The Line of Polity

by Neal Asher

  ‘What is it, Lellan?’ the second man asked her.

  ‘He’s leading it away,’ she replied. ‘Says he’ll be back with us by morning.’

  ‘Lellan . . .’ the man said warningly.

  ‘Seems we got ourselves a hooder out there.’

  Eldene studied the sick expressions worn by these three heavily armed individuals and wondered just how terrible a hooder could be.

  ‘You’re Lellan Stanton,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yeah,’ replied the woman. ‘Welcome to the Underworld.’ Then she faced back out into the night.

  As the ship drew away, Hierarch Loman gazed into the mouth of Faith and contemplated his work. It had been said that on Amoloran’s ascension a red mist had swept through the cylinder world from the bodies of the thousands who had been tortured and killed. Not wishing to be outdone, Loman had ordered the Up Mirror to be painted with the blood of traitors, to cast a red light into the world, for a thousand days. His technical advisors had nervously informed him of the impracticality of doing this in vacuum, but then quickly told him how the reflective surfaces did allow for an amount of tunable refraction – usually to prevent too much ultraviolet being reflected in. So now the light of Faith was red, though only for a maximum of ten days – anything beyond that would start killing the plants in the gardens.

  ‘A jewel in your crown,’ Aberil commented.

  Loman turned to him and nodded, before scanning the rather cramped cabin in which he and his brother had been installed.

  ‘Amoloran should not have sent the General Patten. What was he thinking?’ he asked.

  Sitting on the edge of the sofa as if distrustful of its comfort, Aberil replied, ‘He had the ridiculous idea that Outlinkers might serve as hostages should the Polity decide to come in; also the idea that in their gratitude at being rescued they might help upgrade the laser arrays and close some of the gaps in coverage. Had he spent a little less time killing off those technicians who disagreed with him, that would not have become necessary.’

  Loman winced and briefly wondered if he himself had been a bit hasty in having the chief mirror technician thrown out of the upper tower window into vacuum. Then he dismissed the idea: the man had been impertinent, and could have at least attempted the blood-painting idea.

  ‘Reverend Hierarch, we are ready to U-jump upon your order,’ spoke a voice from a console set into one wall.

  ‘Then do so,’ said Loman, waving his hand dismissively.

  After a short delay, the viewing screen turned black and engines thrummed deep within the ship. Loman grimaced, well aware that Polity ships did not need to warm up like this before dropping into underspace, and that grav-plates were used throughout their ships, not just in one luxury suite like this. He looked around it contemptuously.

  ‘Now all our plans mesh,’ he said. ‘You are sure that no possible connection can be made between the mycelium and us?’

  Aberil shook his head. ‘Our agent entered the Polity at Cheyne III, and travelled via many worlds before finally coming to Miranda, and even he did not know what he was taking there. He thought he was taking a listening device to install on a communications array, and anyway the virus we also gave him before he set out killed him shortly after he delivered the mycelium. Our only problem will be Behemoth himself, should he inform the Polity he gave us the mycelium twenty years ago.’

  ‘Ah, but would the Polity believe him? I think not. They will assume he has done the same as his twin did on Samarkand, and so seek to destroy him. Behemoth will flee them,’ said Loman. ‘Soon we will be utterly free of this Tempter.’

  ‘God willing,’ added Aberil.

  Loman walked away from the screen and dropped into the sofa beside his brother. ‘And once free of him, we can at last excise this cancer that grows at the heart of our civilization.’ He paused and reached up to touch his aug, discomfited by this much-needed Gift. ‘How long until Ragnorak is ready?’ He picked up the inhaler provided to prevent U-space sickness – another aspect of space travel that Polity citizens supposedly did not have to suffer.

  ‘Construction is completed. It will just take another month to move it into position. If Amoloran had started moving it after the construction of the initial framework, it would have been there by now. For some reason he wanted it ready before it was moved.’

  Loman thought that he understood Amoloran’s motivations: having Ragnorak already working whilst it was towed past the cylinder worlds to its orbital position would certainly terrify any aspiring usurpers on Hope, Faith and Charity. He stared at the black screen for a long moment before taking a pull on his inhaler.

  Aberil did the same before saying, ‘You called my mission to supply the Cheyne III Separatists a “fool’s errand” . . .’

  ‘Amoloran was too unsubtle, and not sufficiently ruthless when the situation required it,’ Loman replied. ‘He would never have made so decisive a move as we in planting that mycelium. Yet he wanted us to risk supplying Separatist groups on the Line – an action that gains us very little. We must get our own house in order. It is the Polity way that they never take over a stable system, as that would seem unacceptably militaristic to many of its member worlds. We will rid ourselves of the Underworld, and thereafter give the Polity no reason to attempt to seize control of us.’ He paused as the whole cabin seemed to distort, and he experienced the sensation of weightlessness even though the grav-plates in the cabin held him firm. Feeling slightly nauseous despite the inhaler, he went on, ‘The Polity cannot continue to expand, and without the guiding morality of God it will eventually be torn apart by internecine conflict. We will assist it along that course, but subtly – keeping ourselves distant and safe.’

  ‘You believe this . . . Hierarch?’ asked Aberil.

  ‘How can I doubt? A civilization run by soulless machines cannot succeed. God will not allow it to succeed.’

  ‘Yes, that is true,’ said Aberil. ‘God would not allow it.’

  ‘You have to understand our destiny, Aberil. You have to see the larger picture. We are an outpost of the truth, and when the Polity falls, as it must, we will bring that truth back to its worlds.’

  ‘I try not to doubt, Reverend, but sometimes it is hard when one considers the Polity. It contains thousands of colonized worlds, between which its citizens can travel in an instant. It has hundreds of thousands of ships, many of them the size of Calypse’s moons, and many of them capable of destroying planets . . .’

  Loman snorted. ‘Have you been away so long that you have come to believe Polity propaganda?’

  ‘No, Hierarch.’

  Loman stood and took yet another pull on his inhaler before marching up again to the black viewing screen. This was the sort of thing he should instantly quell: the inflation of rumour and myth about the omnipotent Polity. Now to hear such idiocy from the mouth of his own brother. He slapped his hand against the screen and turned.

  ‘Perhaps I do not do you justice. The Polity does have wonderful technologies, but you must never forget that it does not have our heart. Remember that no matter how large or powerful it is, we have already manipulated it to our own ends. Behemoth has fled and, like our hunting dog unleashed, the Polity will hunt him down.’

  Aberil nodded, his face expressionless. ‘Yes, Hierarch.’

  As if to punctuate this conversation, the ship now dropped out of underspace and the atmosphere of the cabin returned to some form of normality. Loman pocketed his inhaler then turned and rested his hands against the bottom rim of the screen, which now showed only starlit space. After a moment, he reached out and adjusted the view on the screen to show a massive structure out in vacuum. For a long time he had been puzzled as to why the appearance of Ragnorak bothered him so. It was only after searching databanks that he discovered a similar shape in the image files used to teach ancient history. There he found what he had been reminded of: the lethal device they were constructing was the Eiffel Tower displaced into orbit above Calypse.

  ‘I didn’t
understand what you said about Polity field technology,’ he said, turning back to observe his brother, completely unaware that what he was asking made his previous haughty pronouncements laughable.

  Aberil picked up an incendiary bullet he had earlier been using as a model. He held it up before his face. ‘Each kinetic missile weighs one tonne. If we fired them at Masada, at the velocities Ragnorak is capable of generating, they would explode in upper atmosphere. What we’re using is a Polity shimmer-shield over the nose cone of each. It reduces friction sufficiently for the missiles to reach the surface. During penetration they’ll turn to plasma, which will burn downwards up to a kilometre. Each of their caves will be filled with this – it will be as if a fusion bomb had been detonated down there.’

  ‘Losses on the surface?’ asked Loman.

  ‘About thirty per cent,’ Aberil replied.

  ‘A price we have to pay,’ Loman said, wondering how long, after these kinetic missile strikes, it would take before the trade in luxury proteins could recommence.

  11

  The boy had finished his supper and was now listening goggle-eyed to the story in the hope of the usual denouement. The woman pursed her lips as she scanned the next bit of text before reading it out.

  ‘Upon the morning of the second day Brother Serendipity came upon the siluroyne coiled on its bed of grasses. “Please feed me,” begged the creature, “for I am old and cannot hunt so well, and I am hungry.” “Why should I feed you when, given strength by my food, you might rise up and strike me down?” he asked it. “I give you my word,” said the siluroyne. “Swear your word in the name of God and in the name of his prophet Zelda Smythe,” the good Brother demanded. The siluroyne so swore, and he gave it the second third of the meat cake given to him by the old woman by the boundary stone.’

  The boy started playing with the bits left on his plate, his attention wandering.

  ‘Into the night the creature followed him, companion to the heroyne, and so, doubly warded, did he survive to come closer to the compounds.’

  ‘Mum’s boring,’ the boy interrupted.

  ‘You must stay with stories like this, my dear, for through them you will receive great instruction, and great understanding of God,’ said the woman.

  The boy gave her a look – young he might be but he had the innate intelligence of both his parents, and the extra intelligence of the genetic tweaks he had received before being born, and he knew when his mother was taking the piss.

  With no little trepidation, Thorn watched while Jarvellis flew Lyric II in towards a large lump of tumbling asteroidal rock. Once she was close enough, the ship’s AI took over and, with exact bursts of manoeuvring thrusters, apparently brought the rock to stillness. It wasn’t until he looked beyond this piece of asteroidal debris that Thorn felt a touch of nausea to see Calypse and the stars beyond mirroring the tumble he had earlier seen – Lyric II now perfectly matching the rock’s motion.

  Jarvellis now thrust her right hand into a telefactor glove, closed a viewing visor across her eyes, and began to work the loading grab from the centre of the trispherical ship. On various screens Thorn and Stanton watched the multi-jointed arm rise up towards the rock, with its five-fingered grab opening like a hand, then fingers telescoping out so this hand became large enough to get a sufficient grip.

  ‘You say you’ve done this before?’ Thorn asked.

  ‘Four times,’ replied Jarvellis. She glanced at him. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve dealt with heavier loads than this.’

  ‘That wasn’t so much my worry,’ said Thorn. ‘I was just wondering if the Theocracy would be getting suspicious about all the meteor activity.’

  ‘They don’t care unless it’s near their cylinder worlds, and it never is,’ said Stanton. ‘And any large enough to reach the surface and cause deaths, they’d view as the hand of God – just so long as it went nowhere near themselves.’

  The grab closed on the rock and began to draw it down to the deck area extending between the three spheres that made up the ship. As it touched down, Thorn felt a faint vibration through the structure of Lyric II. With the rock now in position, metal arms folded in from the edges of the deck area and Thorn wondered what their purpose could be; they were not long enough to hold the rock down against the metal. The question he had been about to pose was answered for him when jets of vapour issued from cylindrical objects mounted on the ends of these arms as soon as they touched the surface of the rock.

  ‘Explosive bolts,’ Thorn said.

  ‘Uhuh,’ agreed Jarvellis, as she now detached the grab and folded it away.

  ‘Not standard fittings on such a ship,’ he said.

  ‘As Jarv said, we’ve done this before,’ said Stanton.

  The ship’s thrusters were again firing, this time to correct its tumble. The views on the screens began to settle down, and soon Calypse itself was centred on the main screen.

  ‘We take a sling around Calypse, and from here on in it’ll take us five solstan days to reach Masada,’ said Jarvellis.

  Stanton said, ‘Lyric, start the chameleonware generator.’

  Thorn kept his attention focused on the screens showing various outside views of the ship. He watched as cowlings split and slid aside from three devices positioned just in from each of the connecting tunnels between spheres. These things had the appearance of huge metallic ammonites, intersecting with something like an ancient combustion engine. For a second every image shimmered, then stabilized.

  ‘How far out is the interface?’ Thorn asked.

  ‘About twenty metres, but beyond that the field is ten metres deep,’ Stanton replied.

  That meant that outside that distance there would be no sign at all of Lyric II. They were invisible.

  The five days ground past like cripples at a funeral, and Thorn came to agree with Stanton that staying in cold-sleep was the best thing to do whilst travelling on a ship this size. On the second day he decided to take the plunge and have the autodoc assess the damage to the nerves in his fingertips, then later had the pleasure of sitting watching it opening the ends of his fingers – folding up the nails like little hatches – as it repaired the damage it found. Thereafter some hours passed before not everything he touched felt scalding hot or searingly cold. The bed set up for him in the hold was comfortable enough, and in an insulation sheet he had no trouble sleeping despite the constant cold. It was the periods between sleep that almost had him screaming. It was nice for the other two that they were always so wrapped up in each other, but their intimacy made Thorn uncomfortable, so he had to keep avoiding them. He spent most of his time viewing lectures about Masada, put together by the ship’s AI. In this electronic intelligence he found company more to his liking, with its abrasive personality and constant sarcasm. It probably knew how he felt and was doing the best it could to keep him from going mad with boredom.

  On the third day, Lyric II closely passed the Theocracy’s cylinder worlds. Close by extended a structure two kilometres long and half a kilometre in diameter, with a huge mirror mounted at one end to reflect sunlight inside, and at the other end a chaos of loading docks around which various ships hovered like bees round a hole in a log. Further out was another such cylinder with mirrors at both ends, but one of those mirrors forming a ring penetrated centrally by a strangely displaced Gothic tower. And distantly there lay yet another such world, shadowed against starlit space and only just visible.

  ‘How many of these orbitals are there?’ he asked Stanton and Jarvellis who, for this dangerous flyby, were both back at the flight and weapons controls.

  ‘Just the three,’ Stanton replied. ‘With a population of over a few hundred thousand in each.’

  ‘I’d have expected more.’

  ‘Remember, they don’t have Polity technology here, as that’s difficult to maintain without using AI – and AI to them is a product of Satan.’ Stanton pointed at the cylinder world. ‘The shielding from cosmic radiation and solar flares is not the best, and that causes a high
incidence of infertility. They like it that way – keeps the whole thing exclusive.’

  ‘Why cylinders?’

  ‘Again: the technology. AG motors and grav-plates are manufactured, but not on any scale. It would take a major industrial upgrade for them to produce enough for these worlds. Then again, why bother? The centrifugal system works well enough.’

  ‘Lyric tells me there’s something of an imbalance between planetary and orbital populations.’

  Stanton glanced at him. ‘Only the usual one existing between the rulers and the ruled. How many major AIs would you say there are in the Polity? One to ten for each planet?’

  ‘But they don’t rule, as such,’ said Thorn.

  Stanton grinned. ‘Yeah, I know, they “direct”. You have to remember, I’ve often witnessed what happens to people who don’t take the AI’s considered advice.’

  ‘Thinking of becoming a Separatist?’ Thorn sniped.

  ‘Oh no, I’ve no objection to the Polity. The way I see it is that if you don’t like it then there’s plenty of places to go where it isn’t present. It would be an eye-opener for some of those soft objectors to the “AI autocrat” of Earth to come out here and see how they’d get on.’

  The cylinder world slid behind them and Masada itself grew large on the central screen. Some time later, Thorn was in a position to ask Jarvellis her opinion of Polity AIs. She replied, ‘Stone Age men broke flint and found it cut things better than their own teeth did. We’ve created methods of transportation that work better than legs, and often do things we could only dream of, like flying. A hydraulic grip clamps on things better than a human hand. They’re all tools and nobody objects to them, so why should anyone object to creating minds that are better at thinking than our own, and rulers that are better at their job than those humans who would aspire to rule?’

  ‘Tools?’ Thorn repeated.

  ‘All extensions of ourselves.’ She shrugged. ‘And probably not even that for much longer. With augs and gridlinks and the like, we’re seeing them become ourselves. There’ll come a time when humans and AIs are indistinguishable. What’s a memcording of a human mind? Is it, strictly speaking, AI or human? And when they did that experiment, way back, of downloading an AI mind into a vat-grown human body, what did they make then?’