The Neutronium Alchemist

by Peter F. Hamilton

  That just left the passports.

  Louise dressed herself in a tartan skirt (with stiffened fabric to stop it dancing up in the low gravity), black leggings, and a green polo-neck top. Clothes were the same as computers, she thought. After using the Far Realm’s flight computer she could never go back to the stupid keyboard-operated terminals on Norfolk, and now she had a million styles of dress available, none of them shaped by absurd concepts of what was appropriate …

  She went out into the lounge. Genevieve was in her bedroom, the thin sounds of music and muffled dialogue leaking through the closed door as yet another game was run through her processor block. Louise didn’t strictly approve, but objecting now would seem churlish, and it did keep her out of mischief.

  Fletcher was sitting on one of the three powder-blue leather settees which made up the lounge’s conversation area. He was sitting with his back to the glass window. Louise glanced at him, then the view which he was ignoring.

  “I know, my lady,” he said quietly. “You believe me foolish. After all, I have undertaken a voyage between the stars themselves, in a ship where I swam through the air with the grace of a fish in the ocean.”

  “There are stranger things in the universe than asteroid settlements,” she said sympathetically.

  “As ever, you are right. I wish I could understand why the ground above us doesn’t fall down to bury us. It is ungodly, a defiance of the natural order.”

  “It’s only centrifugal force. Do you want to access the educational text again?”

  He gave her an ironic smile. “The one which the teachers of this age have prepared for ten-year-old children? I think I will spare myself repeated humiliation, my lady Louise.”

  She glanced at her gold watch, which was almost the last surviving personal item from Norfolk. “Endron should be here in a minute. We’ll be able to leave Phobos in a few hours.”

  “I do not relish our parting, lady.”

  It was the one topic which she had never mentioned since the day when they had flown up to the Far Realm. “You are still intent on going down to Earth, then?”

  “Aye, I am. Though in my heart I fear what awaits me there, I will not shirk from the task I have found for my new body. Quinn must be thwarted.”

  “He’s probably there already. Goodness, by the time we reach the O’Neill Halo all of Earth could be possessed.”

  “Even if I knew that beyond all doubt, I would still not allow myself to turn back. I am truly sorry, Lady Louise, but my course is set. But do not worry yourself unduly, I will stay with you until you have found passage to Tranquillity. And I will make sure that there are no possessed on your vessel before it casts off.”

  “I wasn’t trying to stop you, Fletcher. I think I’m a little fearful of your integrity. People in this age always seem to put themselves first. I do.”

  “You put your baby first, dearest Louise. Of that resolution, I am in awe. It is my one regret that by embarking on my own reckless venture that I will in all likelihood never now meet your beau, this Joshua of whom you speak. I would dearly like to see the man worthy of your love, he must be a prince among men.”

  “Joshua isn’t a prince. I know now he is nowhere near perfect. But … he does have a few good points.” Her hands touched her belly. “He’ll be a good father.”

  Their eyes met. Louise didn’t think she had ever seen so much loneliness before. In all the history texts they’d reviewed, he had always taken care to avoid any which might have told him what became of the family he’d left behind on Pitcairn Island.

  It would have been so very easy for her to sit beside him and put her arms around him. Surely a person so alone deserved some comfort? What made her emotions worse was that she knew he could see her uncertainty.

  The door processor announced that Endron was waiting. Louise made light of the moment with a chirpy smile and went to fetch Genevieve from her room.

  “Do we all have to go?” a reticent Genevieve asked Endron. “I’d reached the third strata in Skycastles. The winged horses were coming to rescue the princess.”

  “She’ll still be there when we get back,” Louise said. “You can play it on the ship.”

  “He needs you there for a full image scan,” Endron said. “No way out of it, I’m afraid.”

  Genevieve looked thoroughly disgusted. “All right.”

  Endron led them along one of the public halls. Louise was slowly mastering the art of walking in the asteroid’s effete gravity field.

  Nothing you could do to stop yourself leaving the ground at each step; so push strongly with your toes, angling them to project you along a flat trajectory. She knew she’d never be as fluid as the Martians no matter how much practise she had.

  “I wanted to ask you,” Louise said as they slid into a lift. “If you’re all Communists, how can the Far Realm’s crew sell Norfolk Tears here?”

  “Why shouldn’t we? It’s one of the perks of being a crew member. The only thing we don’t like about bringing it in is paying import duty. And so far we haven’t actually done that.”

  “But doesn’t everybody own everything anyway? Why should they pay for it?”

  “You’re thinking of super-orthodox communism. People here retain their own property and money. No society could survive without that concept; you have to have something to show for your work at the end of the day. That’s human nature.”

  “So you have landowners on Mars as well?”

  Endron chuckled. “I don’t mean that sort of property. We only retain personal items. Things like apartments are the property of the state; after all, the state pays for them. Farming collectives are allocated their land.”

  “And you accept that?”

  “Yes. Because it works. The state has enormous power and wealth, but we vote on how it’s used. We’re dependent on it, and control it at the same time. We’re also very proud of it. No other culture or ideology would ever have been able to terraform a planet. Mars has absorbed our nation’s total wealth for five centuries. Offworlders have no idea of the level of commitment that requires.”

  “That’s because I don’t understand why you did it.”

  “We were trapped by history. Our ancestors modified their bodies to live in a Lunar gravity field before the ZTT drive was built. They could have sent their children to settle countless terracompatible worlds, but then those children would have needed geneering to adapt them back to the human ‘norm.’ Parent and child would have been parted at birth; they wouldn’t have been descendants, just fosterlings in an alien environment. So we decided to make ourselves a world of our own.”

  “If I have followed this discourse correctly,” Fletcher said. “You have spent five centuries turning Mars from a desert to a garden?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you really so powerful that you can rival Our Lord’s handiwork?”

  “I believe He only took seven days. We’ve got a long way to go yet before we equal that. Not that we’ll ever do it again.”

  “Is the whole Lunar nation emigrating here now?” Louise asked, anxious to halt Fletcher’s queries. She had caught Endron giving him puzzled glances at odd times during the voyage. It was something to watch out for; she was used to his naïveté, thinking little of it. Others were not so generous.

  “That was the idea. But now it’s happened, the majority of those living in the Lunar cities are reluctant to leave. Those who do come here to settle are mostly the younger generation. So the shift is very gradual.”

  “Will you live on Mars once you’ve finished flying starships?”

  “I was born in Phobos; I find skies unnatural. Two of my children live in Thoth city. I visit when I can, but I don’t think I would fit in down there anyway. After all this time, our nation is finally beginning to change. Not very swiftly, but it’s there, it’s happening.”

  “How? How can communism change?”

  “Money, of course. Now the terraforming project no longer absorbs every single fuseodo
llar earned by our state industries, there is more cash starting to seep into the economy. The younger generation adore their imported AV blocks and MF albums and clothes, they are placing so much value on these status symbols, ignoring our own nation’s products purely for the sake of difference, which they see as originality. And they have a whole planet to range over; some of us actually worry that they might walk off into the countryside and reject us totally. Who knows? Not that I’d mind if they do discard our tenets. After all, it is their world. We built it so they could know its freedom. Trying to impose the old restrictions on them would be the purest folly. Social evolution is vital if any ethnic-nationhood is to survive; and five centuries is a long time to remain static.”

  “So if people did claim land for themselves, you wouldn’t try to confiscate it back?”

  “Confiscate? You say that with some malice. Is that what the Communists on your world say they’re going to do?”

  “Yes, they want to redistribute Norfolk’s wealth fairly.”

  “Well, tell them from me, it won’t work. All they’ll ever do is cause more strife if they try and change things now. You cannot impose ideologies on people who do not embrace it wholeheartedly. The Lunar nation functions because it was planned that way from the moment the cities gained independence from the companies. It’s the same concept as Norfolk, the difference being your founders chose to write a pastoral constitution. Communism works here because everybody supports it, and the net allowed us to eliminate most forms of corruption within the civil service and local governing councils that plagued most earlier attempts. If people don’t like it, they leave rather than try and wreck it for everyone else. Isn’t that what happens on Norfolk?”

  Louise thought back to what Carmitha had said. “It’s difficult for the Land Union people. Starflight is expensive.”

  “I suppose so. We’re lucky here, the O’Neill Halo takes all our malcontents, some asteroids have entire low-gee levels populated by Lunar émigrés. Our government will even pay your ticket for you. Perhaps you should try that on Norfolk. The whole point of the Confederation’s diversity is that it provides every kind of ethnic culture possible. There’s no real need for internal conflict.”

  “That’s a nice idea. I ought to mention it to Daddy when I get back. I’m sure a one-way starship ticket would be cheaper than keeping someone at the arctic work camps.”

  “Why tell your father? Why not campaign for it yourself?”

  “Nobody would listen to me.”

  “You won’t be your age forever.”

  “I meant, because I’m a girl.”

  Endron gave her a mystified frown. “I see. Perhaps that would be a better issue to campaign about. You’d have half of the population on your side from day one.”

  Louise managed an uncomfortable smile. She didn’t like having to defend her homeworld from sarcasm, people should show more courtesy. The trouble was, she found it hard to defend some of Norfolk’s customs.

  Endron took them to one of the lowest habitation levels, a broad service corridor which led away from the biosphere cavern, deep into the asteroid’s interior. It was bare rock, with one wall made up from stacked layers of cable and piping. The floor was slightly concave, and very smooth. Louise wondered how old it must be for people’s feet to have worn it down.

  They reached a wide olive-green metal door, and Endron datavised a code at its processor. Nothing happened. He had to datavise the code another two times before it opened. Louise didn’t dare risk a glance at Fletcher.

  Inside was a cathedral-sized hall filled with three rows of high voltage electrical transformers. Great loops of thick black cabling emerged from holes high up in the walls, stretching over the aisles in a complicated weave that linked them to the fat grey ribbed cylinders. There was a strong tang of ozone in the air.

  A flight of metal stairs pinned against the rear wall led up to a small maintenance manager’s office cut into the rock. Two narrow windows looked down on the central aisle as they walked towards it, the outline of a man just visible inside. Fletcher’s alarm at the power humming savagely all around them was clear in the sweat on his forehead and hands, his small, precisely controlled steps.

  The office had a large desk with a computer terminal nearly as primitive as the models Louise used on Norfolk. A large screen took up most of the back wall, its lucidly coloured symbols displaying the settlement’s power grid.

  There was a Martian waiting for them inside; a man with very long snow-white hair brushed back neatly and a bright orange silk suit worn in conjunction with a midnight-black shirt. He carried a slim, featureless grey case in his left hand.

  Faurax didn’t know what to make of his three new clients at all; if they hadn’t been with Endron he wouldn’t even have let them into the office.

  These were not the times to dabble in his usual sidelines. Thanks to the current Confederation crisis, the Phobos police were becoming quite unreasonable about security procedures.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” he said after Endron had introduced everybody. “Why haven’t you got your own passports?”

  “We had to leave Norfolk very quickly,” Louise said. “The possessed were sweeping through the city. There was no time to apply to the Foreign Office for passports. Although there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have been issued with them, we don’t have criminal records or anything like that.”

  It even sounded reasonable. And Faurax could guess the kind of financial package which the Far Realm’s crew would engineer concerning their passage. Nobody wanted questions at this stage.

  “You must understand,” he said, “I had to undertake a considerable amount of research to obtain the Norfolk government’s authentication codes.”

  “How much?” Louise asked.

  “Five thousand fuseodollars. Each.”

  “Very well.”

  She didn’t even sound surprised, let alone shocked. Which tweaked Faurax’s curiosity; he would have dearly liked to ask Endron who she was.

  The call he’d got from Tilia setting up the meeting had been very sparse on detail.

  “Good,” he said, and put his case on the desk, datavising a code at it.

  The upper surface flowed apart, revealing a couple of processor blocks and several fleks. He picked up one of the fleks, which was embossed with a gold lion: Norfolk’s national symbol. “Here we are. I loaded in all the information Tilia gave me; name, where you live, age, that kind of thing. All we need now is an image and a full body biolectric scan.”

  “What do we have to do?” Louise asked.

  “First, I’m afraid, is the money.”

  She gave a hollow laugh and took a Jovian Bank credit disk from her small shoulder bag. Once the money had been shunted over to Faurax’s disk, he said: “Remember not to wear these clothes when you go through the Halo’s immigration. These images were supposedly taken on Norfolk before you left, and the clothes are new. In fact, I’d advise dumping them altogether.”

  “We’ll do that,” Louise said.

  “Okay.” He slotted the first flek into his processor block and read the screen. “Genevieve Kavanagh?”

  The little girl smiled brightly.

  “Stand over there, dear, away from the door.”

  She did as he asked, giving the sensor lens a solemn stare. After he’d got the visual image filed, he used the second processor block to sweep her so he could record her biolectric pattern. Both files were loaded into her passport, encrypted with Norfolk’s authentication code. “Don’t lose it,” he said and dropped the flek into her hand.

  Louise was next. Faurax found himself wishing she were a Martian girl.

  She had a beautiful face, it was just her body which was so alien.

  Fletcher’s image went straight into his passport flek. Then Faurax ran the biolectric sensor over him. Frowned at the display. Ran a second scan. It took a long time for his chilly disquiet to give way into full blown consternation. He gagged, head jerking up from the bloc
k to stare at Fletcher. “You’re a—” His neural nanonics crashed, preventing him from datavising any alarm. The air solidified in front of his eyes; he actually saw it flowing like a dense heat shiver, contracting into a ten centimetre sphere. It hit him full in the face. He heard the bone in his nose break before he lost consciousness.

  Genevieve squealed in shock as Faurax went crashing to the floor, blood flowing swiftly from his nose.

  Endron looked at Fletcher in total shock, too numb to move. His neural nanonics had shut down, and the office light panel was flickering in an epileptic rhythm. “Oh, my God. No! Not you.” He glanced at the door, gauging his chances.

  “Do not try to run, sir,” Fletcher said sternly. “I will do whatever I must to protect these ladies.”

  “Oh, Fletcher,” Louise groaned in dismay. “We were almost there.”

  “His device exposed my nature, my lady. I could do naught else.”

  Genevieve ran over to Fletcher and hugged him tightly around his waist.

  He patted her head lightly.

  “Now what are we going to do?” Louise asked.

  “Not you as well?” Endron bewailed.

  “I’m not possessed,” she said with indignant heat.

  “Then what … ?”

  “Fletcher has been protecting us from the possessed. You don’t think I could stand against them by myself, do you?”

  “But, he’s one of them.”

  “One of whom, sir? Many men are murderers and brigands, does that make all of us so?”

  “You can’t apply that argument. You’re a possessed. You’re the enemy.”

  “Yet, sir, I do not consider myself to be your enemy. My only crime, so it sounds, is that I have died.”

  “And come back! You have stolen that man’s body. Your kind want to do the same to mine and everyone else’s.”