The Gabble and Other Stories

by Neal Asher

  The mollusc shell was interesting. I noted that the box it came in had the same shipment marks, stamps and tape as the packing strewn about the Golem. This told me no more than that they’d come from the same world. I wanted some hint as to value and did not relish the prospect of initiating a computer search to identify this shell. Life, in its unbelievable abundance in the fifth of the galaxy thus far explored, had often used this sensible method of self-preservation. There were probably more types of shell than excuses for taxation. I put the shell aside and opened the other box.

  For most of the contents of this box I could justify the price paid with resale through my shop, but no more. The digital watch was a dog. The case and the strap, which I thought to be ceramal greyed with age, turned out to be one of the later matt ceramals. There was nothing inside the case. I swore and was about to sling the box to the front of the van compartment when something caught my eye.

  It was a bracelet set with manufactured diamonds and therefore of little value. It was cheap costume jewellery, yet something gave me pause. Something wrong with it … I glanced back into the auction room and saw that it would soon be the Golem’s turn. I’d have to find out later. In a rather distracted mood I returned, after another scanning, to Jane’s side in the auction room, and bid two hundred over the odds for the Golem. Only as Jane and I were leaving did I notice the desperate gaze of a late arrival.

  Chaplin Grable is the kind of man you learn to avoid at Darkander’s, the kind of man who’ll sidle up beside you and start asking the kind of questions you really don’t want to answer if you’re after anything in particular. Then he’ll give you his jaundiced opinion on various objects in the warehouse, and sidle away. After he’s gone you feel the immediate urge to check your pockets, your credit rating, then go home for a shower. That day he stuck to me like a piece of dogshit on an instep.

  ‘Look, all I want is a copy, downloaded copy, it’s easy money.’

  I glanced towards Jane, who was then involved in bidding for an arty-looking mobile made from genuine fossil-fuel-based plastic, if the label was to be believed. I felt a certain relief that she was not at my side then.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Four hundred, that’s fair. I’ll use all my own stuff. It’s easy—’

  I was curious. ‘A thousand.’

  ‘Oh come on, for that piece of junk? I only want it for the Historical Society. Six hundred.’

  ‘Funny, I thought I said a thousand.’

  ‘Seven fifty. That’s it, easy, final offer, no more, capiche capoot.’

  ‘Not interested.’

  Of course I was, very interested, but if there was good money to be made here I intended to make it, not to pass it on to this slime bag.

  ‘Okay okay, a thousand, done, a thousand.’

  ‘Go away,’ I told him. Then I saw something in his expression I didn’t like at all, something incongruous. I turned away and headed for my gravcar with the android walking along behind me.

  ‘A thousand is a lot,’ it said.

  ‘It is.’

  I inspected it contemplatively. But for the loss of the syntheflesh covering of one side of its face and one arm it might well have been human. Many of its kind had since been accepted as such. It was just an unfair quirk of the law that defined this one as a machine and later models as sentient creatures.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked it.

  ‘Paul G6B33.’

  ‘Why do you think he’s interested in your memory, Paul?’

  ‘I do not know. I have no long-term memory other than Cybercorp contract and base program.’

  Grable had obviously loused. There was nothing of value in this android’s mind. I should have sold him a copy. Too late now.

  ‘Get in the back of the car, Paul.’

  My android obeyed me.

  *

  The Tenkian autogun followed with its impeller humming like an AC transformer and its turret revolving with martinet vigilance. A couple of lice came out from the rocks behind, but it did not fire for they did not come into the shifting perimeter. They stayed to feed on the remains of their fellows, their mandibles clacking with relish.

  I had a hell of a time with the crate. I slipped once and grazed my knee, then sat on a wet rock, swearing, with water soaking into the bum of my trousers. I could open the crate and maybe its contents would follow me as obediently as Paul G6B33, if its power pack wasn’t down. Finally I abandoned it in a suitable crevice weighed down with crusted rocks, then I moved on. The world-tide is coming with the rise of Scylla’s binary companion and I have to prepare myself. I don’t like to think about how.

  After taking the precaution of dropping Jane off at her residence – I didn’t want her with me where I was going next – I took Paul straight to a prospective buyer. There was the usual jam up at the atmosphere lock and it took two hours before we were out of the city dome and cruising into the outlands. Paul had remained silent until we were speeding towards the distinctly curved horizon over the landscape of yellow ice-cliffs and weirdly phosphorescent mists.

  ‘What place is this?’ he asked with idiot precision.

  I pointed out of the screen. ‘I suppose I could give you a total of twelve guesses, but no, you only get three.’

  He gazed out of the screen at the massive loom of Jupiter filling half the sky, its red eye-storm gazing down at us speculatively.

  ‘We are on one of Jupiter’s moons,’ he said. I decided he definitely had the mind of a Three, since a Five never felt the need to state the obvious. But as far as antique value went, a Five was half the value of a Three.

  ‘Yes, but can you figure which moon?’

  There was a long pause then the statement, ‘Ganymede.’ If he’d got it wrong I would have been most surprised. Threes are not capable of guessing. If they do not have enough data to come to a conclusion they say so.

  ‘Correct,’ I told him, superfluously, and slowly began to bring the gravcar down towards an expensive residence set in the face of a sulphur-crusted cliff. The lock of a garage opened for us and we were soon climbing out of the car to be greeted by the goddess. Why do I call Henara the goddess? Because that is precisely what she looks like; Aphrodite, Diana, some supernal woman. She is nearly two metres tall and has the kind of build that will leave a man with a hollow feeling in the region of his groin. She has long luxuriant hair and a face to leave sculptors and painters feeling inadequate.

  ‘Jason, so glad to see you … and who is this?’

  Her voice set bits of me vibrating I did not know existed. She was fantastic. The AI that designed her deserved some kind of award, if it hadn’t already got one. She was a Golem Twenty-three, I think. Human beings are never that close to perfection, or apotheosis.

  ‘This is Paul G6B33,’ I said, making the introductions. ‘Paul, this is Henara Indomial, who I hope will soon be your new owner.’

  Paul greeted her politely, and she led us into her home. In a few minutes I was sunk in a sofa, which was ridiculously luxurious, with a large scotch in my hand. Henara and I had an agreement that went back for ten years. She paid me a retainer so I would buy up any Golem that came up for auction at Darkander’s and offer it to her on a percentage basis. She was a free Golem and very very rich. The work of her endless life now was to make other Golem free. She bought them, upgraded them, and put them through the revised Turing Test. Then she set them free.

  ‘There was a great deal of interest in him,’ I told her. ‘I had to pay two hundred more than expected.’

  The credit transfer was made and I relaxed.

  ‘One strange thing. Chaplin Grable offered me a thousand for a download copy of Paul’s memory. Yet Paul only has his short-term memory and his base Cybercorp contract and programming.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Henara with a noblesse oblige nod, then she turned her attention to Paul. ‘Who owned you prior to Jason here?’

  ‘I was attached to the Planetary Survey Corps in 2433,’ was his reply, and I kne
w that was all she’d get. Assignment was in the contract memory. His skills and personality were in his base memory. I didn’t think there was much to be learnt, so after a while I took my leave.

  Back at my apartment I spread my remaining purchases out on a repro twentieth-century glass-top coffee table (no one can afford the real thing) and inspected each of the items minutely. Eventually, reluctantly, I picked up the bracelet and studied it. The metal it was made from, like the watch, was ceramal. There were eight lozenge diamonds spaced evenly round it, one for each colour of the rainbow plus one clear one. What made me suspicious about the object was the centimetre-thickness of the ceramal. It was perhaps the thickness needed for a chain used to tow asteroids, but hardly required for costume jewellery. I popped it open and inspected the clasp and hinges. What I found there increased my suspicion, and stirred up a little of the excitement I always thought dead until each time it reappeared. Where the bracelet opened there were pins on one side and sockets on the other. Where it hinged there were flexible mini conduits. The pins, I realized on seeing their reddish lustre, were made of carbon sixty doped ceramal, a very hard room-temperature superconductor. What I was holding certainly wasn’t cheap costume jewellery. What it was I hadn’t a clue. It was about then that the phone let me know someone wanted to speak with me.

  ‘Yes, who is it?’

  ‘Ah …’

  The hologram of Chaplin Grable’s most unbecoming features flickered into life before me.

  ‘Henara Indomial has it. Go bother her.’

  ‘I’m authorized to offer you two thousand for … what?’

  ‘Henara Indomial.’

  I waved my hand in the general direction of the eye and the face flickered out of existence. I didn’t like the man. The phone called for my attention again.

  ‘Look, you piece of—’

  Henara appeared before me, her legs chopped off at the knees by the coffee table.

  ‘Sorry, I thought you might be Grable.’

  She looked at me quizzically and I explained the previous call to her. She smiled. I asked her what she wanted.

  ‘Paul has his basic personality, his Cybercorp programming and a few giga of short-term memory. His long-term memory has actually been removed.’

  ‘I told you that,’ I said, confused.

  ‘No, you misunderstand me. Up until the Golem Fifteen, compartmentalization was used, not wholemind programming. The LTM unit has been physically removed. Probably at about the same time as the missing syntheflesh and skin.

  ‘Oh,’ I said brilliantly.

  ‘I would of course like you to acquire this LTM should it become available …’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I told her.

  Of course she was far too polite to bring my integrity into doubt. As she flickered out of existence I felt decidedly uncomfortable. I studied the bracelet. Could this be it? Seemed unlikely but I decided to check.

  My hand scanner revealed a complexity it could not analyse. I used my system scanner and paid for time on one of the runcible subminds. It took a few minutes, but I soon received the analysis, along with the bill. The bracelet went under the name of a four-seasons changer. It was a twenty-seventh-century adaptogen laboratory. Not particularly old, but quite valuable if you can find the right buyer, and the right buyer was almost always an adapted human to beyond the fifth generation. I wondered, as always with the kind of morbid fascination that comes with the discovery of such an artefact, if it still worked. I was not to know then that one day the answer to that question was something my survival might depend on.

  Three solstan days later I had expert advice on the changer and the advice was, ‘Use this at considerable risk, the construction is far too complex and old for any kind of study that would not involve deconstruction, and why the hell do you want to know?’ I was of course hoping for documented proof of working order, as this would double the value of the bracelet. There are experts and there are experts.

  On the same day as I received this piece of negative equity I picked up the mollusc shell and listened for the sound of the sea – I hadn’t identified the shell yet. There was no sound, and feeling hard put upon I shook it in irritation as one would shake any other piece of malfunctioning hardware. A cuboid crystal, with silver circuitry etched in three faces like strange glyphs, fell out and cracked the top of my coffee table. Okay, it wasn’t that valuable, but I was attached to it, which was probably why I was pissed off enough to download a copy of what turned out to be Paul’s LTM to sell to Grable before passing the original on to Henara. As was to be my luck at that time I discovered I could not find Grable anywhere. I ended up studying the memory myself, determined to make a decent profit somehow that week.

  It took me a couple of days to run through the last mission. Much of my time was spent fast-forwarding by hand or by computer instruction, i.e. stop when something interesting occurs. It seemed to me that these Golem spent most of their time standing about waiting to be given orders. The tale I eventually managed to piece together was one of incompetence and failure.

  The PSC had tried to establish a base on a planet called Scylla before something called the world-tide occurred. This was to be done by a mixed crew of hired labourers and androids. The whole thing was severely disorganized. The androids weren’t complex enough and the workers not clever enough to sort out the discrepancy. There were disputes about pay and an attempt, considering the time limit on the project, at what can only be described as extortion. I saw the base half-finished and a belated attempt at evacuation. Some of the humans got away, others boxed the androids and attempted to seal the base against the world-tide. Paul was not boxed because he was almost as useful as the humans. He was a very new design. The rest was like some Atlantean disaster; explosions, water, sparks, floating bodies. When Paul’s memory greyed into auto shutdown – after a long period of time recording the marine life feeding – I realized what Grable had been after. The androids. They were Golem Twos, the first workable androids to be sold by Cybercorp – there had only been one Golem One – and if still there they were worth disgustingly huge amounts of money. I wondered then where he got his information from and why Paul’s LTM had ended up in that shell. But even as I wondered I packed the equipment I would need and sought the required permissions for its transportation. By the next solstan day I had booked myself for transmission to Scylla’s runcible, for while running through Paul’s memory I had seen a map and a map reference. I knew where the base was.

  The crate is hidden. The world-tide is coming. And there are only two things that stand between me and death. My Tenkian autogun keeps the lice away, but there is no sensible way it can keep me from drowning. There is another way though. Even as I record this I pull up my sleeve and look at the bracelet clasped around my wrist. The jewels seem to have taken on a sinister glitter.

  Jane was not happy about my sudden business trip, but I managed to bring her round, as I normally do. After spending one pleasant night with her I got up early and made my way to the transmission station. The runcible transmission, the longest and most unbelievable part of any interstellar journey, took no time at all. I don’t even try to pretend to know anything about the technology that can shove me through an underspace non-distance and drag me out a hundred or more light years away, and in that I am more honest than most. Skaidon technology; brought about by the linking of a human mind and AI. It’s impossible to understand unless you are both a genius, like Skaidon himself, and plugged in. In my life I have been neither and am unlikely to be. One moment I was there standing in the containment sphere as before the altar to Minotaur; silver bull’s horns on a dais of black glass, horns holding the shimmering disc of the cusp, then one step after I am one hundred and twenty-three light years away on the other side of another cusp in an identical sphere: standardization across the galaxy – as awesome as it is depressing.

  Beyond the standard one G gravity in the containment sphere the gravity was rather less, but being a fairly season
ed traveller I soon adjusted. A wide concourse led from the row of containment spheres to a huge embarkation lounge; this was because I had arrived on the moonlet Carla; the closest companion to Scylla, which was too unstable for siting a runcible. At the opposite end of the lounge I could see a delta-wing shuttle waiting to heave itself into a violet sky and was surprised to see how few people there were waiting for the flight. I made my way to an information console and called up one of the runcible subminds.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Jason Chel.’

  ‘What information do you require, Jason Chel?’

  ‘There are certain packages under my code and I wish to pick them—’

  ‘The packages have arrived at cargo runcible four. There are AG drays available at all cargo runcibles.’

  I regarded the console with a degree of suspicion. It had been very quick for a submind. Perhaps it was Carla AI taking an interest itself. The contents of one of my packages were unusual.

  ‘Er, could you also tell me when the next shuttle is leaving for Scylla.’

  ‘There will not be another shuttle to Scylla for two hundred solstan days.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There will not be another shuttle—’

  ‘I heard what you said. Why will there not be another shuttle to Scylla for two hundred days?’

  ‘Because it is summer.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  There came a sound very like a sigh from the console, as if it was tired of repeating this information to people who hadn’t checked.

  ‘Scylla is closed to all traffic for a period of two hundred and seventy-three solstan days during its summer season. All ground bases are sealed. This is due to the accelerated activity of dangerous life-forms at this time of the year.’

  I walked away from the console feeling like a complete idiot. Some of the equipment I had in my luggage was brought along to deal with the life-forms I had seen in Paul’s memory, a precaution which had cost me a fair lump of credit for transportation under seal. Now I’d discovered that in my eagerness I’d made a complete bollix. I’d have to go back to Ganymede and wait three quarters of a year before I could come back. In a daze I headed for one of the bars at the edge of the lounge with the vague idea of getting plastered.