The Technician

by Neal Asher

  ‘So is that what we’ll find in Jeremiah Tombs’s head: hooder schematics?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’

  ‘Why, when they made the final form of the hooder, didn’t the Atheter destroy the prototype?’

  Amistad had already wondered about that. ‘Maybe, just maybe, not all of the Atheter agreed with racial suicide.’

  Penny Royal sharpened some more spines, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

  Despite first using Theocracy medical technology to save their lives, then Polity technology to heal up lung damage and the worst of their progressive skin complaint, the Overlanders retained their scars. Or rather, Grant noted as he entered the covered market, they retained those scars that weren’t horribly disfiguring, usually on their arms and the backs of their hands, with maybe the odd example on cheek or forehead. They said they wore their scars with pride as a reminder of all they had gone through and as a memoriam to all those who had not survived. Grant knew that their scars helped them cling to their bitterness and hate, but how could he judge them when still, as to a familiar lover, he clung to his own?

  The stalls sold locally manufactured goods, local produce and Polity goods shipped down from the north or obtained from the occasional trader spaceships that landed on the foam-stone rafts, once supporting worker huts outside the town. Amidst these the Overlanders were easy to spot. As well as their scars, they favoured black clothing often like a photo negative of a proctor’s uniform, though the script running from armpit to ankle consisted of the kind of Euclidean patterns found on the backs of penny molluscs. After the slaughter the creatures had appeared in great numbers here, like poppies on some ancient Earth battlefield.

  All the Overlanders had accepted other Polity medical technology and had their bodies adapted so they could breathe the air outside. They didn’t need a breather mask like Grant, and didn’t need the parasitic scoles. However, many of them carried scoles – gutted out, preserved and lined and turned into shoulder bags. Grant approached the first Overlander he saw, a woman inspecting the contents of an upright glass cylinder standing before an enclosed surgical saucer that had to have come in through the main market doors. The cylinder contained various styles and makes of augmentation, excepting Dracocorp augs, which were now banned from sale here on Masada. She turned towards him as he approached and nodded cautiously – she recognized him.

  ‘I need to find Edward Thracer,’ he said.

  ‘You’re Commander Leif Grant.’

  He felt only a brief inclination to say that he was Commander Leif Grant; that such titles were for the past. But it was not something he really felt, and grabbing at the future was not something he yet had any enthusiasm for.

  ‘Yeah, that’s me,’ he replied.

  ‘I’ll take you to him.’ She pointed across the market, and then led the way.

  As he walked, Grant noted a stall selling parboiled squerms and sprawns, a form of protein it had been an offence for anyone outside of the Hierarchy to eat, and now being sold in paper funnels for just one New Carth shilling or equivalent. Other food and drink being vended here consisted of the big grapes harvested from grape trees in the north, wine from the same source, preserved sausages of all kinds, sliced and served up in pepper sauce between slices of pillow bread, and other more exotic concoctions from offworld. His mouth started to water until the woman spoke again, killing his appetite.

  ‘It’s an honour to have you here,’ she said. ‘Have you come to join us?’

  ‘Nah, not now,’ he said, wincing a little.

  She led him round a market corner where stallholders were selling Theocracy relics: proctor uniforms, various forms of ecclesiastical clothing, badges, medals, jewellery, daggers and other hand weapons – the various guns in a locked chainglass case – numerous ornate paper books and standard electronic Satagenials. It surprised him to see such stuff on sale.

  He gestured towards the stall. ‘Don’t it bother you?’

  She had been about to question him further, but now glanced at the goods on display. ‘No, it doesn’t bother me, nor does it bother any other Overlander or any with allegiance to the Tidy Squad. We like it that all the Theocracy valued so highly is being sold off as trinkets, collectors’ items or decorations. It puts the Theocracy firmly in the past, where it should be.’

  Grant glanced at her. That really didn’t sound like the opinion of someone who wore the negative of a proctor’s uniform and kept her money and make-up in a hollowed-out scole. It occurred to him that they had been forewarned of his arrival here, and that she had been waiting for him.

  Beyond the trinket stalls lay a carousel vending machine about which a collection of tables and chairs had been set out. Such alfresco drinking and dining, albeit undercover and sealed from the air of the world, was something that had never been seen on the surface of Masada until after the rebellion. It was a novelty Grant had noticed spreading, especially amongst those who could really eat and drink alfresco. He’d sat in such a place actually outside and watched the diners and drinkers enjoying a freedom they hadn’t imagined before; he still having to wear a breather mask.

  Edward Thracer, along with two other Overlanders and another individual in plainer dress, sat at a table drinking white wine and sampling mezes from a varied collection of bowls. The four seemed to be having a good time at their feast, and Grant felt like the arriving skeleton.

  ‘Commander Grant,’ the woman announced as they approached the table.

  Grant felt himself cringing as other people all around looked towards him, some giving a rebel salute, others grinning and nodding. Chairs were shuffled aside to leave a space and a new chair pulled over. Grant sat down, ignored the glass of wine poured for him and gazed across at Edward Thracer. The man was a rock, solid muscle, and a shaven head revealing a purple scar almost the shape of an oak leaf.

  ‘So what can we do for you, Commander?’ Thracer asked.

  Grant decided to play it gently at first, not to get too heavy-handed. Here he could not be as terse and abrupt as was his wont, nor could he bark orders and expect them to be obeyed. ‘You know where my sympathies lie, Edward, and I know where yours are,’ he said carefully. ‘What I’m about to tell you, you’re probably already getting set up for.’

  Thracer just folded his arms and sat back, waiting.

  ‘During the rebellion I saved a proctor’s life – took him to our med unit in Triada Compound.’ Grant flicked his gaze around all the other faces at the table. ‘Y’know the story; he survived an attack from the Technician, survived it because the Technician replaced his breather mask.’

  ‘So you say,’ said Thracer.

  Grant felt a flash of annoyance at that. The fact that Tombs’s mask had been replaced by the Technician after its attack on him had been in the public domain for over a decade, but still there were those, like Thracer, who questioned Grant’s word. But instead of arguing the point he nodded acceptance and continued. ‘We’ve always thought there was something odd about the gabbleducks, the hooders, the siluroynes, heroynes and tricones. Now, with that stuff from the Polity Tagreb and that Atheter AI, we know it: gabbleducks are the descendants of the Atheter, hooders and tricones are artificial, and hooders were war machines, either that or they were made from them.’

  ‘You’re not exactly telling us anything new,’ said the woman who had guided him here, now seated astride a chair behind Thracer.

  ‘Well I didn’t know that bit about hooders once being war machines,’ said the man clad in plain clothes.

  ‘That’s because you weren’t paying attention, David,’ she shot back.

  Thracer held up a hand. ‘Let him continue – he at least deserves a hearing.’

  ‘Okay,’ Grant grated, ‘let me tell you something y’don’t know about Proctor Jeremiah Tombs.’

  ‘We know he’s heading in this direction,’ said Thracer. ‘And that it’s quite likely that Greenport is going to be his final destination.’

&nb
sp; Grant shook his head. ‘No it ain’t, and here’s why.’ He took a deep breath, gazed at them steadily. ‘All you know about Tombs is that he’s a proctor loon who can’t accept his Theocracy is dead. He’s become an icon – represents all proctors to some. He’s the prime target for the Tidy Squad, but until now stayed safe on Heretic’s Isle. But he’s more than that, a lot more.’

  ‘How can a proctor be any more than a coffin dodger?’ asked one of the other men at the table, his words succinct, vicious.

  Grant dipped his head. He wanted to slap some sense into these people, but he also perfectly understood them. His stomach tight, he raised his head and focused on the speaker.

  ‘When the Technician took Tombs apart, it plugged into his brain and downloaded something,’ he said succinctly.

  ‘Bullshit,’ said the man.

  Grant shrugged, which was not the response he wanted to make, and continued, his tone even but hoarse. ‘I guess you never wondered why Tombs is still a madman, why Polity mindtechs haven’t straightened out his kinks. The AIs don’t want to damage that download because of its source.’

  ‘So why’d they let him get away?’ asked Thracer.

  ‘Because the realities now, here on Masada, should shock him back to sanity and allow the AIs to get to that information.’ Grant said it straight, succinct, hiding his own doubts.

  ‘Oh, we can acquaint him with realities,’ said the vicious man.

  Thracer glanced at the man, expression blank, then said, ‘You’re asking us to accept that a hooder is capable of inserting information into the mind of a man. They may be the descendants of organisms fashioned for war, but I know nothing about such a capability. Hooder biology is mostly known and understood.’

  ‘The Technician used to make those weird sculptures – we all know that. Do other hooders do that?’ Grant asked.

  ‘So it’s a bit different,’ said one of the others, shrugging.

  ‘A lot different,’ said Grant. ‘Even during the rebellion some Polity gink was here tracking the Technician and snatching its sculptures before the proctors could find and destroy them. He found one in the mountains four years back. It’s a million years old. Hooders don’t live that long, so it seems the Technician was made practically immortal, and there ain’t been anyone capable of doing that on this world for two million years.’

  ‘And your final point?’ asked Thracer.

  ‘Don’t try to kill Tombs, don’t try to have him killed, and warn off any Tidy Squad members preparing to kill him.’ Grant glanced at the vicious man, then returned his attention to Thracer.

  ‘Are you threatening us?’ Thracer asked.

  ‘Just delivering a warning,’ said Grant, now standing up. ‘I’m going to be watching over him, and others will be watching too.’

  ‘What others?’

  ‘One’s a Polity drone that fought in the Prador war. It’s a machine you seriously don’t want to fuck with. But concern yourself with me first. Anyone tries to take Tombs and I will stop them.’

  Mr Vicious looked up. ‘How does it feel, Grant, trying to keep alive a piece of shit like that?’

  ‘It makes me feel filthy,’ said Grant. ‘But the Theocracy is gone and the AIs are here – we can’t be selective about what parts of their rule we’ll accept.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Mr Vicious.

  ‘You’ve delivered your warning, Commander,’ said Thracer. ‘We’ll consider it.’

  It was a dismissal. Grant nodded and moved away. He hoped that Thracer would realize that Tombs alive was more important to Masada and its people than petty vengeance – hoped the man could rein in the hotheads in his organization. Really, he didn’t fear for Tombs’s life, he feared for theirs. Amistad had recently made it quite plain to him. The drone itself wasn’t watching Tombs, that job had fallen to one of the drone’s ‘associates’, and it would not limit its response to any threat to the man’s life. Something had worried Grant about the way Amistad referred to that ‘associate’. It was almost as if that individual might be more lethal than the drone itself, and since Amistad was a veteran of the Prador war, carrying enough munitions to take out a city and enough bile to enjoy the process, that didn’t bode well for any assassination attempts.

  Some time in the past a storm had detached a clump of flute grasses from the main inland growth and one of the complex retreating tides had dumped it. Here the continent was reclaiming some of its land as the grasses now spread their rhizomes across waves of shingle. Jem had felt certain such a small stand of grasses would not contain anything nasty, for within it there would be nothing to hunt, so there he fell into a sleep of exhaustion.

  He woke once in the night, the glare of Amok turning the grasses around him to silver, and noted penny molluscs scattered on the damp ground all around him. Staring at the patterns on their shells he tried to make some sense of it all, but found only an unbearable sadness rising in him. He tried to find comfort in the First Satagent, but the world around him just drank up the words and replied with a distant and mocking ‘Sudburf hogglemiff’, and he fell silent, both sadness and fear mingling in his chest.

  Everything seemed to be testing his faith. Reality seemed to be testing his faith. And with that disconcerting thought playing in his mind, he tried to find sleep again, but that background mutter haunted a mind stirred by flashes of scripture, memories of childhood and the endless theological classes, and easy sleep now evaded him. At some point he slid into dream and found himself gazing at the words of his Satagenial and simply not comprehending them, terrified because the teacher would be along soon with his flute-grass cane that hooted and whistled when the man delivered the inevitable thrashing.

  Jem jerked awake, Calypse high and misty above, and sunlight casting cage shadows across him from the surrounding grasses. He sat up, not sure what proportion of the night he had spent in real sleep. After a moment he opened his pack and took out his remaining flask of cold coffee, drank deeply, then eyed the sealed packs of food he had brought along. He knew he should eat, but did not relish the prospect. Already doubts were coming back to haunt him; a continuous nagging pain at the core of his being. What Sanders had told him seemed the only rational explanation for the things he had seen: twenty years ago there had been a successful rebellion here, after which the Polity brought in its satanic machines.

  He ate because he needed the strength, but without relish, then repacked his supplies and lurched to his feet. Heading out onto the shingle he first noted that Calypse had drawn the sea in close, the waves lapping at the rhizome mat here, then he saw two trails running across shingle and the mudflat, drawing two lines between where he stood and the inland grasses. Something big had come out here in the night and then returned. He shuddered, took a diagonal course back towards the mudflat where walking would be easier, then finally reaching the compacted mass, which was much interwoven dead grasses, he picked up his pace, realizing that by now he had rounded the peninsula. Checking the time display on his watch he saw that over a day of his air supply remained, so he must cover a distance he estimated at about thirty kilometres within that time. He should have no problem, just so long as this world did not throw new barriers in his path.

  Still linked via her aug to Thracer’s comunit, Shree turned to gaze through the panoramic window of Thracer’s apartment as Grant stood up from the table in the market square below and departed. He’d been recruited to act as close protection for Tombs, a guide, a mentor. Obviously Grant’s past history with the proctor was why he had been asked, but though for her own plans it was what she wanted, it surprised her that he had accepted. His dislike of the Theocracy had been as fanatical as her own, and he had often been considered for recruitment to the Squad. Something had changed, obviously, but as Halloran had said, circumstances were now in her favour.

  She listened in on further discussion at the table. Miloh and David Tinsch were having none of it. Fuck the Atheter. What value was information about a race that trashed its own civilization and
lobotomized its descendants? They lived in the untidy now and it was time to make Masada just a little bit cleaner. Protection? Right. Let’s see how Tombs would be protected from an HV bullet at a thousand metres, though, of course, they’d much prefer to bury the bastard up to his neck in guano and see just how long he managed to keep screaming.

  ‘I disagree, I’m afraid,’ said Thracer. ‘We’ve only glimpsed what these Polity drones are capable of. Remember, just two of them here took out most of the Theocracy air force and they, apparently, were nothing like the things made during the Prador war.’

  ‘So we let the fucker live?’ said Miloh incredulously.

  ‘When the AIs have got to whatever it is inside his head, they’ll lose interest in him.’ Thracer smiled. ‘Then we take him down.’

  Miloh pushed his chair back and stood. Tinsch, who wore rather ordinary clothes to disguise a gut full of hate, stood also.

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Miloh. ‘You damned well know that this might be our only chance at him.’ He stepped away from the table and departed.

  ‘I never thought you’d go soft on us, Edward,’ said Tinsch, just a hint of disappointment in his voice, and he headed off after Miloh.

  The party began to break up then, its earlier conviviality now dead. After the last of them departed, Thracer stood and took his leave, wending his way across the market, out along the covered walkway, then up to his apartment. Shree shut down her aug link, then gazed at the door as he entered. He paused to stare at her, his look unreadable, then tiredly walked over and took the seat opposite her.

  ‘So?’ he asked.

  ‘He told you no lies.’

  ‘Then Tombs can’t be killed – you know how things are now. We need as much information as possible about the Atheter, about the history of this world. We need to be able to fight our case.’

  Shree gave a slow nod, then said, ‘Did you think Tidy Squad’s interest was only in turning him into a corpse?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Politics.’

  Thracer suddenly looked even more tired. ‘Tell me.’