Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  It seemed safest to grin back. Seldyan made a mental note to read up on religion when she got a chance.

  By what seemed like a miracle they made it across the frenetic floor of Embarkation without losing anyone. Seldyan got the strong impression that their robed companion had a way of parting the crowds. She also received a far more subtle impression that not all of the crowds were appreciative – with her Hive sensibilities she thought she detected hints of dissent in their wake. She looked around casually and saw robed figures dotted across the big room. Even in the throng they seemed to attract turned backs. Whatever; Shahatiel’s presence had worked. In a shorter time than she would have thought possible they had reached the other side of the crowded space, jumped a long queue – leaving more suppressed resentment behind them – and dropped into deeply upholstered seats in a monorail carriage that shot them down into a black tunnel at a steep angle.

  Seldyan had deliberately waved everyone past, leaving her sitting next to Merish at the back of the compartment. As the carriage hummed away she leaned in close and mouthed into his ear.

  ‘Thoughts?’

  They swapped head positions. ‘Looks okay. Feels worrying.’

  ‘That’s what I think. Our friend?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nut job. Hope she’s not typical. There’s a big atmosphere there. Everyone seems to hate her but no one says it out loud.’

  She nodded. ‘Yeah. The atmosphere reminds me of something but I’m not sure what. Keep alert, will you?’

  ‘No problem. It’ll be a while before I relax enough to feel sleepy.’

  ‘Cool. Now, let’s behave.’

  They sat up straight like good tourists. Ahead of them, the bald head of their guide stuck out from the folds of her robe. For a moment Seldyan thought of a moon hanging low above a barren landscape.

  It was a short journey but a very fast one, and the monorail engineers had made no attempt to conceal G-forces. The opposite, if anything; Seldyan suspected that some of the curves and plunges were more playful than needful. It almost felt like a Hive shuttle, except it didn’t smell.

  Then the car burst out of the tunnel, and things stopped feeling like anything she had ever experienced. She heard Merish draw in a breath.

  They were lancing across the surface of Oblong on the opposite side to the embarkation gantry. The abrupt movements had ceased so that if Seldyan lifted her eyes from the blurring landscape there was nothing to tell her they were moving. She did lift her eyes, or rather they were drawn upwards.

  The vast glowing circle of the three planets hung above them. It filled the starscape, and pretty soon it filled the mind. It was beautiful, and even as Seldyan used the word to herself she smiled; it was the second time in a day, and in a life.

  She felt Merish’s fingers touch her hand. It was probably the one thing that could have distracted her from the view.

  The car began to slow. The rail dipped back below the surface and the ground closed over them. Shahatiel half turned in her seat and spoke over her shoulder.

  ‘We’re nearly there. There’ll be time for you to refresh yourselves before everyone arrives.’

  Kot cleared her throat. ‘Everyone?’

  The woman laughed. ‘Well, not absolutely everyone, obviously. But a reception to welcome you. Patras will be there.’ She looked at them and added, ‘He’s the new Supervisor.’

  She turned away. Merish leaned towards Seldyan. ‘Supervisor?’ he whispered.

  She shrugged. ‘New? Who knows? I know this much – we’re going to be on duty for a while longer.’

  He nodded. His fingers clasped hers more tightly for a moment. Then he withdrew his hand.

  Village 91, Hive

  THE FOOD LINE crawled forward. He had already learned to keep pace with it. The previous evening he had fallen a few paces behind and had suddenly found bodies swirling past him, filling the gap and forcing him backwards until there was no more queue behind him. Ahead he could see a knot of bodies gathered around the dispensary. They dispersed as he reached the hatch.

  It slid out a shallow bowl of flimsy paper about the size of his outstretched palms. The bowl began to sag almost immediately. He cupped his hands underneath it and then looked at the contents. He felt his lips pull back so that his teeth chilled.

  It held a congealed mass of something yellowish grey. It smelled of vomit.

  There was laughter somewhere in front of him. He looked up into the faces of half a dozen people with grinning mouths and watchful eyes. He stared at them as coldly as he could until the grins faded. Then he pushed through them and dumped the bowl into the waste. He turned before the cover had closed, leaving the hiss of the disposal flare behind him, and walked back through the gap between the two halves of the watching group. It felt familiar, from a long time ago.

  He went to his Village hungry, but no one troubled him. The hunger didn’t trouble him either. He had been there before. The only surprise was that here, the memory was almost welcome.

  Each Village held ninety-six sleep cells, each just larger than a standard human. They were arranged round a central observation shaft in three stacked wheels of thirty-two. The sleepers’ feet pointed towards the shaft and the cells were backlit at the head end so any movement within the cell threw a moving shadow across the translucent cylindrical sensor mesh that surrounded the observation shaft. Two human guards sat with their hands on dead man’s handles. While either handle was held, the automatic weapon system was merely armed. If both were released, so were the weapons. It was simple and foolproof.

  The Villages were themselves arranged in vertical stacks of seven which could be isolated from each other instantly. A Village with both handles free was automatically isolated. One where both had remained free for more than an hour without explanation was fumigated. Depending on the explanation it might be fumigated anyway.

  Village stacks were arranged in a hexagonal close-packed matrix. The roughly triangular spaces between stacks were used for engineering and storage. Five hundred stacks made a Hive. There were many, many Hives, but the whole collection was still called by the singular – The Hive.

  Vess had learned about it – and much more besides – in six days of what they called orientation. To himself he called it indoctrination, but he didn’t share the word with the faceless voices in the dark of the immersion suite. Instead he cooperated with them as they taught him who he wasn’t any more, and then as they showed him who he was to be while he was on the Hive world and what he was to do. Apparently it was all quite standard.

  It was better than being dead – but sometimes he had found himself questioning that. He had kept his questions to himself.

  The learning had been true to the reality but when he arrived – with the guilty cargo of the real Vess buried deep inside him – the reality turned out to be far more than the learning. The first thing that struck him was the smell. He had expected bodies and stale food, and the expectation had drawn him back to a faint memory of childhood in crowded places. He had shut that down quickly; in fact his Village smelled aggressively clean, with a chemical edge and a dry papery background from the disposable coveralls that were renewed every day. No other clothes were provided or allowed in the Village.

  He woke with his belly growling and his newly implanted chip smarting near the base of his spine. The food line was welcome. This time no one interfered with his meal, which was a greyish porridge that looked uncomfortably like the bowl from last night but which smelled and tasted of almost nothing. But it was hot and his senses detected starch. Within a minute he had emptied the bowl, although without properly filling his stomach. Then there was work. That was what the Hive was about.

  The buried part of him understood the logic – always had, in a general way, but it had been explained in words of one syllable during the process that was not called indoctrination.

  There had been different teachers for different subjects. The mechanics of espionage were covered by a blocky being of a species unf
amiliar to Vess, but which looked like a cross between a large human and a small cargo container. It – Vess had tried and failed to settle on a gender – had a peculiar voice which managed at the same time to be effeminate and powerfully baritone.

  Then there was a long political briefing from a small apparently standard human female who barely looked up from her notes. When she did, Vess realized with a jolt that she was not so standard; in the dim light the four eyes that met his were huge, with slightly luminous purple irises. The eyes were stacked, one above the other, on either side of an ordinary-looking nose. Vess found himself wondering how many species, or sub-species – or whatever they were – the basic human form had produced, and how many more of them he was yet to meet.

  He didn’t have to wonder with the creature that briefed him on economic strategy. At first sight it could have been a twin of Clo Fiffithiss. But first sight was deceptive; it hadn’t taken him long to realize that the only thing the two beings had in common was species. For a start, and unlike Clo Fiffithiss, it didn’t use a translator. It was one of the few that had learned to produce human-compatible speech using its own vocal apparatus, a group of layered reed-like membranes set low down its windpipe. The result sounded like a wind through dead leaves.

  ‘Most societies arrive at slavery by accident, or because they never left it. In the Spin there has been plenty of economic oppression but little actual slavery, unless you count examples like the Fortunate Protectorate, who arrived at it by accident and were obliterated by an Artefact shortly afterwards. The Inner Federation is very unusual in having decided to return to slavery on an industrial scale millennia after having abandoned it, and probably unique in that it did so as a strategic decision based on detailed gaming. You have been told that already, I know.’

  Vess nodded.

  ‘There is something you haven’t been told. That decision wasn’t to ensure stability; there was no outcome of the gaming that achieved that. It was about managing decline. Now the situation has passed over a threshold. It is unmanageable.’

  The rustling voice fell silent. Vess squinted at the dimly lit creature. There was no readable expression; it was quite still.

  ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘How long until what? The Abstainer has gamed it. Until we default on our debts, a year. Mass unrest leading to civil war, another year. Complete dismantling of the Inner Federation by aggressors and creditors, five years. There is a certain urgency.’

  The Abstainer, thought Vess. Not a friendly term, Clo Fiffithiss had said. Keeping his voice level he said, ‘And me?’

  ‘Unstable though we are, we need the economic flywheel of the Hive as a bastion against even worse instability. At the moment it is being the opposite. It is becoming unstable – a source of insurrection. Of revolution, even. Find the instability, Vess, and then come back and tell us.’

  Vess nodded again. Then a thought occurred to him. ‘Am I the only one in there?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Have you any more questions?’

  He dared himself. ‘Clo Fiffithiss – do you trust its gaming?’

  ‘The Abstainer? You should know that my kind do not make good slaves. For the most part. But what it was ordered to game, it would have gamed.’ There was a quick inscrutable hissing as if the wind had swelled to a gale and then subsided. Then the voice returned to normal. ‘That is the end of this briefing – of all the briefings, I believe. I wish you luck.’ There was a slight pause and then it added, ‘Hunt well.’

  Vess bowed in acknowledgement. He managed to restrain his shudder until he was alone. He had no idea how a shudder would have been interpreted.

  But then, yes, there was work. There was always work.

  The economic model was simple enough. The Hive was the ultimate outsourcing destination. It provided anything which needn’t be done in a particular place, and which could be achieved by forced labour – intellectual or physical. It was also a strong attractor of opportunity. People relocated things so as to be near it. Factories, logistics hubs, whole space-borne agri-businesses – anything which either didn’t need much sunshine or could bring its own with it, and which could be done more cheaply by people than machines – had accreted in the riotously cluttered sector around the original Hive planet to take advantage of that cheap labour. It had grown from a resource into an economy within an economy and it worked.

  And Vess worked. He didn’t know how many of the Hive management knew who he was. Very few, he had been told, and certainly no one seemed to be influencing his fate for the better. So he worked, mostly doing things which he would always have assumed were done by inhuman equipment. It took him a while to realize that in many ways they still were.

  One of the things was mining. On his second day he was corralled into a careworn short-hop shuttle along with a hundred or so others. The shuttle’s gravity compensation wasn’t working; two miserably motion-sick hours later, his clothes stained with his own vomit and that of his neighbours, he walked unsteadily into a tunnel on a recently arrived asteroid.

  The next two days passed as one infinitely repeated minute of dust and colossal, deadly fatigue. They exchanged hardly any words, just the bare minimum needed for cooperation. Their throats were coated with rock flour, their eyes dry and swollen and rimmed with it, their fingers peeling raw. Apparently this was normal, or anyway acceptable.

  On the return shuttle he was too tired to vomit. So was everyone else. When they left the shuttle their filthy clothes barely needed to be removed. They fell away in shreds on the way to the decon units. The decontamination wasn’t for their benefit. It was standard practice; the Hive was not to be inoculated with off-planet materials.

  He slept an endless sleep that was far too short, and woke to more work. The cycle lasted eleven days; on the twelfth he woke – eventually – and there wasn’t work. It was almost jarring.

  People’s cycles were staggered. The resters were allowed to move freely within the Village, which meant very little because the Village contained sleep cells and a small social area next to the cafeteria and nothing else.

  Everyone took it differently. A thin, elaborately sinewy woman called Zephorere spent her time exercising, jogging round the outer walkway a set number of times – Vess was too tired to count, but anyway it looked like a set number – before stopping at what seemed to be predetermined points to carry out joint-cracking manoeuvres that made Vess wince. She had a following of a sort; from time to time other resters would trot after her for a few circuits, and the braver ones would imitate her exercise routines. Mostly they fell over and limped back, laughing, to the cafeteria.

  Vess didn’t follow her because his senses had woken up. They were concentrating on the only other person who didn’t, and he trusted them. His trust amused him. Perhaps I really could be a spy, he thought.

  She was called Dimollss and she was very young. She had only been moved into the adult environment of the Village a few cycles ago. She had the transparent wisdom of youth, and the indiscretion.

  ‘The others think you’re a spy.’

  He blinked, gathered himself and smiled at her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re new and old.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She sighed. ‘You’ve just come here so you’re new, but you’re grown-up so you’re old.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Why does that make me a spy?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But people like you have been falling dead out of the Mind Stacks. It must mean something.’

  He blinked. ‘Falling dead?’

  ‘Well, not falling. Lying dead. In those couches.’ Her eyes searched his face. ‘Have you been in the Mind Stack yet?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve heard of it,’ he said. That was true enough; it had been an important part of the briefing.

  She nodded. ‘Good. So you know about when they chip you into the Stack, and you trance? When they bring you out you’re supposed to come out of the trance bu
t some people, people like you, just don’t move … oh …’

  ‘Oh?’ He wanted to ask more but her eyes had broken contact with his and she was staring over his shoulder. He looked round.

  There were three of them, two women and a man, and they were wearing the dull grey-brown uniforms of Monitors. One of the women took a step forwards. ‘Gossip like that is not allowed.’ She looked at Vess. ‘Move away from her or I’ll assume you want to be involved.’

  The argument in his head seemed to take for ever, but it was probably less than a real-time second before his legs acknowledged inevitability. He stood aside and they walked past him. Dimollss shrank back one pace and then stopped, her head raised and her eyes defiantly focused. As upright as she was – and for all she was effectively an adult – Vess realized with a start that she was a head shorter than the Monitors, and far slighter.

  The lead Monitor reached for something at her waist. ‘You know what to do. Ten seconds this time.’

  Dimollss bit her lip. Then she dropped into a sitting position and looked up. For a moment her eyes met Vess’s and she gave the trace of a wink. Then she turned her face to the Monitor and her expression dissolved into such pure hatred that Vess almost recoiled.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Enjoy yourself.’

  The Monitor held out the little grey stubby cylinder she had taken from her belt. She did something to a control at one end of it and then pointed it at Dimollss.

  The girl convulsed. Her body curled forwards into an awkward ball that reminded Vess horribly of a dying insect. From the ball came a harsh keening. It seemed to last a very long time. Then, suddenly, it was over. The Monitor lowered the cylinder. The keening stopped and although Dimollss did not uncurl, Vess could see that her muscles had relaxed.

  The Monitor put the thing back on her belt and looked at Vess. ‘For the record, I did not enjoy that,’ she said. ‘No pleasure is involved.’ She turned and walked away. The other two followed her wordlessly.

  Vess managed to wait until they were almost out of sight before he knelt at the girl’s side. ‘Are you okay?’ The word seemed utterly inadequate.