy mud flowing between ancient layers of decayed rhizome.

If the
Technician didn’t change its present course he would intercept it in about two
hours. Thereafter he would be able to keep pace with the creature until its
next kill. He felt certain that the creature must be aware, in some way, of
recent events. It had to be aware that its living artwork, Jeremiah Tombs, was
on the move too and was in some way responding to this. And, maybe, even after
twenty years of no product, no art, its next kill might be turned into
something new, something different, something from which Chanter would be able
to extract explanations, find some sort of resolution . . .

Twilight brought no rest, just better visibility in which to observe the
devastation. The way station looked like a titan had segmented it with some
immense cleaver, then torn out its guts and strewn them about the surrounding
landscape. The big tricone shell, almost the length of Grant’s ATV, offered
welcome cover for the three of them. Others had hidden in some of the debris –
Jem had seen people peeking out from the large chunk of apartment building
lying canted where it had landed in the mud a hundred metres away. Still others
had not been so lucky. Just a few metres away from where they crouched behind
the shell lay a woman’s head, whilst a little way beyond it lay what might have
been her enviroboot, the foot still inside.

Debris
both Human and machine strewed the surrounding landscape. Judging by the
wreckage lying smeared across from where the way station main entrance had
been, not one of the departing vehicles had escaped. As he studied the whorls
in the curve of shell before him, Jem wondered if anyone at all had managed to
get clear of the area, including those the dracomen had come for.

‘I think
it fairly fucking evident that they’re missing nothing,’ said Shree.

‘They’re
still looking for dying gabbleducks,’ said Grant. ‘And anything that moves
they’ll come down on.’