Polity 4 - The Technician (9 page)

Chanter
unshouldered his pack and squatted on the dusty floor to open it. His tent was
a short cylinder he held in one hand. He pressed the activation button then
tossed it a few metres away. The cylinder hinged open along its length, the
tent expanding out of it as a small pump forced air into the open foam
structure of its walls. Within a minute the domed tent, two metres across,
extruded barbs along its lower rim to anchor itself to the ground, then the
internal light came on. Chanter ate worms before crawling inside and slumping
on the inflated bed, where sleep came down like a hammer.

The
remains of the hooder revealed no more than that this particular creature had
been a young one, which was surprising – the only hooders to die young on land
were those killed by Human weapons, yet Chanter could see no sign of their use
here. Only after puzzling over the remains for some while, recording images and
taking samples, did he begin to search the rest of the cave. Two hours later he
found something quite odd where the ceiling slanted down to join the floor and
where the gap was so narrow he had to crawl in on his hands and knees. Here a
square of stone had been excised from the floor, laboriously cut out using a
diamond saw by the looks of it, but no clues remained as to why. An hour after
that he found the narrow cleft concealed behind where one of the hooder’s
segments lay against the wall, squeezed through the narrow gap and pointed his
torch inside.

Rebel cache. On the floor near one wall of the cave were
scattered dusty plasmel crates, one of which lay open with its lid propped
against the wall beside it. He stomped over and pointed his torch beam inside,
noted a single, heavily corroded chemical-propellant rifle, and realized that
this must be an old cache indeed – probably placed here when the rebellion was
just getting started and before the rebels found their way to the deep
underground. He shone the beam around, and felt a sudden surge of incredible
excitement when light fell on the object at the back of the cave.

They’d
enclosed it – employed what looked like part of the kind of tough, transparent
plastic cylinders used in old spaceships to hold deep-frozen members of the
crew or passengers. The top of the cylinder was capped off with a steel plate,
its lower edge was bolted to the slab of stone it rested upon, and only while
studying these bolts and wondering how he might undo them did Chanter realize
that the slab was the one that had been excised from the main cave. Incredible.
Even while fighting to survive, fighting to get their rebellion under way
against the vicious regime here, they had seen the value of this object and
sought to preserve it. Here before him stood yet another of the Technician’s
sculptures.

Moving
nearer, Chanter studied the thing more closely. It was definitely old and
looked extremely fragile. He could see where sinews once bound it together,
those sections now secured with corroded copper wire. The form itself seemed
rough, primitive; the product of the young artist in all its gauche brilliance
but lack of refinement. The bone itself had faded to a chalky white and in some
areas it seemed that pieces were missing; some pieces had also fallen off and
were scattered around it. But this was a discovery indeed, and Chanter wondered
what truth Dragon had directed him here to find.

He had
to get this back to his mudmarine; he really needed to investigate further. How
old was this thing? By his reckoning, the Technician, at its present size, would
have been too big to enter the main cave out there, let alone to make its
sculpture in that narrow place near the cave’s end. Even the dead young hooder
out there could not have squeezed in. The artist must have made this when still
but a worm, still spending most of its time rooting up small mud snakes or
ambushing grazer young from below. So maybe, from what he knew of the lifespan
of hooders, this was as much as a century old.

Chanter
stooped and fingered one of the bolts, but they were corroded in place and he
hadn’t thought to bring cutting equipment. Next he studied the steel lid and,
after a moment, realized only its weight was holding it in place and it
possessed no airtight seal as he had suspected. He lifted the edge, and then
let it drop back into place – first things first.

Over the
next hour he recorded holographic images of every part of this cave, and every
detail of the sculpture. He went out into the main cave and packed away all his
equipment but for one sample bottle and a pair of tweezers, then returned to
the small cave, lifted the lid aside and reached inside to take up some of the
scraps of bone scattered about below the sculpture and carefully insert them into
the bottle. He could not take the whole sculpture himself – it looked far too
delicate – but he couldn’t leave this place without taking something, some
trophy.

Back out
in the main cave he hoisted his pack and exited into bright day. No matter the
risks and no matter how tiring the journey, he would return here with Mick to
collect his find. It was important, very important, though he’d yet to figure
out why. With renewed vigour he stomped the trail back towards his mudmarine,
stopping neither to eat nor rest. As he finally approached the crater rim he
wondered if his fatigue was why things began to get rather strange.

There
seemed a yellowish haze down in the crater, swirling with odd organic shapes
like the ghosts of all the creatures the Technician had killed. An odd taste
suffused his mouth and he smelt something nutty and sweet in the air, as if he
were walking into a cake shop. As he began to make his way down he spotted four
figures further round the rim from him, humanoid, but moving with an odd birdlike
gait. They made a rush towards him and terror surged up inside. Dracomen –
Dragon had lured him here to finish what it couldn’t finish under the ground.

Chanter
broke into a dogged run, determined to reach his mudmarine before they reached
him, but something whirred through the air and wrapped itself about his legs.
He sprawled, head down towards the crater, and saw yellow ghosts crawling up
towards him, a siluroyne opening diamond jaws and a fungus grazer coming to
suck out his brains. Glancing back at his legs he saw a bolas tightly wrapped
around them, its string like the linked bodies of snakes and its weights like
scaled pomegranates. Writhing, it settled itself comfortably, binding his legs
more tightly. It must have also injected some sort of poison, for he was
finding it hard to breathe, but still he tried to crawl on down. Then a shadow
loomed across him.

One of
the dracomen stood over him. Here stood one of those things Chanter had seen
forming underground from the very substance of Dragon: humanoid, but with legs
hinging the other way at the knees, toadlike head jutting forward on a long
neck, scaled green and red skin over most of the body but fading to yellow down
the front as on the body of a lizard. This creature clutched a rifle that bore
the shape of an ancient muzzle-loader, but also looked like something living.

‘Adapted
Human,’ it hissed.

‘Hardly
edible,’ commented another dracoman, now stepping into view. ‘Is it dead?’

‘No, not
yet.’

The
first dracoman squatted beside him and tapped the bolas, which abruptly
released its hold and wound itself round the creature’s arm. Then Chanter’s
consciousness fled to a hot yellow place filled with the burning sculptures of
the Technician.

Chanter opened his eyes and gazed up at night sky, the familiar glare of
Calypse somewhere over to his right, a background rustle of flute grasses
fading in and out of hearing as he turned his head to the left, to utter
horror.

Resting
there beside him the thing’s lower spines stabbed down into the rhizome mat,
the others starred all around. One tentacle with two stalked and lidded red
eyes protruding from its tip loomed up above him whilst other tentacles writhed
here and there, one stacking single rhizomes, another building cubes out of
neatly severed flute-grass stalks, whilst one tentacle snaked into Chanter’s
chest, which lay open like a butcher’s shop display, the smaller tentacles into
which this main one divided writhing inside like maggots. He tried to pull
away, but knew he was dead: the agony would reach him any moment.

‘Keep
still, Human,’ said a voice. ‘Penny Royal is saving your life – its first-ever
experience of putting someone back together rather than taking them apart. Or
rather, its first experience of putting someone back together correctly.’

‘What?’
he said, surprised he could speak, seeing as his lungs appeared to be missing.

‘The gas
vents every five and a half hours,’ said the voice, closer now. ‘It was one of
those random and very rare occurrences the Atheter did not account for in their
very thorough nihilism.’

‘Gas?’

‘Hydrogen
cyanide,’ the voice explained. ‘It didn’t occur in such quantities when the
Atheter wiped themselves out, but is now a product of decay of large tricones.
They die to eventually form the chalk layer, but whilst dying here their juices
enter narrow mud pipes under the mountains where they flow to the old volcano’s
cap to be cooked up in cyanide-infused sandstone and some metallic remains of
the Atheter civilization that were missed. The result is gas, which bubbles up
in that volcanic pipe you came here through. It would kill a normal Human
within a minute, but on one adapted like you acts as a hallucinogen, and takes
longer to kill. It can kill hooders, which is why they avoid the area and why
that gabbleduck carcass down below remains intact. In fact it was this same gas
that killed that young hooder whose remains you found in the cave – it must
have received a small dose and so managed to get some distance off before
expiring.’

‘Atheter?’

‘You’ve
been out of the loop for too long, Chanter, and so lack information vital to
your own research. Whilst your previous research might also be of value to me.’

Something
happening in his chest cavity. He watched with an utter detachment from reality
as two lungs inflated like little pink balloons and one of the smaller
tentacles began negligently flicking ribs back across and zipping up
intercostal muscle.

‘I’ve
stories to tell you,’ said the voice.

Chanter
turned his head as the speaker loomed into view, and he wondered if the mentioned
hallucinogen was still affecting him. But though the massive scorpion drone
seemed a fearsome creature, he recognized a Polity entity and felt some
reassurance. The other thing sticking him back together also seemed likely to
be a Polity entity of some kind . . .

‘Where
are the dracomen?’ he asked.

The
scorpion gestured with one claw, and shrugged. ‘They hunt. They saved your life
but did not want to be burdened with you, so they called me.’

He felt
momentary relief, followed by a touch of confusion, odd images flashing through
his mind. ‘So what stories do you have to tell me?’

The
drone advanced a little and he flinched, but then it kneaded the rhizome mat
with its numerous legs and settled down. It was almost as if it were making
itself comfortable, if comfort could matter at all to such a machine.

‘The
Atheter, as an intelligent race capable of building civilizations, retreated to
their homeworld trashing all their technology behind them, then on their
homeworld they committed a form of racial suicide that defies the imagination
of an AI,’ the drone told him. ‘They reconstructed and reprogrammed organisms
they had created for soil building on other worlds, to diligently grind up
every trace of Atheter civilization and technology. They sacrificed their own
intelligence, utterly abandoned it to revert to the state of animals, but only
after they’d reprogrammed and otherwise reformatted some of their organic war
machines so that they would obliterate the remains of those animals as each one
died. This was an almost irrelevant piece of nihilism, probably stemming from
self-detestation. But that’s how their minds worked back then, as they sought
to destroy what they felt had kept them warring with each other over the
millennia.’

‘Here?’
said Chanter, realizing at once that the soil builders mentioned must be the
tricones.

‘Tricones,
hooders and gabbleducks,’ said the drone. ‘The gabbleducks are the animalistic
descendants of the Atheter, and the hooders were once war machines.’

‘I don’t
understand.’

‘Jain technology,’
said the drone.

Chanter
understood that this Polity machine was now feeding him smaller amounts of
information to test the quality of his intelligence, and was probably
disappointed by his immediate response of ‘Uh?’ But he recovered and continued,
‘The stuff that kept this place quarantined for so long.’

‘A
technology created as a weapon, created to destroy civilizations, yet in itself
first appearing to be something that offered great power and knowledge. A
poisoned chalice the Atheter took up with the result of millennia of war,
worlds burnt down to the bedrock, trillions of deaths, and an eventual choice
to put away civilization, put away technology and even to shut off their minds.
Racial insanity.’

‘How do
you know all this?’

‘Polity
researchers on this world began to see the shape off it, and a surviving
Atheter AI, which now resides here, confirmed the likelihood of some of it,
though what happened here happened long after it went out of contact with the
kind that built it. There’s other proof too. A man called Rho – an adapted
Human like you – found an Atheter memchip. Before he could do anything with it,
it was stolen from him and taken, along with a gabbleduck, to a black AI called
Penny Royal who was willing to do the install.’ The drone waved a claw towards
the sea-urchin thing, which was now stretching Chanter’s skin back into place
and somehow sealing it invisibly. ‘The result was messy – Atheter technology
hidden in U-space activating and shutting the whole thing down, and nearly killing
the black AI concerned.’