Dacron nodded. The Confederation had practically reinvented the wheel to allow safe operations on Ancient worlds, using technology that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Second or Third Age world. Even so, the technology did have problems, which was why some researchers believed that the Ancients – or the Elders – were deliberately screwing with the lesser races attempting to explore their ruins.
“If the stunners don’t work,” Elyria asked, “what do we do then?”
“There are other weapons,” Jorlem pointed out. “We could use the gas, then scan their minds and...”
“Out of the question,” Elyria snapped. “There are ethical issues here.”
Dacron had to check his terminal before he understood her anger. The Confederation’s technology allowed it to do all sorts of things, including reading minds, editing memories, reprogramming minds and genetically-engineering slaves. But the Confederation, largely in memory of the atrocities committed by the Thule, also had strict laws governing the use of such technology. They weren’t put aside just because it would be useful to scan a local’s mind and find out what they knew of their world. Even with the chance to learn how to manipulate the quantum foam, those laws would remain in force.
But would Jorlem respect them? Or, for that matter, would the AIs? Dacron found himself caught between two different opinions, unable to decide which one was right. The AIs had little concept of mental privacy; indeed, it was hard to draw lines between the different AIs that made up the mental Gestalt. It would be very tempting to consider the option of kidnapping Master Faye or one of the other identified magicians and scanning his mind, hoping to see how he worked magic. Given the sheer immensity of the prize, Dacron wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t be considered acceptable after all.
And yet he knew that it would cause a rupture in the Confederation if the truth ever came out.
Other societies could and did talk about cruel necessity. Sometimes they were even right. When the food supplies ran short, they had to be rationed, even if that meant sentencing a part of the population to death. Or worse. There were societies that had had to destroy half their population to prevent the spread of a deadly virus that would have wiped them out. But the Confederation had no such excuse. Probing a mind without permission would horrify everyone. It would still worry them even if permission were granted.
“I think it should be considered,” Jorlem said. “The ability to manipulate the quantum foam...”
“Is not worth the risk of utter disgrace,” Elyria pointed out, sharply. “Just because they’re primitive doesn’t give us the right to treat them like animals.”
There was, Dacron noted, a certain amount of hypocrisy in her words. The Confederation didn’t hesitate to tear down primitive human societies it judged uncivilised, destroying their governments and incorporating their inhabitants into the Confederation. There was a strong school of thought that suggested the Confederation should do the same to alien races, particularly the ones still struggling through their First Age. And yet the cultural shock of encountering the Confederation would be vastly greater for a non-human race. They wouldn’t be able to realise that humans had built the towering Confederation.
But intervening in human societies was for their own good. Everyone agreed on that. However probing their minds, without permission... Elyria was right. They’d be treating them as animals.
“We stay here, then,” Elyria said, clapping her hands together. “And if they come back, we move, without being seen. I don’t want to have to wipe anyone’s memory.”
“Assuming we can do that here,” Adam pointed out. “What happens if the brain-probe suffers a glitch in the middle of the session?”
Dacron nodded. The likelihood of brain damage would be unacceptably high.
“Put out an extra shell of snoops,” Elyria added. “Make sure we monitor everyone leaving the city; try to tag them all with a snoop if possible. The AIs can draw it all together into a workable whole.”
“That leaves the other issue,” Adana said. “Are we still going to head down to the city?”
“If half of us were away from the shuttle,” Jorlem pointed out, “they could easily end up being stranded.”
“But we’d still know where they were,” Dacron countered, defending the honour of the AIs. “They could be warned and then picked up later.”
“True,” Elyria agreed. She looked from face to face, and then nodded. “We’ll wait an hour, see if anyone comes up here after us. If not, we will proceed with the plan.”
“There may be problems in discovering what they know,” Dacron warned. “The places we have identified as government buildings are places the snoops have been unable to go. We may not know if they are planning to move against us.”
“We’d see them coming,” Jorlem said. “Even if all the snoops fail, there’s orbital observation...”
“Unless the power that glitches our equipment can reach up to low orbit,” Adam pointed out. Hamilton was well away from the planet, although no one knew what actually constituted a safe distance. The network of microsatellites was expendable, if necessary. They could always make more. “What happens then?”
“We might be in trouble,” Jorlem said, dryly.
“Keep reviewing the data,” Elyria ordered, finally. “And then we can prepare to move the wagons out onto the surface.”
Dacron left the shuttle as the meeting broke up and stepped out into the cavern the diggers had created, hollowing out the ground under the clearing. Much of the earth and stone had been processed into building materials, allowing the base to expand at astonishing speed; they were already installing an elevator that would lift the wagons to the surface when the time came. Given enough time, and a suitable source of raw materials, the base would become large enough to house an entire research team, as well as hundreds of sensors devised by the AIs. One of them, Dacron had learned, attempted to measure changes in universal constants, something only possible by manipulating the quantum foam. The full potentials of the capability were rather terrifying. What if someone managed to cancel gravity all over the universe?
It seemed impossible; it was impossible, at least by conventional technology. One could manipulate gravity, even counteract it, but cancelling the force altogether? It was at least theoretically possible. One could do remarkable things in hyperspace, given enough processing power; the AIs had certainly proven that possible. What could one do if granted access to the quantum foam? The inhabitants of Darius might become gods.
But they weren’t gods. It was difficult to be sure, but there had to be limits to their powers, apart from their own self-restraint. Maybe they countered each other, or maybe there were other limits to what they could do. Human brains were slow and feeble, as Dacron well knew. What could an AI do with the power to manipulate the quantum foam?
It made a certain kind of sense. Everyone knew that races in their Sixth Age – transcendence, like the Elder Races – became beings of pure thought and energy. They probably had at least some connection to hyperspace, like the AIs, as well as a link to the quantum foam. Given enough power, they could presumably do far more using the quantum foam than any mere human. They’d certainly be more capable of comprehending their full potential.
And then they just... faded away.
It was another mystery, one that fuelled the Conservatives’ desire to hold the Confederation in an eternal state of stasis. Few Elders would talk to the Confederation – apparently, there had been one major contact, which had been hushed up – but it was clear that they eventually went... elsewhere. Did they burn out, the energies that supported them no longer sustainable, or did they ascend to a higher plane of existence? Or did the universe eventually erase them from existence, making room for other beings? No one had ever been able to figure out the answer.
His implanted communicator buzzed. “Dacron, it’s time to get dressed,” Elyria said. “Can you report to the dressing room?”
“On my way,” Dacron said.
He walked b
ack into the shuttle. The AIs didn’t even begin to comprehend humanity’s fascination with clothing, although Dacron was starting to suspect that it actually served a functional purpose. Several weeks as a human had taught him that looking at nude attractive females was very distracting. Oddly, he didn’t seem to have any yen for human males, which surprised him. Perhaps it was a biological desire to procreate buried inside his new body that drove him towards females. But the Confederation could easily turn a male into a female.
Local clothing, at least that deemed suitable for apprentices, was grey and uncomfortable. AIs did not have a sense of aesthetics, at least as humans understood the term, and Dacron found it hard to care what he wore, but the humans had said it was ugly. Looking at himself in the reflector field, Dacron was inclined to agree. The outfit didn’t show his body to his best advantage. On the other hand, as he was supposed to be a lowly apprentice, that was probably a good thing.
Adam, as the merchantman, enjoyed a far more spectacular set of clothes. A bright red and orange suit, with a green sash and leather belt, ensured that everyone would know him for a rich and prosperous merchant. He carried a cane in one hand – careful study of the snoop records had informed them that the canes were normally concealed swords – and a large bag in the other, which held notebooks, quill pens and a small amount of gold, silver and bronze coins. The hat he wore completed his disguise; Jorlem, who wasn’t allowed to join the first exploration mission, had snidely pointed out that it made an excellent target. Elyria had suggested that might be the point.
His wife – played by Gigot – had an outfit similar to her husband, although hers had a long dress instead of trousers. It was also very loose, concealing the shape of her breasts; she wore no hat, nor was she allowed to carry a sword. The weapons she did carry would have to be kept hidden from the locals, as only a small number of women had been observed carrying any weapons at all. Until the exact nature of the local taboos were figured out, none of the women could carry weapons openly.
The daughters – Elyria and Adana – were dressed in drab black robes. Analysis had suggested that the black robes signified unmarried women, but there was no way to know for sure, at least until they had a chance to ask. It wasn’t unusual to see girls accompanying their parents on business trips and a number had been observed helping with the sales, or keeping the accounts. In cities, women seemed to live more restricted lives, although there were a number of female-owned business. Or so they thought. Dacron reminded himself, again, that they were seeing everything at one remove and they might not fully understand what was going on.
Finally, the bodyguards wore leather armour and carried swords. They’d been lucky; a snoop had seen one of the City Guardsmen demanding a weapons permit and one had been handed over, allowing the fabricator to produce a forged copy. Adana had pointed out that primitive societies often tried to restrict weapons ownership, knowing that it might lead to rebellion if the lower classes got ideas. They hadn’t picked up many people owning weapons other than the City Guards and those wealthy enough to pay the fees.
“We have been through the procedure seven times,” Elyria said. She might have been playing a submissive daughter, but she was definitely in charge. “We say little about where we come from; if pressed, give them the cover story and little else. Ideally, we say nothing while buying items from their shops, particularly books. Keep an eye open for anyone selling them.”
Dacron nodded. Apart from the libraries, which were proving worryingly closed to the snoops, there were travelling booksellers, who moved from city to city selling books. One of them was heading to Warlock’s Bane, which was another reason to start their operations there. A few dozen books could tell them more about the society on Darius than anything else. Quite where the books came from was something of a mystery, although he had no doubt the AIs would solve it soon enough. Making paper wasn’t difficult and printing presses would be relatively simple, even for Darius’s level of technology. And perhaps they could use magic to speed it up.
“We will take an inn inside the city” – all of the other travelling merchants had done the same, no doubt because they felt cramped inside their tiny caverns – “and assume that we will be watched at all times,” Elyria continued. “Just because these people are primitive doesn’t mean that they are stupid. We’ve seen them spying on each other just to try to get better deals. Use the implants for any communications outside our roles, or to stay in touch with the Hamilton. Alert us at once if you run into trouble of any sort.”
She smiled. “It will be hard for some of you to stay in character,” she concluded. “Remember that there is no other choice – and that you volunteered for it.”
Dacron hadn’t volunteered – or perhaps the AI that had spawned him had volunteered in his place. But it wasn’t what Elyria meant and he knew it. Everyone would have to play their roles, including the women – and they were playing second-class citizens at best. The Confederation had no real concept of gender discrimination – being able to change sex at will had eliminated it completely – but Darius didn’t seem to have anything of the sort, unless it was done by magic. Elyria had stepped into primitive worlds before, as had Adana. Gigot... hadn’t.
Two hours later, the drones helped move the wagons to the surface. The horses weren’t happy at all – they’d been bred on a Ring and they found Darius a little unnatural – but Fred and Plax handled them perfectly. Indeed, it was possible that the locals would want them both for breeding stock. They’d had their genetic code improved, although they hadn’t been uplifted to intelligence. Uplift procedures were banned, another legacy of the Thule War. No one would easily forget uplifted gorillas rampaging across human worlds.
“Here we go,” Elyria said, as she climbed into a carriage. “Next stop, Warlock’s Bane.”
Despite himself, Dacron couldn’t resist a thrill. This was going to be something new.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
They smelt the city a long time before they drew near to it.
Elyria took a breath, silently grateful for the enhancements in her sense of smell. Most primitive societies lived in filth, literally, unaware that it was dangerously unhealthy. Only a handful of human colony worlds that had lost technology had remembered germs and how diseases spread from person to person. Darius didn’t seem to be any different. The unholy combination of smells reached out towards them as they finally headed down towards the city.
Warlock’s Bane was laughably small by the standards of the Confederation, or even by the standards of a Second Age society. The snoops had revealed no more than a few thousand people living in the city, mainly workers, merchants and a handful of governors and City Guardsmen. That too wasn’t untypical; the majority of Darius’s population would still live on the land, producing food for their masters. They’d seen enough farms from orbit to conclude that the yields were very low, barely average for a First Age society. The locals had no way of countering crop pests, diseases and other problems that plagued comparable societies.
The city was surrounded by a high stone wall, topped with battlements that suggested the main threat to the city was an invading army trying to climb over the defences and into the city. Elyria knew that such walls would become obsolete very quickly once the locals developed gunpowder; indeed, given the power of some of their magicians, the walls might be already useless. Maybe they just marked the limits of the city, although they’d seen several cities where the walls were surrounded by shacks on both sides. An enemy with nothing more than swords and spears could use the ramshackle hovels for cover and advance against the city. It wasn’t very secure.
Warlock’s Bane seemed to avoid having any habitations on the wrong side of the wall. Someone had cleared away everything that could provide cover to an invading army, leaving them exposed to arrows fired from the walls – assuming that the City Guards had enough manpower to hold back an army. Their snoops couldn’t go everywhere, so it was impossible to be sure, but it looked ver
y much as if they didn’t have enough trained men to hold the walls. The real protection of the city rested in the power and reputation of Master Faye. That was strange, almost an inverse of every other First Age society Elyria had studied; there was no way to know what it meant for the development of society at large.
Unless it’s another Kahn, she told herself, silently. Some animals are just more equal than others.
The road, never very good outside the borderlines, grew better as they headed down towards the main gates. Elyria felt the carriage rocking as the horses started to slow down, waiting for the gates to open and allow them to enter. A heavy portcullis barred their way until it rattled upwards, powered by a pair of slaves who were chained to the pulley. It was a killing ground for unwary invaders, she’d been told; inside the gatehouse, they’d be bottled up and very vulnerable to anything from swordsmen to boiling oil. Dropping hot oil on enemy heads was a standard tactic in medieval societies, even though it inflicted injuries that were very much beyond their ability to mend. That might have been the point.
“Here we go,” Adana said, as they rattled into the gatehouse. There was a long, almost pregnant pause, and then the inner portcullis slowly rose up into the air, allowing the horses to pull the carriages forward, into the courtyard. It was a barren space, smelling of the wastes of countless horses, with a handful of low gates that barred access into the city beyond. “Just keep our mouths shut.”
Elyria nodded. Thankfully, the locals didn’t seem to be particularly corrupt, at least from what they’d picked up with the snoops. There might be a demand that some city taxes were paid, but they weren’t going to try to steal everything in the carriages. And yet they would just have to wait and see what happened. As far as they could tell, cities that had poor government, the type that would make it hard for merchants to operate, were simply excluded from the trading networks. It wasn’t an uncommon pattern when a world was developing the rudiments of a capitalist economy.
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