Polity 4 - The Technician (40 page)

‘Ah, you
mean Earthnet’s reporting on your great interest in the painter Silbus?’ said
Shree. ‘That was a long time ago and nothing to do with me.’

Obviously
the three here had gone through a frightening experience, and it seemed her
reaction was to put on a dismissive air.

‘The
restriction orders that resulted from it killed my line of research there – I’m
not going to allow that to happen again.’

‘As I
understand it,’ said Shree, ‘Earthnet reports were vetted by AIs even then. It
wasn’t a hatchet job, just the truth.’

Chanter
snorted in annoyance, turning to study Jeremiah Tombs. Still he felt some
resentment about what had happened back then, though over the intervening years
he had come to understand that he had been rather too . . . enthusiastic.

‘So
you’re the one,’ he said.

Tombs
just looked at him, looked through him.

Chanter
tried, ‘The Technician is an artist and you are art.’

Tombs
blinked, seemed to only just realize he was being spoken to. ‘All is art,’ he
said, as if this were obvious.

By now
Mick had a full load of black spines and tentacles, which it took over to the
domed hatch into the mudmarine’s cargo blister. A signal from the robot opened
the hatch, and Mick began to try loading the parts of Penny Royal into the
space within. Chanter noticed the robot was experiencing difficulties, for many
of the separate components had attached to each other, turning the load into a
tangled mass. The robot eventually got round this by upending itself and
tipping the whole lot inside, where it landed with a sound like rubble pouring
into a hopper. The robot then trundled out again to collect the rest.

‘Let’s
go inside,’ said Chanter.

With
four people inside, the mudmarine’s compartment was cramped. Chanter opened
down his wall cot, where Shree and Grant sat. Tombs just studied his
surroundings for a moment, then squatted, whilst Chanter himself sat in his
control chair.

‘All is
art?’ Chanter repeated, now checking feed from his sensor array. There were
hooders out there still, some starting to draw closer now the Technician was
departing, but none of them close enough to be too much of a worry. It seemed
that the common hooders kept their distance from the Technician, but of course,
the albino hooder was no part of the common herd.

Tombs
remained silent, so Chanter turned to him, only for Shree to add her opinion.
‘Tombs here has been coming out with a lot of stuff like that.’ She eyed the
ex-proctor. ‘Maybe if he keeps up this Zen shit the air of mystery around him
won’t disperse and the Polity will keep paying him to do just exactly as he
pleases.’

Chanter
glanced at her with irritated puzzlement. Something didn’t ring true about her
words; they sounded almost desperate, as if she was having trouble being
dismissive.

‘I’ve studied
the Technician’s sculptures for decades,’ Chanter said, switching back to his
own concerns. ‘The scientists here see them as the product of malfunction, but
I see more. It was I who dated the oldest sculpture and it is I who see beyond
such mechanistic views of reality.’

‘He
searched for a million years and found the Weaver at last,’ said Tombs.

Chanter
just stared at the man, not quite sure what he had heard for a moment, then
some mechanistic facts fell into place. He had dated
the oldest sculpture at about a million years yet, so Amistad and Clyde claimed
the Technician itself dated back to the suicide of the Atheter race, two
million years ago.

‘The
Technician searched for a million years?’ Chanter asked.

Tombs
glanced at him, almost dismissively, then looked past him at the screen showing
Mick collecting up further parts of Penny Royal.

‘It
destroyed his mind, but not completely – broke the circuit but left the
components in place. It must have taken him a million years to rebuild
himself.’ He shrugged, looked slightly puzzled. ‘That’s the only explanation.’

‘The
Weaver?’ Grant enquired, peering at Tombs.

Chanter
felt like telling the man to shut up, but then perhaps he did have something to
contribute. ‘Yes, what is this weaver?’

‘He
died, but what is death?’ Tombs pointed at the screen and Chanter turned to
look at it. Mick was trundling in with the last of Penny Royal, but beyond the
robot, just visible, a big old gabbleduck was lolloping towards them. Something
ran cold fingers down Chanter’s spine. The gabbleduck wouldn’t reach them
before Mick finished up, and they would be well out of its reach deep in the
mud shortly afterwards, but its presence out there just seemed too
coincidental.

‘You
found where it happened,’ Tombs stated. ‘He died there, again.’

‘You see
– mysterious bullshit,’ said Shree, with a break in her voice as Chanter
turned.

Tombs
gazed up at him, something more Human returning to his expression. He smiled.
‘I gabble,’ he said.

Chanter
reached behind, groping across the console to open com, finding he didn’t need
to when Amistad spoke from the speaker. ‘Yes, Chanter?’

‘I
missed something,’ said Chanter.

‘You
did?’

Chanter
frowned – it was so unlike the scorpion drone to pretend such surprise at his
mistakes. ‘I did – I need someone to check the data I used to date that old
sculpture.’

‘You
feel you have the date wrong?’

‘Stop
fucking with me Amistad.’

‘What do
you want to check?’

‘At a
million years in this environment, we’re at the bottom end of mineralization
mapping.’ Chanter paused, realized he was both dreading and fascinated by the
results that surely could be obtained. ‘I did the mapping from a general
mineral content of a Masadan grazer’s bone, the Technician’s usual prey, but I
might have that wrong. However, we should be able to backtrack through the map
to give us a specific mineral content and thus nail down the precise species of
the animal the sculpture was made from.’

‘Even
now, Rodol is running the maps . . . one moment.’

After a
pause Chanter asked impatiently, ‘Has it got it yet?’

‘Of
course,’ Amistad replied.

‘What
has it got?’

‘I think
you know the answer to that one, Chanter.’

‘Thank
you,’ Chanter replied, not feeling in the least bit grateful.

‘They’re gone,’ said Jonas Clyde. ‘Every last one of them that came to
this world is gone.’

The
clarity came, rolled through Jem like a wave of pure crystal, and it faded to
leave odd shells in its wake. Studying those shells was an absorbing task that
seemed to fold immediate reality away, in the big place in which Jem resided
the immediate seemed some drama playing on a fuzzy screen – the best place for
such pain. For a moment he focused back into the real, but he couldn’t nail
down the now, and time dislocated . . .

. . .

. . .
putting him back in the mudmarine, cramming himself to one side of the small
compartment as the robot returned inside and affixed itself to the wall. The
robot’s return here ran completely contrary to Chanter’s instruction for it to
secure itself in the same compartment as the cargo it had just loaded. The
amphidapt probably didn’t understand that the machine had evolved, had stepped
up into the Turing band, and now possessed enough consciousness to know it did
not want to stay that close to Penny Royal.

‘What
was that all about?’ Shree asked.

‘Mick is
obviously malfunctioning,’ said Chanter, staring at the robot.

‘Not
that.’ Shree waved a hand at the console before Chanter. ‘All that stuff about
mineralization mapping.’

Chanter
just shook his head, concentrated on taking his vessel under the rhizome layer
to avoid hooders and the gabbleduck out there, both of which were starting to
draw uncomfortably close. The gabbleduck, Jem realized, would lose the sense of
it all and just return to its animalistic existence. No matter – another would
be along soon enough.

‘You
gabble, you said?’ queried Shree.

Jem
realized the comment had been directed at him. She wanted him responding to
her. She wanted him to associate with her on a Human level so she could lose
her fear of him, of what he might be, and the doubt that cast on her own firm
beliefs.

‘Obviously
a direct reference to the Gabble,’ said Grant. ‘Language seems his entry
point.’ He passed her the shell Jem had given him – the shell Jem hadn’t wanted
to keep now he understood its attraction, and the accompanying denial.

The
journey slid past, an odd dream, unimportant . . .

. . .

. . .
back in the Museum Jem gazed at the neatly preserved carcass of a hooder and
felt only a species of disappointment when the mechanisms inside the corpse
activated it for those here.

‘I
worked that all out when I studied this.’ Clyde gestured towards the corpse.
‘Shardelle and I put it all together – the tricones, the nihilism, all of it.’

Jem
replayed the previous events in his mind. He remembered their arrival at the Tagreb,
remembered Chanter instructing his robot to unload Penny Royal and the robot
simply refusing to move. Like some iron animal self-eviscerating and spilling
its guts, the mudmarine opened its cargo compartment, and Penny Royal clattered
out. Strewing itself across the ground in the Masadan night, the black AI began
to move with the same incremental slowness as the Tagreb itself.

‘It’s
still functioning,’ Shree had said.

‘Damaged
but unbowed, I’m told,’ Grant had stated. ‘Penny Royal’s still alive and should
be able to pull itself together within the next few days.’

Jem only
now noticed how Shree had used the word ‘functioning’ whilst Grant had used
‘alive’.

Shortly
after that Clyde had come out to greet them, then led them inside. Behind them
the whole of Penny Royal shifted with the glacial slowness of a slime mould,
but a couple of spines swivelled in their direction as if tracking their
progress, which finally brought them to the Tagreb’s museum.

. . .

‘He
needs to know it all,’ said Grant. ‘He needs to know all about the Atheter.’

Clyde’s
succinct and bitter reply to Grant’s earlier question, ‘Tell us about the
Atheter,’ had obviously not been enough.

‘So tell
us all about that nihilism,’ said Shree.

‘Here on
Masada is where the Atheter committed racial suicide,’ Clyde explained. He
folded his arms, his expression slightly irritated, then went on to detail what
had happened on Masada – a story he seemed to have become tired of telling.

With
half an ear Jem listened, but he knew the story so well now. The rest of his
attention focused on the long row of sculptures, then down to the end, where
Chanter stood looking at the last in the row, and the oldest. Then, almost as
if time itself had shaken out the staples holding it to reality, he found
himself sliding back into the near past.

. . .

‘What
the hell was that all about?’ Shree asked.

Jem was
back in the mudmarine again. Grant had just passed her the penny mollusc shell
and she held it like some poisonous insect.

‘It’s a
glyph, or a pictograph, or an entire word,’ Grant replied. ‘It’s one of the
basic elements of the Atheter language – I thought you got that, Shree.’

‘I get
that it’s what many would want to believe.’ She passed the shell back to him.
‘You know what I think? I think our proctor here is playing on the fact that
the Polity thinks he has something important locked up inside his skull, and
he’s getting away with it because the AIs don’t dare open up his skull and take
a good hard look inside.’

‘You saw
what he did with the Technician,’ said Grant.

Shree
just turned away from him.

What did
he do with the Technician? Jem closed his eyes and saw the weaving, recognized
that after the scorched-earth return to Homeworld it was coming unravelled, and
that his own kind had waded into madness and not recognized it as such.

‘Okay,
taking us under,’ said the amphidapt.

Strange
creature, Jem felt, yet somehow more familiar to him than both Shree and Grant.
Certainly this familiarity stemmed from Chanter’s webbed feet and bulky
physique.

As the
mudmarine shuddered into motion the floor tilted underneath Jem, so he sat
down, ankles crossed, hands resting on his knees . . .

. . .

. . .
and now found himself sitting in exactly the same pose on the floor of the
Museum. The three close by were peering down at him with varying expressions.
Shree just looked with contempt, Clyde with puzzlement, whilst Grant showed
expectation. Of course, they had hoped that hearing the full truth of what had
happened on this world would free up things in his mind. He sensed Penny Royal,
still outside and still mostly immobile, waiting in attendance upon that, still
haunting them like some vicious but restrained spectre.

‘You
okay?’ Grant asked.

Jem
ignored him and gazed at Clyde. ‘They are not all gone – I think you know
that.’

The man’s
puzzlement increased. ‘Some tried to save themselves or some part of their
civilization, but you yourself said the tricones grind very fine.’

‘Not
fine enough.’

Victory
in Grant’s expression, a slight tilt of his head indicating Penny Royal or the
drone Amistad must be talking to him. They thought they had succeeded here with
Clyde’s testimony. Jem decided to disabuse them of that notion, pointing to the
row of sculptures.

‘It
surfaces because of them,’ he said. ‘Chanter knows.’

Jem
closed his eyes.

The
technology had been all but annihilated, the war machines hunting down and
burning to ash the last Jain nodes – the seeds left after the technology
completed its millennia-long season of destruction – but the fear and the
hatred had not gone away. The people knew that all it would take was one missed
node and the whole nightmare would begin again. Retreating, they left behind
the worlds seared down to the bedrock, acidic atmospheres and volcanism.
Steadily they destroyed every trace of their interstellar civilization, mass
dumping of all offworld constructs into suns, using the war machines to take
out the rest of their own AIs, then using them at Homeworld to chew remaining
offworld tech to dust, before summoning them to the surface for decommissioning.
But the Weaver, like so many, did not agree with this.