Snare (82 page)

‘That must be it, yes.’

‘Fascinating!’ Warkannan said. ‘They really do have true consciences. No wonder she wants to hear about the Lord.’

‘Idres, my dear old friend!’ Jezro paused for a sigh. ‘There’s something going on here that you’re not seeing. We’ve had a double dose of Chof politics just lately, and I’ll bet you vrans to breadmoss that it isn’t piety blooming in Water Woman’s six-chambered heart. If she brings a new religion to her people, she’ll be way ahead of her rivals when the Great Mother dies.’

‘What a damned cynical remark!’ Warkannan looked genuinely distressed, so much so that Jezro winced.

‘Well, I could be wrong,’ the khan said.

As they rode free of the canyon, Warkannan and Jezro urged their horses forward and pulled ahead of the two women to
continue their talk in Kazraki. Loy turned to Ammadin.

‘Think Jezro’s right?’ Loy said.

‘Of course,’ Ammadin said. ‘And I think he’s going to make a fine ruler, assuming he can fight his way to the throne.’

After N’Dosha, the eastern valley appeared profoundly ordinary – another stretch of drying grass, dotted here and there with Midas trees. Small maroon birds broke cover and rose shrieking with a flap of naked wings as the Chof loped through, hurrying east. Booming in excitement, Water Woman came trotting back to meet the H’mai.

‘Ride faster!’ she said. ‘We camp by water, and then we be at Sibyl’s cave.’

The water, another canal, lay only a few miles from the canyon’s mouth. While the servants made camp, Water Woman led Ammadin and Loy back to the traps. Out of a scatter of rocks, the cliff here rose sheer and high. Although pitted with caves in its upper reaches, from the valley floor up to some hundred yards it presented a smooth pale face, stippled here and there with black stone. Water Woman stamped both feet in a brief jig.

‘There be Sibyl’s cave. You see not see it?’

‘We don’t,’ Loy said, smiling. ‘That’s a pretty convincing holo.’

‘Yes.’ Water Woman tipped back her head and thrummed a command.

A long, low stripe of cliff shimmered once and vanished. About twenty feet up, a dark slit appeared, flanked by two black pillars, shaped like stacks of flattened spheres. This close Loy could see that they were not rock but some artificial substance, gleaming and perfectly smooth. She swore under her breath in sheer awe. Ammadin’s carefully composed face revealed no feeling at all.

‘That’s clever,’ Ammadin said. ‘Can I go in now?’

‘You want-not eat first?’ Water Woman said.

‘I can wait for food, if it won’t offend you.’

‘You come-now many long miles. I see why you want to enter right away. Loy Sorcerer, Sibyl like-always to see new persons one at a time. It be best that Ammadin go first.’

‘Fine with me,’ Loy said. ‘I’ve got to write up our trip through N’Dosha.’

Water Woman led Ammadin up the path, cut shallow into the side of the hill, to a landing directly in front of the overhang of rock
protecting the entrance. In the shadows Ammadin could see a pair of metal doors. Water Woman inflated her throat sac and thrummed one long high note. The doors clanked, groaned, and slid open.

‘They stay open-next-soon till I command-again. It be safe to enter.’

The sunlight illuminated the beginnings of a narrow hallway leading deeper into the cliff. At the moment Ammadin walked in, ceiling panels began to glow with a pale silver light. Down at the far end of the hallway, other lights turned themselves on in a circular room, some twenty feet in diameter. Floors, walls, freestanding metal screens propped between flexstone pillars, a collection of sleek blue boxes the height of a man, a square dais sitting in the centre of the room – they all glittered silver in the light from above.

Ammadin hesitated at the door to the circular room. She was afraid, she realized, and the fear stretched the hallway behind her until the exit seemed to stand miles away. Outside lay everything she knew. In the room ahead of her she would learn new truths, perhaps even more dangerous than the ones she’d already faced. She took a deep breath and walked in.

At each corner of the dais stood an oblong blue box, and in the centre sat a chair made of the same blue crystalline substance as Zayn’s imp. Sitting in the chair was a woman, dressed in a pair of narrow blue trousers and a loose shirt of the same material, decorated with squares of coloured metal on the pocket and gold leaves clipped to the collar points. She looked no more than thirty, with her smooth, pale skin and long, brown hair, but her haunted dark eyes marked her as old, so weary that one could think her as old as the cliffs themselves. She looked Ammadin over with a bitter smile.

‘Well, Lisa adin, I suppose you’ve come to gloat over your damned horses.’ She spoke Tekspeak, and her words crackled with anger. ‘I never thought Chursavva would be stupid enough to let you have them.’

‘What? I’m not Lisadin. My name is Ammadin, the spirit rider of Apanador’s comnee, and I’m here because you wanted my help.’

The woman vanished. Ammadin stood gaping until, just as suddenly, she reappeared.

‘I malfunctioned,’ Sibyl said. ‘My memory banks at times make
incorrect connections. I beg your pardon. You look almost exactly like Lisa adin Bar, Mother of Horses. Considering the small size of the Tribal gene pool, this is not surprising.’

Faced with greater marvels Ammadin had no interest in whom she resembled. ‘How did you disappear like that?’

‘I’m not really here. I am what is called a REV, a name that comes from the Old Vranz phrase retrouver et voir, a databank made up of electronic circuits housed in a variety of devices. Part of me exists here, in the Analysis Lab. The rest exists in some of those objects you call the Riders. If I have any body at all, it exists only as polyquartzine and other such materials. This is why the indigenes call me the stone woman.’

‘But you look so solid.’

‘What you are seeing is a hologram that preserves the appearance of the flesh-and-blood woman I once was. All organics have been stripped away. I exist only as a collection of data. Never make the mistake of thinking of me as a living H’mai. The hologram exists only to make my functions easier to access.’

‘Did they take pictures of you, you mean, before you died?’

‘No, I died in order to become a REV. You will not be able to understand how this was achieved. My ancestors developed the process of transferring a H’mai mind into what were known as artificial intelligence units. It was not widely used, as the actual person died once its flesh-and-blood neurons were catalogued and replicated. I remember the process as very painful, but fortunately I have no physical nervous system left to actualize that memory.’ Sibyl leaned forward and held out one arm. ‘Try to touch me.’

When Ammadin laid her fingers on what appeared to be Sibyl’s wrist, they felt nothing. She waved her hand back and forth, passing it through the apparently solid flesh.

‘Very well,’ Ammadin said. ‘So you’re a ghost. I believe you now.’

‘Good, but the accurate term is REV. Let me remind you that I am fully interactive. I will answer questions if you have any. My prime functions are to act as a repository of knowledge and to answer questions.’

‘You brought me here to stop Yarl Soutan from finding the Ark of the Covenant. Is that right?’

‘Not precisely. When I sent Water Woman to the grass, I wanted
to stop him from trying to find it. The Ark as he has conceptualized it no longer exists. As you now know, I have no true physical existence. Thus, I could not stop him personally. Water Woman is enmeshed in the politics of her kind. Thus I thought it wise to ask for human help.’

‘All right. You know about Zayn Hassan. He’s a highly trained soldier, and at the moment he and some of the Chur are hunting Soutan down.’

‘I am pleased to hear that, but it is too late to prevent all negative consequences. Yarl has already told other H’mai about the items and lore that may be found here. I have reformulated what I want thusly: help me minimize the damage Yarl has caused.’

‘I’ll do what I can, certainly.’ Ammadin hesitated, debating where to start. ‘You’ll answer my questions?’

‘One of my functions is to answer questions provided the answers are stored in my memory banks.’

‘What if the questions are about things the Landfall Treaty says we shouldn’t know?’

‘I will answer. The time has come for the truth. The Treaty is now eight hundred years old. The concerns it was meant to address have changed since that time.’

‘Good. I know that we’re all on Snare because of some kind of mistake. What was it?’

‘A jumpshunt accident that damaged the astrogation unit, which Soutan calls the Ark. I see that you don’t understand. Travel between stars is difficult. Given the state of your general knowledge, I cannot possibly explain how ships manage to cover vast distances in small amounts of time. You will have to take it as a given in this discussion that there are places in space that make such travel possible. These locations are called jumpshunts. Travelling through them is dangerous. Something happened while our fleet was in the shunt. No one ever discovered the cause, and thus that answer is not in my databanks. But it resulted in our being thrown off-course.’

‘So we fetched up here, and you decided to come to terms with the Chof.’

‘This is correct.’

‘So your people drew up the Landfall Treaty.’

‘Correct.’

‘And one of the terms was that we’d all lie to each other, the
Cantonneurs, the comnees, and the Kazraks. You set up lies right in the Treaty.’

‘We did so in an attempt to protect the indigenes. We wished them to develop in their own way in their own time. Sibyl Davees, the person from whom I was created, was a xenobiologist. I was trained to protect sapient species wherever she found them. Our species, the H’mai, in its early days interacted very poorly with other species. We learned to defend against such self-centred actions with time.’

‘But why the lies? I’ve been told that my ancestors wanted them.’

‘Yes, precisely.’ Sibyl leaned forward, and suddenly her eyes, her voice, took on life. ‘Your ancestors signed on to the migration because they wanted to live simple lives as wandering nomads. They needed myths for their new culture, and so they created some. The Treaty protects those myths.’

‘Like, the Tribes shall believe they have always belonged to the grass?’

‘Exactly. Hypothesis: Loremaster Millou has already told you things forbidden under the Treaty.’

‘Yes, but she had no choice. We found the wall with the sculptures on it. Your ancestors must have made it.’

‘They were not my ancestors. I co-existed with them.’

‘Sorry. I should call them the Settlers, Loy says.’

‘Loremaster Millou is correct. Yes, the Settlers created long-lasting records of their circumstances.’

‘Loy told me that the world is huge. If you were so worried about the Chof, why did you settle down right on top of them?’

‘The world is indeed very large, but it is mostly water. There is only one land mass, a pangea as such are called. It would have been possible to settle on the opposite coast from the Chof, yes, but in the past, H’mai colonies have always spread across any land mass upon which they found themselves. Inevitably the descendants of the Karashiki and the Companies would have made contact with the Chof at a time when none of the original Settlers were alive to guide the meeting. We – I mean they, including the woman upon whom I am modelled – the fleet council decided after much debate that it would be better to supervise the process and set up laws and procedures to protect the indigenes, to teach the colonists from the beginning that the Chof are sapient beings like ourselves. Further questions?’

‘Yes. Who were my ancestors and where did they come from?’

Sibyl leaned back in her armchair; her illusion of a face turned pale and for a moment seemed to dissolve into a stack of tiny cubes. When she spoke, however, the illusion came back strong. She twined her fingers together, glanced away, her eyes narrowed in thought. ‘I will explain with basic definitions. Your ancestors were soldiers. They were also victims of a great crime. The crime was necessary to save billions upon billions of lives. There was an enemy that our ordinary soldiers could not defeat. This enemy wished to feed upon other sapient races as you feed upon saurs. Your ancestors were created to kill this enemy.’

‘Wait! What do you mean, created?’

‘I cannot answer that question with any precision in terms you can understand. Giving you the correct terms will take –’ here Sibyl paused ‘– twelve to fifteen standard hours, and even then there is no guarantee you will understand me.’

‘Sibyl, I’ve got to have some sort of answer. It doesn’t need to be precise.’

‘Very well. You have released me from a constraint. I will answer in terms that are not precise. Do your people still remember the role of the female in human reproduction?’

‘If you mean producing eggs in her womb, of course we do.’

‘Very good. The word you need to know is clone. They recruited the best soldiers they could find to supply them with reproductive materials, eggs and sperm both. They changed the nature of these materials in the fertilized egg. Then they treated the earliest stage of each embryo with a substance so that it divided into many embryos, identical and healthy. They grew them in vitrinuters –’ another pause ‘– think of glass bottles, very large. In less than a year they had thousands of infants. They placed these infants in other mechanisms and raised them to adulthood in four more years. They continued growing infants for some years more.’

‘What? How could –’

‘Please.’ Sibyl held up a hand for silence. ‘Think: magic. They used magic to speed up the growth process for their altered H’mai. These men and women could see, hear, smell, and do things no other H’mai could. Each possessed special talents in the areas of memory, perception, and warfare.’

‘Oh gods!’

‘No, they were not gods. They were specially created H’mai.’

‘Yes, yes, I know. I was saying those words because I suddenly understood something.’

‘Very good. What do you understand?’

‘The Kazraks say that all those talents came from demons. They must have meant the people who made those – what was that word?’