by Neal Asher
The Technician
A Novel Of The Polity
Neal Asher
For Martin Asher
1955–2010
Too soon, brother. Too damned soon
Prologue
Three Years before the Rebellion (Solstan 2434)
The sculpture had been mounted on a rock which, though far from the Northern Mountains of the continent, Chanter knew to be the tip of a mountain itself submerged in the underlying tricone-generated soil of the planet Masada. After studying the screen display for a moment longer, he turned to the other displays arrayed before him and did some checking. His mud-marine had risen to the surface pushing up the rhizome mat as a shield above it, so should be all but invisible to the cameras peering down from the Theocracy laser arrays. However, he ensured that the chameleonware shield was functioning too and now extended to the rock, so would cover his departure from his vehicle. It was only by such attention to detail that he had remained undiscovered under the eyes of the Theocracy for so many decades.
He spun his seat round then heaved his bulky amphidapt body from it, traipsing across to the door to one side, his big webbed feet making a wet slapping against the floor. Beside the door he unclipped his root shear from its rack and turned it on. The thing looked like a dental-floss stick, the handle extending to a bow-shaped section across which a monofilament stretched, now vibrating at high frequency.
The door opened with a thump, extruding in towards him then sliding aside into its cleaner compartment. Inevitably, mud and chunks of flute-grass rhizome spilled in towards him. Amidst this mess a nest of green nematodes also tumbled in and began to wetly writhe apart, so Chanter took the time to grab up a sample bag and scoop the worms inside. Waste not want not – he had not had his body adapted to this environment to no purpose, and here was lunch.
The rhizome mat overhung the exit like a pergola collapsing under an excessive weight of vines, but the work of a moment with the root shear dropped it all back down into the black mud below. Chanter next returned the shear to its rack before stepping out. He paused for a moment to breathe deeply, gill slits opening to increase his air intake and thus winnow out the small amount of oxygen in the air. He held his right webbed hand up before his face, peering at the sculpture through the translucent skin between forefinger and mid-finger, but the infrared image gave him no more data than his mudmarine’s sensors had already obtained. The next web across gave him ultraviolet and evidence of some puzzling trace radioactives, but that was all.
Chanter sighed and now trudged through mud then across the flattened layer of flute grass to the rock and gazed up at the sculpture. The structure of carved bones had been joined together with plaited sinew threaded through drilled holes, or small mortise-and-tenon joints carved with a precision normally only available to machines. One of the grazers of this world had been disassembled, its poisonous fats meticulously extracted from its still-living body and discarded, in fact, stacked neatly in a pyramidal Chinese puzzle to one side, glistening in the light of the sun, whilst the rest, excluding sinew and bone, had been consumed. The predator had then taken the hard remains and made this.
As always Chanter felt a species of awe upon seeing such expressions of the artistic temperament, yet though the sculpture had been fashioned with such precision, such symmetry and such definite purpose, he still had no idea what it represented. The thing before him looked like something living, but bore little resemblance to its original form. To his recollection, it also did not look like anything else on this world, nor on any of the other worlds he had visited. The skull had been shortened, the grinding plates removed, cut into spikes along one side then reinserted sideways to give the skull pointy teeth. The thing sat upright, like the statue of some Human god, which was perhaps why Theocracy proctors destroyed these things if they got to them before Chanter.
The rib bones had been closed together vertically and added to at the bottom to form a cone-like structure. The rear legs extended up from behind and had been substantially altered; the long bones sliced thin, lengthways, and splayed out almost like a peacock’s feathers. Forelimbs formed a single hoop looping round from the top of the cone to its bottom – a perfect circle.
Chanter whistled, and Mick came trundling out of the mudmarine, long-toed feet extending almost like paddles from the sides of the low, flat louse-like robot to keep its weight supported on the delicate rhizome mat. It headed straight over to the sculpture, stalked eyes hingeing from under its front end to inspect the thing for a moment, then arms folding up from each side of its flat body to reach out with long-fingered hands to probe into the bonework and ensure the thing would remain undamaged when shifted to Mick’s flat-ribbed back. Soon afterwards Mick had safely installed the sculpture inside the mudmarine.
Sighing yet again, Chanter realized he was no nearer to understanding the work of this artist. This sculpture would join the rest of his unfathomable collection in his underground base. Of course, he shouldn’t be surprised, even after fifty years, at his lack of comprehension. This was no ordinary artist. The Technician, as some had begun to call it, was a very strange and lethal beast indeed.
The Rebellion from Underneath (Solstan 2437)
‘Damnation!’ Chanter exclaimed.
Hauling himself up by the console from the tilted floor of his mudmarine, he plumped himself back in his chair. Once ensconced, he pulled across safety straps he only used when negotiating particularly moist strata of mud – the stuff that possessed currents and was also navigated by tricones the size of gravcars.
On his screen he called up a seismic map created by the various infrasound emitters he’d planted about Masada, but what it showed just didn’t quite make sense. At first he’d thought the shockwave slamming into his conveyance came from a test firing of the Theocracy’s new weapon – that massive coilgun they’d named Ragnorak and intended to use to punch missiles right down through the mountains into the rebels’ cave systems – but no, they could not have moved it into position so soon and the readings here were just not right for that. The seismic map showed that something big had come down just fifty kilometres away from his present position below the surface, but that it hadn’t come down hard enough to be a direct fall from orbit.
He wanted more data – something was going on and he needed to know what it was, and to collect that data he must surface and take a look. He engaged the vehicle’s conveyor drive and it began to worm its way forwards, then up as he pulled the control column up. Occasionally there came a bump as the mudmarine shoved tricones aside, but they were of little danger to him, since though their grinding tongues could turn the toughest metal to powder, or sludge, out here he tried not to stay in one spot long enough for them to converge, and when halting did become necessary, he had the means to repel them.
Within an hour he was near the surface, the marine travelling faster in the less dense soil. He slowed almost to a halt below the rhizome mat, taking the precaution of engaging chameleonware before surfacing, then eased the vehicle up. Once it was stable, he first extruded a camera up through the mat to take a look around. No Humans in the vicinity, no technology, and he was a good distance from any Theocracy arachniculture. However, an unseasonal storm was blowing out there, the grasses waving about vigorously and the air filled with broken stems – the aftermath of the same shockwave he had felt below. Also the light seemed odd. It was night out there and, though the nights here were never that dark, it seemed oddly bright. Maybe a distant fire fed by some oxygen supply? Perhaps a spaceship had come down – that certainly matched the seismic profile, but pointing the camera in the direction of the impact revealed no fire. Finally he tilted the camera upwards, and gasped in surprise.
Meteor showers and the extended dull orange blooms that w
ere the after-effect of massive orbital explosions filled the sky. Obviously some major events had occurred above and whatever had come down was probably a result of them. Had the Polity finally intervened here? The AIs had not been showing much sign of doing so over the last few years. As he understood it, intervention here was a bit of a political hot potato that might result in trouble on Line worlds whose Polity affiliation was . . . delicate. He decided the camera wasn’t good enough, retracted it and next extruded his main sensor array.
Further surprises. Chanter swore quietly. The Theocracy satellite array was gone or, rather, now formed a cloud of wreckage feeding that meteor storm. However, though the powerful radio telescope in his sensor array showed him much detail of this, and even revealed that the shipyard on the Calypse moonlet Flint had also been destroyed, it did not reveal what had done the damage. He began searching frequencies for Theocracy communications and, slowly weaning fact from rumour and all the religious dross, finally figured out the chronology of events.
The thing they called Behemoth, which he knew as one of the remaining three of four massive alien organisms that originally formed the entity called Dragon, had arrived in rather bad temper. It had destroyed the Flint base then, by pretending to head directly for Hierarch Loman’s ship, forced him to call the Fleet away from Masada to protect him. Dragon had then U-jumped to Masada, and the Fleet, with ships that could not engage their underspace drives from a standing start, had been unable to pursue. Here it had destroyed the laser satellites before hurling itself to the surface and crash-landing. Chanter considered what this might mean.
Almost certainly, now, Lellan Stanton and her rebels would take advantage of the situation. They would head for the surface, and he knew there were enough of them, with enough armament, to take it. Loman would then respond, sending forces down from space to retake the surface – those troops presently training in the cylinder world Hope. The ballot for Polity intervention, being secretly collected here, might climb above the required 80 per cent but, even if not, there would be such a mess here that Polity intervention seemed inevitable. Chanter was of two minds about that. He rather liked his secretive molelike existence here, enjoyed his singular research and the lack of interference.
He retracted the sensor array and re-engaged his mudmar-ine’s drive. Large events were in the offing and things were due to get a little fraught up there, but he intended to remain underneath it all. Right now, he intended to take a look at a Dragon sphere, from the underside.
Chanter slowly drew his mudmarine to a halt as the seismic image of what lay ahead became clearer and clearer. After checking data stored in his computer system he had ascertained that Dragon spheres were a kilometre across. This one had lost a large portion of its substance and no longer bore the shape of a sphere.
Its impact with the soft ground had thrown up mountains of debris around it on the surface, and within the crater these enclosed, a substantial quantity of alien remains lay visible. The signals from his seismappers revealed incredibly dense bones of a material similar to ceramal but intricately formed and laminated with cellular structures. Other items up there looked like the by-blows of fusion reactors and giant animal organs. Scales strewn about the area reflected as dense as a Polity dreadnought’s armour, and other softer items formed an encompassing morass. Anyone stumbling across this would feel sure they had found all that remained of the creature, but it was all for show.
Underneath the ground the story was very different. A half hemisphere of Dragon remained, being pushed deeper into the ground on some thick stalk almost like a mushroom growing the wrong way up. Activity within that hemisphere was intense enough for Chanter to also pick up energy readings through the intervening mud. Seismics showed that internally the hemisphere had divided up into a cellular structure that bore no resemblance to the debris above. Each cell lay about a metre across and was rapidly forming something at its heart. Dragon, it seemed, was not dead and was up to something nefarious, which by the record seemed par for the course for this creature.
Also remembering how dangerous were the Dragon spheres – one had, after all, destroyed a runcible on the cold world of Samarkand, resulting in something like thirty thousand deaths, and this one had just thoroughly shafted the Theocracy – Chanter began to consider just how precarious his position here might be. But no, he was passively picking up data from his seismappers as they transmitted infrasound pulses through the ground. The nearest seismapper lay twenty kilometres away and Dragon should have no awareness of his own presence here, nearby. Chanter sat back with a sigh and tried to dispel his unease, just as the seismap reformed from new data to reveal something snakelike, and two metres thick, punching from the hemisphere directly towards his mudmarine. He swore upon seeing the end of this thing opening like the head of a tubeworm into many strands, just as they closed about his vehicle, jerked it into motion, and began to reel it in.
Nothing Chanter did would shake free Dragon’s grip. He tried the device that had been described to him as a ‘cattle prod for seriously big cows’ – the thing he used to drive away persistent tricones when he needed to stop somewhere deep down for maintenance, or sleep – but the Dragon hand of pseudopodia on the end of that massive tentacle shook his mudmarine so hard he thought the hull would crack, so he desisted. Still it reeled him in and now the seismapper images were becoming clearer. There were things growing inside those cells developing within Dragon’s remaining body. They looked like nymphs; somewhat similar to the young of mud snakes, though possessing a more alarming foetal look. Then his instrumentation went crazy before blinking off and, after a moment, the lights went out.
Chanter awaited extinction, waited for his vehicle to be crushed and for the loose mud here to slide in and engulf him, but then the instruments blinked back on again, and he gazed in perplexity at his screens. Something, it appeared, was going through his files methodically and at high speed. At present he recognized the layout of his journal, though the words were blurring past too fast for him to read. Next came the images of all the sculptures he had collected, along with his speculations about what they might mean. Seemingly in a response to this a hissing issued from his communicator, along with something else that sounded like distant laughter.
‘Little toad man,’ said a voice, spooky, perfectly coherent yet in some manner quite obviously that of no Human, but Dragon itself. ‘See how in your form I live again?’
‘What are you doing . . . Dragon?’ he asked.
‘I grow ready for sleep.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why have you seized my craft?’ Chanter asked, and when no answer was forthcoming added, ‘I’m no threat to you.’
‘No.’
Chanter wasn’t sure if that was a denial or agreement, but then, judging by some of the documents he’d glanced at under the title ‘Dragon Dialogues’, the ambivalence shouldn’t surprise him.
The file search ended and seismic imaging returned. The tentacle had drawn the mudmarine very much closer to the main body now, but had ceased to reel him in. With invisible icy fingers drawing down his back he gazed at those nymphs, those things being created from the very substance of Dragon. They bore something of the shape of Human children, and something very much of the reptile. Was Dragon somehow mocking him? Had Dragon expected him to come? This was madness.
Abruptly, all but one of the pseudopodia released their hold of his craft, the one remaining still engaged with his sensor array, through which Dragon had penetrated his computer system. He considered restarting his craft’s conveyor drive, but knew he could not flee fast enough to avoid being snatched up again. He must be given permission to leave if he was to survive this.
‘You destroyed the laser arrays,’ he tried.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘The question you ask.’
‘Yes, it’s the damned question I ask,’ said Chanter in frustration. ‘Is your lack of clarity a function
of your vast intelligence or vast stupidity?’ The words were out of his mouth before he could recall them and he winced. It occurred to him that his long isolation, the years spent speaking to no one but his machines, had rather undermined his conversational judgement. However, Dragon seemed unconcerned about his outburst.
‘I go now,’ the creature said. ‘I fragment.’
And so it was. There on the screen, the remaining hemisphere of this part of Dragon entire was coming apart, dividing into those individual cells which, even as Chanter watched, were inflating and beginning to rise towards the surface.
‘Go here, little toad man.’ Coordinates appeared on one of his screens, precise Masadan coordinates he recognized as somewhere in the mountains – a place he tended to avoid since that meant travelling on the surface. ‘Or grovel in the mud without answers.’
The last pseudopod flicked his mudmarine dismissively and the whole tentacle began retreating into the fragmenting mass, but even as it did so it writhed to an abrupt halt and it too broke apart as the mind directing it went away – ceased to be, as Chanter later learnt, one mind but broken into the minds of many.
Chanter fled the scene just as fast as he could and the chaos above kept him grovelling in the mud long afterwards. Dangerous Jain technology arrived up there in the form of a massive subverted Polity dreadnought and it seemed the whole world was in danger of extinction. Rebel forces battled Theocracy soldiers turned into zombie servants of the one wielding that technology, and those that fought beside the rebels bore some of Chanter’s form: dracomen, risen from the ground as from the sowing of the dragon’s teeth. Chanter rose once or twice to the surface to view the ruination, as he fruitlessly searched for further sculptures, and he spent long years searching for the Technician, which at some point during the rebellion had managed to shake off his tracking device and gone to ground.
Only later, much later, when it seemed less likely he would end up on the wrong end of a Theocracy or rebel bullet, or be infected by some dangerous technology, long after the Polity finally raised the quarantine, did he take a long hard look at those coordinates. Maybe he was being too damned cautious, maybe his caution was the reason the answers he sought perpetually evaded him.