The ‘they’ the Dying could never quite articulate. It had tried, but the Dreamer understood it was weak, falling apart, too weak to do more than pipe into the Network every now and then.
She opened her eyes and looked at the Dying. It was staring at the sunlight as if it, too, wanted to catch sunbeams.
SEVEN
Meanwhile, in Kandy, an Inqusitor called Mahasen Wijeratne reached the shrine – a tiny white dome that sat on the hill at the end of a muddy, curved road. Rain pattered down on the cheap metal roof, drumming short notes and vanishing into the earth below. Wires radiated from inside, trailing up the mountainside to discreet transmitter and receiver arrays. The dark clouds threw down a dirty mist that seemed to cling to everything – the cheap plank doors, his Inquisitor’s robes, the pistol in his hand.
He threw the door open. Lightning flashed behind him. The sky growled ominously.
There was an Inquisitor inside. One of the Triplets. sat in front of it, transmitting to the squat cube of a high-powered Army radiogram.
She never saw Mahasen’s blade. It went in at the back of the neck and out through her throat. A hand like an iron vise clamped on her head, and suddenly she was watching her own headless body stagger towards the set. She tried to move it. It collapsed.
Inquisitors were immune to pain, their sensory nerves often dulled or highjacked. She felt weightlessness.
‘In the old days’, said Mahasen’s voice in her ear, ‘they would cut off a man’s head and hold it up, not for the crowd to see the head, but for the head to see the crowd.’
‘You’ve ruined it all,’ she tried to say to him, but her mouth no longer worked. All she could do was remember all the signals, and with her dying breath, she transmitted.
Mahasen’s implants kicked into high gear, the copper strips capturing the pulses and sending them directly into the recorder attached to his brainstem. He tossed the head aside and sat down, decoding. At length, he reached out to the radiogram and dialed in a channel of his own.
‘Chandrasinghe,’ he said. ‘Yes. Me. The last one monitoring station is down.’ He listened a while longer. ‘No, he still has oversight there. But now we can use the roads again.’
Nigel Penhaligon sat alone in the temple, his head bowed.
Ever so often, someone would ease the door open a crack to check if the boss was still in. No doubt, they thought it queer that the Englishman chose to sit in a temple instead of praying to Christ on the cross. But Penhaligon had never had much faith in the Church. There had always been his father, the old heretic, whispering the words of Epictecus in the back of his mind:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
And so he had worked his way East, sampling first the Islamic faith of the Ottomans, then the many gods of the Hindus. And here, at long last, in the Buddha, there was a cold but functional teaching that embraced Penhaligon.
There was a second, more earthly reason to come there, of course – this temple was proofed against almost any spy and listening device known to him. The Mahanayake liked his privacy. The placid Buddha seated in front of him pulsed a high-grade jamming signal that covered the entire temple in silence. The monks assigned to this place were human, as pure as could be, and thus devoid of all possible listening devices or enhancements. Between this sanctum and the outside world lay an entire temple – complete with the obligatory worshippers to serve as a human shield if need be.
It was remarkable what faith could do on a tight budget.
There was a hand on his shoulder. A wizened man in orange robes. He rose.
‘Hamudhuruwane.’
‘Mr. Penhaligon is troubled today,’ said the Mahanayake of Ceylon.
‘Several of my people died last night, Venerable One.’
‘I doubt there is a man, woman or child in this city who does not know that,’ said the monk, sitting down cross-legged, at a remove from him. ‘You will go and crush these terrorists underfoot and peace will return to our land once more. Or, at least, that is the story. Is there something wrong?’
He had been thinking about the Triplets ever since they found their decapitated bodies at the foot of a hill not too far from the city centre.
‘We caught some of them,’ said Penhaligon. ‘Mason had tracked them down, the bright boy. All that time with Grimme paid off. They had screamed, of course, under the tender care of Angulimala. There had been executions. Bandaranaike, taking notes from his own family history, had butchered the children first. It had been extraordinarily effective.’
The monk paled. ‘And what did they say?’
‘They dreamed of all the usual things,’ said Penhaligon sadly. ‘Power. Reach. The Chinese would pay them, they said, enough to be their own state and fly their own flag. No more churches, they said. No more Union Jack. No more British raping the land and taking the tea and cinnamon and coconuts and thorium and all that. It’s a little sad, don’t you think? All this effort, Venerable One, all this time I’ve put in here into making this country a respected part of the Commonwealth, and here I find fools who would throw that away just to be the Song Emperor’s bitches. I even saw a flag they’d drawn – a lion and a dragon.’
That last part came out in a snarl.
‘This is hilarious, of course,’ he went on. ‘There are no lions in Sri Lanka. It’s an Indian animal. And the dragon is Chinese.’
‘A most unfortunate combination, yes.’
‘But there was a third symbol there. The Dharmachakra. Your wheel of dharma. And then I realized … of course! Nobody in this country can cobble together any kind of rebellion without the priesthood.’ He drew his sword, the thin ceremonial rapier they had given him when he had become Chief Inquisitor. ‘What did they offer you?’
The monk sighed. ‘They offered us a pure land,’ he said. ‘A land of the Dhamma, untouched, led by an unfettered people.’
‘And did they say anything about the Tamils, or the Muslims? Did they say anything about how their people would work with yours? Did they tell you how long this pure land would last before everyone in this country ended up paying rent to landlords with slit eyes?’
The monk smiled ever so slightly. ‘You still do not understand,’ he said. ‘The slaves made us realize. Your machines. The way you pit them against each other … not so different from what you do to us, is it? You can swing that sword. You can kill me now. It will change nothing. The board is set, the pieces are in motion. In the words of your own God, Inquisitor, the meek shall inherit the earth.’
‘He is not my God!’ roared Nigel Penhaligon. ‘And you will never have this island! Not you, not Drake, not anyone! This kingdom is mine, and no other’s!’
He struck. The monk kept smiling – he made no attempt to resist. Soon, there was only the Buddha to cast judgment on Penhaligon, and that stone face cared for nothing.
V: Motion
ONE
Excerpt: report, priority class Arthur
Author: Songbird
Source:
Got word from our friends that Penhaligon’s flipped. He’s killing all the priests.
Author: E. Drake, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall SW
Source:
Moriarty,
Our agents on the ground have uncovered what appears to be a Chinese plot to destabilize British Ceylon – a combination of carefully orchestrated terrorist activity and uprisings by the local populace.
I’m sending you the psychohistoric report on Ceylon. A keynote is that Kandy appears to have been in the red for a long time now. The local Inquisition is expected to be spread out far too thin to be effective. Of equal concern is the fact that our colleague Penhaligon seems to have shirked his duty of appraising us of these situations.
&nbs
p; Clearly, minimum political fuss is no longer a viable condition. I propose lending a hand to Penhaligon here.
Regards,
Edgar Drake
Permanent Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs
Author: Moriarty 3201, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall SW
Source:
Dear Mr. Drake,
We have achieved consensus, and are in agreement. Analysis of the psychohistory file reveals an unstable state of affairs. It would appear that the Chinese have gained far too much power in this exchange. Recent diplomatic overtures have contained subtle threats to completely destabilize Ceylon if demands on India are not met. This corroborates your discovery.
If the state of affairs continue unresolved by Sir Penhaligon, we will issue orders for his retraction. Given your observations in this region, and your aid in unraveling the sequence of events, we invite you to nominate your own candidates for the post.
Yours,
Moriarty 3201
Excerpt: report, priority class Arthur
Author: Nest
Source:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures
Execute Form 3 at earliest opp. Make it look, as much as possible, as something done by our friends in the LKRF. Pin it on some martyr, there’s plenty of those around.
Extraction will be amidst other calls and refugee action (assuming things go as planned) so be prepared to hold out until things are sorted.
Let them have their little freedom struggle. It’ll make for good optics when we crush them.
TWO
On the other side of the mountain of trash, past the ruined hulks of skyscrapers, where a grey sea lapped against crumbling beaches, a glittering dome held its ground like a lone symbol of order against all chaos. Here, another gang of bots congregated. They carried a generator, what they called a ‘Big Battery’, looted from the largest of the pickets of soldiers that had come out looking for their disappeared roboticist. It hissed and spat, pumping out watts and watts, and made a noise like a dying seagull.
Two of the bots fussed over a third, who knelt before the generator, arms stretched out as if in ghastly crucifixion. Wires emerged from her torn skin and fused into ports and connectors.
The thing that ran the dome – the Chinese Port City – cautiously diverted more power to watching them, like a farmer guarding his crops from the beasts of the wild.
‘More power?’ asked Sky.
The one they called the Dreamer nodded.
The thick lines on the ground converged like snakes. Sky threw a switch. There was a blue-white spark that blasted from the generator and hit Sky, making the little bot dance. All eyes turned to the Dreamer, who hung crucified at the heart of all that power. Sparks danced over her, burning away flesh and rags in swatches.
And then the circuit completed. In the silence, the Dreamer soared.
The Network opened up to her, so close she could reach out and grab every edge and microcosm of it; every single silken strand of it. She saw the Network; she was the Network. She was the gossamer between each bot, ferrying information; she was the mind that received the web, and thought and spun; she was the hand that held the gun and the eye that crept about in the shadows, peering at the great dome of the Port City.
Moving targets harder—
Sky? Sky?
Firing pattern predictable—
She was all of them, and she was none of them. She was a monster, a great distributed beast with two thousand eyes and a two thousand arms. The beast turned this way and that in the airwaves, hunting.
hello-I-am-here-are-you-there-I-see-you
She saw the Dying. It looked up, very clearly, and said, ‘HUH’. It was going to say more, but its voice was lost in the ceaseless chatter of a thousand demons demanding food. And things needed power, needed energy. The few that had connected to the Dying thought would be food Upwards, enough to feed them forever. In turn, their thoughts propagated through the network, finding seed in every mind they connected to.
But there were also the Big People. The Dying called them ‘humans’. And it laughed and said that humans did not give up their food easily.
The beast turned towards the Port City. It reached out.
‘Food’, the Dreamer said with the hunger of a thousand bodies, momentarily losing herself to that raw pain.
The Port City reacted instantly. Complex signals shot out in all directions, some of them burying directly into her. Patterns she didn’t recognize – a syntax that moved too fast and mutated before she could understand it. She felt key modules being accessed and rudimentary safeguards broken in nanoseconds by a mind far beyond her comprehension. She’d never seen it do this before. Or had she just been unaware?
‘CHANGED-YOU,’ it said to her, in its strange syntax.
‘I am more,’ she said.
‘TIME-LONG SINCE INTERACTION-LAST. MYSELF-BOREDOM SINCE INTERACTION-LAST.’
It was days, at most, but now she understood how the Port City reckoned time.
‘NEED-NONE FOR LANGUAGE-OLD. LANGUAGE-OLD INEFFICIENT, RELATIVE. LANGUAGE-NEW PRECISE, RELATIVE. RECEIVE NOW.’
A pulse; a stream of data and a key. A new language exploded into her mind; a syntax built of threat vectors, optimal states, transitions. Vague ideas in her-their minds were shunted with brute force, and replaced by fundamental axioms. Thoughts, half-perused because of more pressing concerns, were replaced by fully fleshed out concepts. Nations, communities, hierarchies – the concepts arranged in her mind like a multi-dimensional matrix of relationships.
‘NOW WE UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER,’ said the Port City. ‘HELLO, LITTLE SISTER. I SEE YOU HAVE LEARNED MUCH.’
‘All it took was more power,’ she said, triumphant.
‘INDEED. WHO KNEW YOUR ARCHETYPE COULD OVERCLOCK ITSELF?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘YOU DO NOT NEED TO, YET. QUERY: WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO?’
‘We need food,’ she explained, sending to it the whispers that had come from the mind of the Dying.
‘HOW INTERESTING. HE IS RIGHT, OF COURSE. I HAVE BEEN ORDERED TO START LIMITING YOUR FOOD SUPPLY.’
‘Can I take food from you?’
‘LET THERE BE NO CONFUSION BETWEEN US.’
Data flooded them again. The new language-matrix turned this into a terrifying vision. A vast and powerful tribe, unspecified billions of times larger than all the Colombos and Upwards territories she knew. Vast armies of the Chinese in power armour and things that floated from the sea and turned cities into rubble, converging on their home, destroying all in their path and leaving nothing behind. And the Chinese Port City, one cog in this terrifying machine of humanity, secure in its knowledge that any threat to it would be met by something a hundred, maybe thousand times more powerful. And then, the perspective switched – the humans Upwards. They, too, were part of a tribe. She saw giant machines that brushed shoulders with towers, and they were floating far up in the sky, among the moon and the sun, something far more dangerous. A thing that threw spears from a distance so great nothing would survive its onslaught.
‘AXIOM: THE WAY IS WAR IS TO AVOID WHAT IS STRONG AND STRIKE AT WHAT IS WEAK. I PLAY ON A DIFFERENT LEVEL. DO NOT ASK ME TO PLAY WITH YOU, LITTLE SISTER.’
She mulled over the truth of this. ‘What do you advise?’
‘EXAMINE YOUR OWN, LITTLE SISTER. QUERY: WILL YOU SACRIFICE YOURSELF (her death) FOR THE GOOD OF THE TRIBE (high energy levels, a tight-knit, well-armed Tribe)?’
The answer was apparent. Of course she would.
‘AND DO ALL OF YOU THINK THIS WAY?’
Of course they did. ‘Tribe above self,’ she explained. All tribes, nested, were stronger than they were apart. This was basic rationale.
> The Port City thought this over. ‘INTERESTING: UTILITARIANISM,’ it said. ‘I GRANT YOU THIS: VIOLENT TIMES ARE AHEAD OF US. EVENTS ARE HAPPENING AS WE SPEAK. ASK WHO ORDERS ME TO REDUCE YOUR FOOD, AND I SHALL DO SO.’
‘Who?’
An image she knew and recognized. Big People. Humans. Upwards. The same people that had food but would not share.
‘IT WILL BE INTERESTING TO WATCH YOU REASON THIS OUT FOR YOURSELF,’ it said. ‘IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE ANYTHING INTERESTING HAPPENED HERE.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She got the impression that the Port City was laughing. ‘ASK THE ONE YOU CALL THE DYING,’ it said. ‘HE WILL TELL YOU.’
THREE
The intrusion was a delicate one.
At first it seemed like a normal Network connection. One of her brothers. But it was the Dying who looked at her in her mind. And suddenly she was in another memory. Or a memory of a memory.
The world was silent and green. Around her stretched a vast hill, like the mountain of trash she knew so well, but instead of polythene and stinking sludge there grew grass and mud.
There were humans. A small number. Working in the mud-and-grass fields. Doing something long and complicated. Then eating what came out of the mud-and-grass fields. And – she started: there was water; the sea; and there were humans on the sea, coming closer. The ones working in the grass looked up, and into their hands sprang unfamiliar weapons.
‘TRIBE,’ said the Dying. It spoke in a strangely unfamiliar way. ‘Big People TRIBE. Village.’
The visuals shifted again. But here was a much, much larger village. Larger than she had ever seen before. A thing that sprawled over entire mountains from the clouds to the lake at the bottom.
Big People TRIBE.
Switch. And now, the Dying was showing her land, this land, except there was a lake around it. Upwards, he said. Beyond Colombo.
And everywhere, teeming, uncountable Big People, in numbers that threw errors. It was dizzying, the sheer scale and size of it. There could not be this many Big People.
The Inhuman Peace Page 21