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“Correct,” Lieria said through the wafer. “Similarity approaching eighty-five per cent. The data packages represented colours to a Laymil eye.”
“Once we’d established that, we ran a comparison on the rest of the data, trying to match it with other Laymil nerve impulses,” Oski Katsura said. “Jackpot. Well, more or less. It took four months to write interpretation programs and build suitable interface units, but we got there in the end.” A wave of her hand took in the benches and all their elaborate equipment. “We unravelled the first full sequence last night.”
Dawning realization at what Oski Katsura was actually saying brought a sense of real excitement to Ione. Her eyes were drawn to the stack in its protective bubble. She touched the transparent surface reverently, it was warmer than the ambient temperature. “This is a recording of a Laymil sensorium?” she asked.
Parker Higgens and Oski Katsura grinned like ten-year-olds.
“Yes, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said.
She turned to him sharply. “How much is there? How long does it go on for?”
Oski Katsura gave a modest shrug. “We don’t quite understand the file sequences yet. The one which we have translated so far lasts a little over three minutes.”
“How long?” Ione let a waspish note creep into her voice.
“If the bit rate holds constant for the other sequences . . . approximately eight thousand hours.”
Did she say eight thousand?
Yes,said tranquillity.
“Bloody hell!” An oafish smile appeared on Ione’s face.
“When you said translated, what did you mean?”
“The sequence has been adapted for human sensevise reception,” Oski Katsura said.
“Have you reviewed it?”
“Yes. The quality is below normal commercial standards, but that ought to improve once we refine our programs and equipment.”
“Can Tranquillity access your equipment through the communication net?” Ione asked urgently.
“It should be simple enough. One moment, I’ll datavise the entry code,” Oski Katsura said. “That’s it.”
Show me!
Senses which were fundamentally wrong engulfed her conscious thoughts, leaving her as a passive, faintly protesting, observer. The Laymil body was trisymmetric, standing one metre seventy-five high, possessing a tough, heavily crinkled slate-grey skin. There were three legs, with a double-jointed knee, and feet which ended in a hoof. Three arms with a bulbous shoulder which permitted a great deal of articulation, a single elbow, and hands with four triple-jointed fingers as thick as a human thumb and twice as long, bestowing considerable strength and dexterity. Most disturbing of all were the three sensor heads, emerging like truncated serpents between the shoulders. Each one had an eye at the front, with a triangular bat-ear above it, and a toothless breathing mouth below. All the mouths could vocalize, but one was larger and more sophisticated than the other two, which made up for their deficiency with a more acute sense of smell. The feeding mouth was on the top of the torso, in the cleft between the necks, a circular orifice equipped with sharp needle teeth.
The body Ione now wore constricted her own figure severely, pulping it below circular bands of muscle that flexed and twisted sinuously, squeezing protesting flesh and bone into a new shape, forcing her to conform to the resurgent identity suspended in the crystal matrix. She felt as though her limbs were being systematically twisted in every direction apart from the ones nature intended. But there was no pain inherent in the metamorphosis. Feverish thoughts, electrified by instinctive revulsion, began to calm. She started to look around, accepting the trinocular viewpoint input as best she could.
She was wearing clothes. The first surprise; born of prejudice, the foreign physique was animal , unhuman, no anthropomorphism could possibly exist here to build a bridge. But the trousers were easily recognizable, tubes of midnight-purple fabric, sleek as silk against the coarse skin. They came halfway down the lower leg, there was even a recognizable belt. The shirt was a stretchy cylinder of light green, with hoops that hung over the necks.
And she was walking, a three-legged walk that was so easy, so natural that she didn’t even have to think how to move the limbs to avoid tripping. The sensor head with the speaking mouth was always at the front, swinging slowly from side to side. Her other two heads scanned the surrounding countryside.
Sights and sounds besieged her. There were few half-tones in her visual world, bright primary colours dominated; but the image was flecked with minute black fissures, like an AV projection running heavy interference; the myriad sounds sliced with half-second breaks of silence.
Ione glossed over the flaws. She was walking through a Laymil habitat. If Tranquillity was manicured perfection, this was manicured anarchy. The trees were at war, thrusting and clashing against each other. Nothing grew upright. It was like a jungle hit by a hurricane, but with the trunks packed so closely they couldn’t fall, only topple onto their neighbours. She saw trees with their kinked trunks cupped together, trunks that spiralled round each other wrestling for height and light, young shoots piercing old flaking boles. Roots the size of a man’s torso emerged from the trunks well above her head, stabbing down like fleshy beige fork prongs into the sandy soil, producing a buttress cone. The leaves were long ribbons, curled into spirals, a deep olive-green in colour. And down where she walked, where shadows and sunbeams alternated like incorporeal pillars, every nook and crevice was crammed with tiny cobalt-blue flowering mushrooms, their pilei fringed with vermilion stamens, swaying like sea anemones in a weak current.
Pleasure and peace soaked into her like sunlight through amber. The forest was in harmony, its life spirit resonating with the spaceholm mother essence, singing their madrigal in unison. She listened with her heart, thankful for the privilege of living.
Hoofs trod evenly along the meandering trail carrying her towards the fourth marriage community. Her husbands/mates awaited her, the eagerness inside her was woven into the forest song and rejoiced over by the mother essence.
She reached the borders of the jungle, saddened by the smaller trees, the end of song, jubilant that she had passed through cleanly, that she was worthy of a fourth reproduction cycle. The trees gave way to open land, a gentle valley swathed in high, lush grasses and speckled with vivid reds and yellows and blues of bell-shaped flowers. Spaceholm reared around her, a landscape of tangled greens, rampant vegetation choking the silver veins of streams and rivers, smeared with fragile tufts of cloud. Sunspires stabbed out along the axis from the centre of each endcap, thin sabres stretching for twenty kilometres, furiously radiant.
“Tree spirit song unity,”she called with voice and mind. Her two clarion heads bugled gleefully. “I await.”
“Richness reward embryo growth daughter,”the spaceholm mother entity replied.
“Male selection?”
“Concord.”
“Unison awaits.”
“Life urge rapture.”
She started to walk down the slope. Ahead of her on the floor of the valley was the fourth marriage community. Blue polyp cuboidal structures, rigidly symmetrical, arrayed in concentric rings. On the paths between the featureless walls she could see other Laymil moving about. All her heads craned forward.
The memory ended.
The lurch back into the conformity of the electronics lab was as abrupt as it was shocking. Ione put a hand on the bench to steady herself. Oski Katsura and Parker Higgens were giving her an anxious look, even Lieria’s dark violet eyes were focused on her.
“That was . . . astonishing,” she managed to say. The hot Laymil jungle lurked around the fringes of sight like a vengeful daydream. “Those trees, she seemed to think of them as alive.”
“Yes,” Parker Higgens said. “It was obviously some kind of mating selection test or ritual. We know Laymil females are capable of five reproductive cycles, it never occurred to anybody that they might be subject to artificial restraints. In fact I find it amazing that a culture so sophisticated should still indulge in what was almost a pagan rite.”
“I’m not sure it was pagan,” Oski Katsura said. “We have already identified a gene sequence similar to the Edenist affinity gene in the Laymil genome. However they are obviously far more Gaiaistic than Edenist humans; their habitat, the spaceholm, was virtually a part of the reproductive process. It certainly seemed to possess some kind of veto power.”
“Like me and Tranquillity,” Ione said under her breath.
Hardly.
Give us another five thousand years, and the birth of a new Lord of Ruin could easily become ritualized.
You are entirely correct, Ione Saldana,lieria said. The Kiint continued speaking through her white wafer. “I note considerable evidence to indicate the Laymil mate-selection process is based on scientific eugenics rather than primitive spiritualism. Suitability is considerably more than possession of desirable physical characteristics, mental strength is obviously a prime requirement.”
“Whatever, it opens up a fantastic window into their culture,” Parker Higgens said. “We knew so little before this. To think that a mere three minutes could show us so much. The possibilities it reveals . . .” He looked at the electronics stack almost in worship.
“Will there be any problem in translating the rest of it?” Ione asked Oski Katsura.
“I don’t see any. What you accessed was still pretty crude, the emotional analogues were only rough approximates. We’ll tweak the program, of course, but I doubt we could have direct parallels with a race that alien.”
Ione stared at the electronics stack. An oracle for a whole race. And possibly, just possibly, the secret was inside it: why they did it. The more she thought about it, the more puzzling it became. The Laymil were so vibrantly alive. What in God’s name could ever make an entity like that commit suicide?
She shivered slightly, then turned to Parker Higgens. “Set up a priority budget for the Electronics Division,” she said decisively. “I want all eight thousand hours translated as soon as possible. And the Cultural Analysis Division is going to have to be expanded considerably. We’ve concentrated far too much on the technological and physical side of the Laymil to date, that’s going to have to change now.”
Parker Higgens opened his mouth to protest.
“That wasn’t a criticism, Parker,” she said quickly. “The physical is all we’ve had to go on so far. But now we have these sensory and emotional memories we’re entering a new phase. Extend invitations to whichever xenoc psychology experts you think will be of help, offer endowment sabbaticals from their current tenures. I’ll add a personal message to the invitations if you think my name will carry any weight with them.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Parker Higgens appeared bemused by her speed.
“Lieria, I’d like you or one of your colleagues to assist with the cultural interpretation, I can see your viewpoints will be invaluable.”
Lieria’s arms rippled from root to tip (a Kiint laugh?). “It will be my pleasure to assist, Ione Saldana.”
“One final thing. I want Tranquillity to be the first to review the memories as and when they are translated.”
“Yes,” Oski Katsura said uncertainly.
“Sorry,” Ione said with an earnest smile. “But as Lord of Ruin I retain the right to embargo weapons technology. The cultural experts might argue over the finer nuances of what we see for months at a time, but a weapon is pretty easy to spot. I don’t want any particularly unsavoury armaments released to the Confederation at large.” And if it was an enemy’s weapon that destroyed the Laymil habitats I want to know before I decide what to tell everybody.
Chapter 15
“Once we’d established that, we ran a comparison on the rest of the data, trying to match it with other Laymil nerve impulses,” Oski Katsura said. “Jackpot. Well, more or less. It took four months to write interpretation programs and build suitable interface units, but we got there in the end.” A wave of her hand took in the benches and all their elaborate equipment. “We unravelled the first full sequence last night.”
Dawning realization at what Oski Katsura was actually saying brought a sense of real excitement to Ione. Her eyes were drawn to the stack in its protective bubble. She touched the transparent surface reverently, it was warmer than the ambient temperature. “This is a recording of a Laymil sensorium?” she asked.
Parker Higgens and Oski Katsura grinned like ten-year-olds.
“Yes, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said.
She turned to him sharply. “How much is there? How long does it go on for?”
Oski Katsura gave a modest shrug. “We don’t quite understand the file sequences yet. The one which we have translated so far lasts a little over three minutes.”
“How long?” Ione let a waspish note creep into her voice.
“If the bit rate holds constant for the other sequences . . . approximately eight thousand hours.”
Did she say eight thousand?
Yes,said tranquillity.
“Bloody hell!” An oafish smile appeared on Ione’s face.
“When you said translated, what did you mean?”
“The sequence has been adapted for human sensevise reception,” Oski Katsura said.
“Have you reviewed it?”
“Yes. The quality is below normal commercial standards, but that ought to improve once we refine our programs and equipment.”
“Can Tranquillity access your equipment through the communication net?” Ione asked urgently.
“It should be simple enough. One moment, I’ll datavise the entry code,” Oski Katsura said. “That’s it.”
Show me!
Senses which were fundamentally wrong engulfed her conscious thoughts, leaving her as a passive, faintly protesting, observer. The Laymil body was trisymmetric, standing one metre seventy-five high, possessing a tough, heavily crinkled slate-grey skin. There were three legs, with a double-jointed knee, and feet which ended in a hoof. Three arms with a bulbous shoulder which permitted a great deal of articulation, a single elbow, and hands with four triple-jointed fingers as thick as a human thumb and twice as long, bestowing considerable strength and dexterity. Most disturbing of all were the three sensor heads, emerging like truncated serpents between the shoulders. Each one had an eye at the front, with a triangular bat-ear above it, and a toothless breathing mouth below. All the mouths could vocalize, but one was larger and more sophisticated than the other two, which made up for their deficiency with a more acute sense of smell. The feeding mouth was on the top of the torso, in the cleft between the necks, a circular orifice equipped with sharp needle teeth.
The body Ione now wore constricted her own figure severely, pulping it below circular bands of muscle that flexed and twisted sinuously, squeezing protesting flesh and bone into a new shape, forcing her to conform to the resurgent identity suspended in the crystal matrix. She felt as though her limbs were being systematically twisted in every direction apart from the ones nature intended. But there was no pain inherent in the metamorphosis. Feverish thoughts, electrified by instinctive revulsion, began to calm. She started to look around, accepting the trinocular viewpoint input as best she could.
She was wearing clothes. The first surprise; born of prejudice, the foreign physique was animal , unhuman, no anthropomorphism could possibly exist here to build a bridge. But the trousers were easily recognizable, tubes of midnight-purple fabric, sleek as silk against the coarse skin. They came halfway down the lower leg, there was even a recognizable belt. The shirt was a stretchy cylinder of light green, with hoops that hung over the necks.
And she was walking, a three-legged walk that was so easy, so natural that she didn’t even have to think how to move the limbs to avoid tripping. The sensor head with the speaking mouth was always at the front, swinging slowly from side to side. Her other two heads scanned the surrounding countryside.
Sights and sounds besieged her. There were few half-tones in her visual world, bright primary colours dominated; but the image was flecked with minute black fissures, like an AV projection running heavy interference; the myriad sounds sliced with half-second breaks of silence.
Ione glossed over the flaws. She was walking through a Laymil habitat. If Tranquillity was manicured perfection, this was manicured anarchy. The trees were at war, thrusting and clashing against each other. Nothing grew upright. It was like a jungle hit by a hurricane, but with the trunks packed so closely they couldn’t fall, only topple onto their neighbours. She saw trees with their kinked trunks cupped together, trunks that spiralled round each other wrestling for height and light, young shoots piercing old flaking boles. Roots the size of a man’s torso emerged from the trunks well above her head, stabbing down like fleshy beige fork prongs into the sandy soil, producing a buttress cone. The leaves were long ribbons, curled into spirals, a deep olive-green in colour. And down where she walked, where shadows and sunbeams alternated like incorporeal pillars, every nook and crevice was crammed with tiny cobalt-blue flowering mushrooms, their pilei fringed with vermilion stamens, swaying like sea anemones in a weak current.
Pleasure and peace soaked into her like sunlight through amber. The forest was in harmony, its life spirit resonating with the spaceholm mother essence, singing their madrigal in unison. She listened with her heart, thankful for the privilege of living.
Hoofs trod evenly along the meandering trail carrying her towards the fourth marriage community. Her husbands/mates awaited her, the eagerness inside her was woven into the forest song and rejoiced over by the mother essence.
She reached the borders of the jungle, saddened by the smaller trees, the end of song, jubilant that she had passed through cleanly, that she was worthy of a fourth reproduction cycle. The trees gave way to open land, a gentle valley swathed in high, lush grasses and speckled with vivid reds and yellows and blues of bell-shaped flowers. Spaceholm reared around her, a landscape of tangled greens, rampant vegetation choking the silver veins of streams and rivers, smeared with fragile tufts of cloud. Sunspires stabbed out along the axis from the centre of each endcap, thin sabres stretching for twenty kilometres, furiously radiant.
“Tree spirit song unity,”she called with voice and mind. Her two clarion heads bugled gleefully. “I await.”
“Richness reward embryo growth daughter,”the spaceholm mother entity replied.
“Male selection?”
“Concord.”
“Unison awaits.”
“Life urge rapture.”
She started to walk down the slope. Ahead of her on the floor of the valley was the fourth marriage community. Blue polyp cuboidal structures, rigidly symmetrical, arrayed in concentric rings. On the paths between the featureless walls she could see other Laymil moving about. All her heads craned forward.
The memory ended.
The lurch back into the conformity of the electronics lab was as abrupt as it was shocking. Ione put a hand on the bench to steady herself. Oski Katsura and Parker Higgens were giving her an anxious look, even Lieria’s dark violet eyes were focused on her.
“That was . . . astonishing,” she managed to say. The hot Laymil jungle lurked around the fringes of sight like a vengeful daydream. “Those trees, she seemed to think of them as alive.”
“Yes,” Parker Higgens said. “It was obviously some kind of mating selection test or ritual. We know Laymil females are capable of five reproductive cycles, it never occurred to anybody that they might be subject to artificial restraints. In fact I find it amazing that a culture so sophisticated should still indulge in what was almost a pagan rite.”
“I’m not sure it was pagan,” Oski Katsura said. “We have already identified a gene sequence similar to the Edenist affinity gene in the Laymil genome. However they are obviously far more Gaiaistic than Edenist humans; their habitat, the spaceholm, was virtually a part of the reproductive process. It certainly seemed to possess some kind of veto power.”
“Like me and Tranquillity,” Ione said under her breath.
Hardly.
Give us another five thousand years, and the birth of a new Lord of Ruin could easily become ritualized.
You are entirely correct, Ione Saldana,lieria said. The Kiint continued speaking through her white wafer. “I note considerable evidence to indicate the Laymil mate-selection process is based on scientific eugenics rather than primitive spiritualism. Suitability is considerably more than possession of desirable physical characteristics, mental strength is obviously a prime requirement.”
“Whatever, it opens up a fantastic window into their culture,” Parker Higgens said. “We knew so little before this. To think that a mere three minutes could show us so much. The possibilities it reveals . . .” He looked at the electronics stack almost in worship.
“Will there be any problem in translating the rest of it?” Ione asked Oski Katsura.
“I don’t see any. What you accessed was still pretty crude, the emotional analogues were only rough approximates. We’ll tweak the program, of course, but I doubt we could have direct parallels with a race that alien.”
Ione stared at the electronics stack. An oracle for a whole race. And possibly, just possibly, the secret was inside it: why they did it. The more she thought about it, the more puzzling it became. The Laymil were so vibrantly alive. What in God’s name could ever make an entity like that commit suicide?
She shivered slightly, then turned to Parker Higgens. “Set up a priority budget for the Electronics Division,” she said decisively. “I want all eight thousand hours translated as soon as possible. And the Cultural Analysis Division is going to have to be expanded considerably. We’ve concentrated far too much on the technological and physical side of the Laymil to date, that’s going to have to change now.”
Parker Higgens opened his mouth to protest.
“That wasn’t a criticism, Parker,” she said quickly. “The physical is all we’ve had to go on so far. But now we have these sensory and emotional memories we’re entering a new phase. Extend invitations to whichever xenoc psychology experts you think will be of help, offer endowment sabbaticals from their current tenures. I’ll add a personal message to the invitations if you think my name will carry any weight with them.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Parker Higgens appeared bemused by her speed.
“Lieria, I’d like you or one of your colleagues to assist with the cultural interpretation, I can see your viewpoints will be invaluable.”
Lieria’s arms rippled from root to tip (a Kiint laugh?). “It will be my pleasure to assist, Ione Saldana.”
“One final thing. I want Tranquillity to be the first to review the memories as and when they are translated.”
“Yes,” Oski Katsura said uncertainly.
“Sorry,” Ione said with an earnest smile. “But as Lord of Ruin I retain the right to embargo weapons technology. The cultural experts might argue over the finer nuances of what we see for months at a time, but a weapon is pretty easy to spot. I don’t want any particularly unsavoury armaments released to the Confederation at large.” And if it was an enemy’s weapon that destroyed the Laymil habitats I want to know before I decide what to tell everybody.
Chapter 15
Night had come to Durringham. It brought with it a thick grey mist which flowed down the slushy streets and over the mouldering roof slats, depositing an unctuous coating of droplets in its wake. The water filmed every exterior wall until the whole city was glistening darkly, droplets running together and dribbling off the eaves and overhangs. Doors and shutters were no protection, the mist penetrated buildings with ease, soaking into fabrics and condensing over furniture. It was worse than the rain.
The Governor’s office was faring little better than the rest of the city. Colin Rexrew had turned up the conditioning until it made an aggravated rattling sound, but the atmosphere inside remained obstinately muggy. He was reviewing satellite images with Terrance Smith and Candace Elford, Lalonde’s Chief Sheriff. The three big wall-screens opposite the curving window were displaying pictures of a riverside settlement village. They showed the usual collection of shambolic huts and small fields, large piles of felled trunks, and stumps which played host to ears of orange fungi. Chickens scratched around in the dirt between the huts, while dogs roamed free. The few people captured by the camera were dressed in dirty, ragged clothes. One child, about two years old, was completely naked.
“These are very poor images,” Colin Rexrew complained. Most of the edges were blurred, even the colours appeared wan.
“Yes,” Candace Elford agreed. “We ran a diagnostic check on the observation satellite, but there was no malfunction. The images from any other area it views are flawless. The satellite only has trouble when it’s passing over the Quallheim.”
“Oh, come on,” Terrance Smith said. “You can’t mean that the people in the Quallheim Counties can distort our observation, surely?”
Candace Elford considered her answer. She was fifty-seven, and Lalonde was her second appointment as chief sheriff. Both senior appointments had been won because of her thoroughness; she had worked her way up through various colony planet police services, and harboured a kind of bewildered contempt for colonists, who, she had discovered, were capable of damn near anything out in the frontier lands. “It’s unlikely,” she admitted. “The Confederation Navy ELINT satellites haven’t detected any unusual emissions from Schuster County. It’s probably a glitch, that satellite is fifteen years old, and it hasn’t been serviced for the last eleven years.”
“All right,” Colin Rexrew said. “Point noted. We don’t have the money for regular services, as you well know.”
“When it breaks down, a replacement will cost the LDC a lot more than the expense of proper triennial maintenance,” Candace Elford countered.
“Please! Can we stick with the topic in hand,” Colin Rexrew said. He eyed the drinks cabinet longingly. It would have been nice to break open one of the chilled white wines and have a more relaxed session, but Candace Elford would have refused, which would make it awkward. She was such an uncompromising officer; one of his best though, someone the sheriffs respected and obeyed. He needed her, so he put up with her rigid adherence to protocol, counting his blessings.
“Very well,” she said crisply. “As you can see, Aberdale has twelve burnt-out buildings. According to the sheriff in Schuster town, Matthew Skinner, there was some kind of Ivet disturbance four days ago, which is when the buildings were razed. The Ivets allegedly murdered a ten-year-old boy, and the villagers set about hunting them down. Supervisor Manani’s communication block wasn’t working, so an Aberdale villager visited Schuster the day after this murder, and Matthew Skinner reported it to my office. That was three days ago. He said he was riding to Aberdale to investigate; apparently most of the Ivets had been killed by that time. We heard nothing until this morning, when Matthew Skinner said the disturbance was over, and the Aberdale Ivets were all dead.”
“I disapprove of vigilante action,” Colin Rexrew said. “Officially, that is. But given the circumstances I can’t say I blame the Aberdale villagers, those Ivets have always been a mixed blessing. Half of them should never be sent here, ten years’ work-time isn’t going to rehabilitate the real recidivists.”
“Yes, sir,” Candace Elford said. “But that’s not the problem.”
Colin Rexrew brushed back tufts of his thinning hair with clammy hands. “I didn’t think it would be that simple. Go on.”
She datavised an order into the office’s computer. The screens started to display another village; it looked even more impecunious than Aberdale. “This is Schuster town itself,” she said. “The image was recorded this morning. As you can see, there are three burnt-out buildings.”
Colin Rexrew sat up a little straighter behind his desk. “They had Ivet trouble, too?”
“That is the curious thing,” Candace Elford said. “Matthew Skinner never mentioned the fires, and he should have done, fires like that are dangerous in those kinds of communities. The last routine satellite images we have of Schuster are two weeks old, the buildings were intact then.”
“It’s pushing coincidence a long way,” Colin Rexrew said, half to himself.
“That’s what my office thought,” Candace Elford said. “So we started checking a little closer. The Land Allocation Office divided the Quallheim territory up into three counties, Schuster, Medellin, and Rossan, which between them now have ten villages. We spotted burnt-out buildings in six of those villages: Aberdale, Schuster, Qayen, Pamiers, Kilkee, and Medellin.” She datavised more instructions. The screens started to run through the images of the villages her office had recorded that morning.
“Oh, Jesus,” Colin Rexrew muttered. Some of the blackened timbers were still smoking. “What’s been happening up there?”
“First thing we asked. So we called up each of the village supervisors,” Candace Elford said. “Qayen’s didn’t answer, the other three said everything was fine. So we called up the villages that didn’t show any damage. Salkhad, Guer, and Suttal didn’t answer; Rossan’s supervisor said they were all OK, and nothing out of the ordinary was happening. They hadn’t heard or seen anything from any of the other villages.”
“What’s your opinion?” Colin Rexrew asked.
The chief sheriff turned back to the screens. “One final piece of information. The satellite made seven passes over the Quallheim Counties today. Despite the shoddy images, at no time did we see anybody working in any of those fields; not in any of the ten villages.”
Terrance Smith whistled as he sucked air through his teeth. “Not good. There’s no way you’d keep a colonist from his field, not on a day with weather like it has been up there. They are utterly dependent on those crops. The supervisors make it quite plain from the start, once they’re settled, they don’t get any help from Durringham. They can’t afford to leave the fields untended. Remember what happened in Arklow County?”
Colin Rexrew gave his aide an irritable look. “Don’t remind me, I accessed the files when I arrived.” He transferred his gaze to the screens, and the image of Qayen village. A black premonition was rising in his mind. “So what are you telling me, Candace?”
“I know what it looks like,” she said. “I just can’t believe it, that’s all. An Ivet revolt which has successfully taken control of the Quallheim Counties, and in just four days, too.”
“There are over six thousand colonists spread out in those counties,” Terrance Smith said. “Most of them have weapons and aren’t afraid to use them. Against that, there are a hundred and eighty-six Ivets, unarmed and unorganized, and without any form of reliable communication. They’re Earth’s junk, waster kids; if they could organize something like this they would never be here in the first place.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I said I don’t believe it. But what else could it be? Someone from outside? Who?”
Colin Rexrew frowned. “Schuster’s been a problem before. What . . .” He trailed off, requesting a search through the files stored in his neural nanonics. “Ah, yes; the disappearing homestead families. Do you remember, Terrance, I sent a marshal up to investigate last year. Bloody great waste of money that was.”
“It was a waste of money from our point of view because the marshal didn’t find anything,” Terrance Smith said. “That in itself was unusual. Those marshals are good. Which means either it was a genuine case of some animal carrying the families away, or some unknown group was responsible, and managed to cover their tracks to such an extent it fooled both the local supervisor and the marshal. If it was an organized raid, then the perpetrators were at least the equal of our marshal.”
“So?” Colin Rexrew asked.
“So now we have another event, originating in the same county, that would be hard to explain away in terms of an Ivet revolt. Certainly the scale of the trouble argues against it being the Ivets by themselves. But an external group taking over the Quallheim Counties would fit the facts we have.”
“We only have a secondhand report that it was Ivets anyway,” Colin Rexrew said, pondering the unwelcome idea.
“It still doesn’t make any sense,” Candace Elford said. “I concede that the facts indicate the Ivets are getting help. But what external group? And why the Quallheim Counties, for God’s sake? There’s no wealth out there; the colonists are barely self-sufficient. There’s no wealth anywhere on Lalonde, come to that.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Colin Rexrew said. “Look, I’ve got three river-boats scheduled to leave in two days, they’re taking six hundred fresh settlers up to Schuster County so they can start another village. You’re my security adviser, Candace, are you telling me not to send them?”
“I think my advice would have to be, yes; certainly at this stage. It’s not as if you’re short of destinations. Sending unsuspecting raw colonists into the middle of a potential revolt wouldn’t look good on any of our records. Is there a nearby alternative to Schuster where you can settle them?”
“Willow West County on the Frenshaw tributary,” Terrance Smith suggested. “It’s only a hundred kilometres north-west of Schuster; plenty of room for them there. It’s on our current territory development list anyway.”
“OK,” Colin Rexrew said. “Get it organized with the Land Allocation Office. In the meantime, what do you intend to do about the Quallheim situation, Candace?”
“I want your permission to send a posse up there on the boats with the colonists. Once the colonists have been dropped off at Willow West, the boats can take them on to the Quallheim. As soon as I’ve got reliable people on the ground we can establish what’s really going on and restore some order.”
“How many do you want to send?”
“A hundred ought to be enough. Twenty full-time sheriffs, and the rest we can deputize. God knows, there’s enough men in Durringham who’ll jump at the chance of five weeks cruising the river on full pay. I’d like three marshals, as well, just to be on the safe side.”
“Yes, all right,” Colin Rexrew said. “But just remember it comes out of your budget.”
“It’ll be nearly three weeks before you can get your people up there,” Terrance Smith said thoughtfully.
“So?” the chief sheriff asked. “I can’t make the boats go any faster.”
“No, but a lot can happen in that time. If we believe what we’ve seen so far, this revolt spread down the Quallheim in four days. Taking a worst case scenario, the revolt could carry on growing at the same rate, leaving your initial hundred-strong posse heavily outgunned. What I suggest is that we get the posse out there as fast as physically possible, and stop any further expansion before it gets totally out of hand. We have three VTOL aircraft at the spaceport, BK133s that our ecology research team use for survey missions. They’re subsonic, and they only seat ten, but they could run a relay out to the mouth of the Quallheim. That way we’d have your posse there in two days.”
Colin Rexrew let his head rest on the back of the chair, and ran a cost comparison through his neural nanonics. “Bloody expensive,” he said. “And one of those VTOLs is out of service anyway after last year’s cuts reduced the Aboriginal Fruit Classification budget. We’ll compromise, as always. Candace sends her sheriffs and deputies up to the Quallheim on the river-boats, and her office here in town continues to monitor the situation with the observation satellite. If this revolt, or whatever it is, looks like it’s spreading down out of the Quallheim Counties, we’ll use the VTOLs to reinforce the posse before they get there.”
The electrophorescent cells at the apex of Laton’s singular study were darkened, eradicating external stimuli so he could focus himself on the inner self. Senses crept in on his glacial mind, impressions garnered via affinity from the servitor scouts spread throughout the jungle. The results displeased him enormously. In fact they were edging him towards worry. He hadn’t felt like this since the Edenist Intelligence operatives had closed in, forcing him to flee his original habitat nearly seventy years previously. At that time he had felt fury, fear, and dismay the intensity of which he had never known as an Edenist; it had made him realize how worthless that culture truly was. His rejection had been total after that.
And now something was closing in on him again. Something he neither knew nor understood; something which acted like sequestration nanonics, usurping a human’s original personality and replacing it with mechanoid warrior traits. He had watched the drastically modified behaviour of Quinn Dexter and the Ivets after the incident with the lightning in the jungle. They acted like fully trained mercenary troops, and others they came into contact with soon exhibited similar traits, though a minority of those usurped acted almost normally—most puzzling. Nor did they need weapons, they acquired an ability to throw sprays of photons like a holographic projector, light which could act like a thermal-induction field, but with tremendous power and reach. Yet there was no visible physical mechanism.
Laton had felt the first overspill of pain from Camilla when the Ivets cremated her, mercifully shortened as she lost consciousness. He mourned his daughter as was proper, away in some subsidiary section of his mind, her absence from his life a sting of regret. But the important thing now was the threat he himself faced. In order to confront your enemy without fear, for fear is a bolt in the enemy’s quiver, you must understand your enemy. And understanding was the one thing which had not come in four solid days of supreme cerebral effort.
Some of the glimpses he had snatched through the scouts defied physics. Either that or physics had advanced beyond all reasonable expectations during his exile. That was conceivable, he reasoned, weapons science was always kept very close to the government’s chest, receiving the most funds and the least publicity.
Memory: of a man looking up at the sky and seeing the affinity bonded kestrel. The man laughed and raised his hand, snapping his fingers. Air around the kestrel solidified, entombing it in a matrix of frozen molecules, and sending it tumbling from the sky to dash its body against the rocks two hundred metres below. A snap of the fingers . . .
Memory: of a frantic terrified villager from Kilkee firing his laser hunting rifle at one of the usurped. The range had been fifteen metres, and the beam had no effect whatsoever. After the first few shots the rifle had died completely. Then the vennal Laton was using to scout with had curled up and sunk into some kind of coma.
The villages throughout the Quallheim Counties had been conquered with bewildering swiftness. That more than anything convinced Laton he was up against some kind of military force. There was a directing intelligence behind the usurped, expanding their numerical strength at an exponential rate. But what really baffled him was why. He had chosen Lalonde because it fitted his long-range goals; other than that it was a worthless planet. Why take control of people out here?
A test was the only explanation he could think of. Which begged the question what was it a preliminary to? The potential was awesome.
Laton?waldsey’s mental tone was fearful and uncertain, not like him at all.
Yes,laton replied equitably. he could guess what was coming next. After sixty years he knew the way his colleagues’ minds worked better than they did. He was only mildly surprised that it had taken them so long to confront him.
Do you know what it is yet?
No. I have been considering some kind of viral nanonic, but the number of demonstrated functions it possesses would be orders of magnitude above anything we even have theories for. And some of those functions are difficult to explain in terms of the physics we know and understand. In short, if you have a technology that powerful, why bother using it in this fashion? It is most puzzling.
Puzzling!tao said angrily. Father, it is bloody lethal, and it’s right outside the tree. To hell with puzzling , we have to do something.
Laton let the glimmer image of a smile penetrate their shared affinity. Only his children ever dared to contradict him, which pleased him after a fashion; obsequiousness was something he disapproved of almost as much as disloyalty. Which gave everybody a narrow, and perilous, balance to maintain. No doubt you have an idea as to what we should do.
Yeah. Load up the landcruisers, and head for the hills. Call it a strategic withdrawal, call it prudence, but just let’s get out of this tree. Now. While we still can. I don’t mind admitting I’m frightened, if nobody else will.
I would imagine that even this planet’s chief sheriff will know that something odd is happening in Aberdale and the other Quallheim villages by now,laton said. he sensed the others coming into the conversation, their minds carefully shielded from leaking too many emotions. The LDC’s surveillance satellite may be in a deplorable condition, but I assure you it would be quite capable of spotting the landcruisers. And it will be focused on the Quallheim Counties with considerable diligence.
So? We just zap it. The old blackhawk masers you brought down can reach it. It’ll be weeks before the LDC replace it. By that time we’ll be long gone. They’ll see the track we made breaking through the jungle, but once we reach the savannah they’ll lose us.
I would remind you just how close to success our immortality project is. Are you willing to sacrifice that?
Father, unless we get out of here, we aren’t going to have a project left, or a life to immortalize. We can’t defend ourselves against these usurped villagers. I’ve watched what happens when anyone shoots them. They don’t even notice it! And even if somebody does manage to beat them, the Quallheim Counties are going to be searched a centimetre at a time afterwards. Either way, we can’t stay here.
The lad’s got a point there, Laton,salkid said. We can’t cling on here simply out of sentiment.
You always told me knowledge can’t be destroyed,tao said. We know how to splice a parallel-processing brain together. What we need is a secure location in which to do it. The tree certainly isn’t it, not any more.
Well argued,laton said. Except I’m not sure anywhere on Lalonde can be classed as safe any more. This technology is fearsome.he deliberately allowed his emotional shield to slip, and felt the shocked recoil of their thoughts that he who never demonstrated weakness was so deeply perturbed.
We can hardly walk into Durringham’s spaceport and ask for a lift outsystem,waldsey said.
The children can,laton said. They have been born here, the intelligence agencies have no record of them. Once in orbit they can secure a starship for us.
Bloody hell, you mean it.
Indeed. It is the logical course. At the ultimate extreme, I am prepared to contact the Intelligence agencies in Durringham and report the situation to them. They will take me seriously, and that way a warning will get out.
Is it that bad, Father?salsett asked anxiously.
Laton projected a burst of reassuring warmth at the fifteen-year-old girl. I don’t think it will come to that, darling.
Leaving the tree,she said wonderingly.
Yes,he said. Tao, that was a good suggestion of yours; you and Salkid take a blackhawk maser out of storage, and be ready to eliminate that observation satellite. The rest of you have ten hours to pack. We start for Durringham tonight.
He couldn’t detect a single whiff of dissension. Minds retreated from the affinity contact.
In the hours which followed, the gigantea tree was subject to the kind of coordinated activity it hadn’t seen since their arrival. Orders were flung frantically at the incorporated and the housechimps as the residents attempted to dismantle the work of thirty years in the short hours they had left. Heartbreaking decisions were made over what could go and what must stay, several couples arguing. The landcruisers had to be checked over and prepared after thirty years’ unemployment. Laton’s younger children scampered about getting in the way, nervous and elated at the prospect of leaving; the older members of the fellowship started thinking about the Confederation worlds again. Thermal charges were set throughout the rooms and corridors, ready to obliterate all trace of the gigantea’s secrets.
The hectic activity registered as a background burble amid Laton’s steely thoughts. Occasionally someone would intrude into his contemplation to ask for instructions.
After designating the few personal items he wanted to accompany them, he spent his time reviewing the memory of what happened in the clearing when Quinn Dexter killed Supervisor Manani. That strange lightning was the start of it. He ran and re-ran Camilla’s memory images, which were stored in the tree’s sub-sentient bitek processor array. The lightning seemed to be flat, almost compressed, some sections darker than others. As he ran the memory again the dark areas moved, sliding down the glaring streamers of rampaging electrons. The lightning bolts were acting as conduits to some kind of energy pattern, one which behaved outside the accepted norm.
A draught of air stroked his face. He opened his eyes to darkness. The study was as it always had been. He switched his retinal implants to infrared. Jackson Gael and Ruth Hilton stood on the curving wood before him.
“Clever,” Laton said. His contact with the processors faded away. Affinity was reduced to a whisper rattling round the closed confines of his skull. “It’s energy, isn’t it? A self-determining viral program that can store itself in a non-physical lattice.”
Ruth bent down, and put her hand under his chin, tilting his face up so she could examine him. “Edenists. Always so rational.”
“But where did it come from, I wonder?” Laton asked.
“What will it take to break his beliefs?” Jackson Gael asked.
“It’s not of human origin,” Laton said. “I’m sure of that; nor any of the xenoc races we know.”
“We’ll find out tonight,” Ruth said. She let go of Laton’s chin, and held out her hand. “Come along.”
The morning after Governor Rexrew’s briefing with Candace Elford, Ralph Hiltch was sitting behind his own desk in the Kulu Embassy dumper receiving a condensed version of events from Jenny Harris. One of the ESA assets she ran in the sheriff’s office had asked for a meeting and told her about the trouble brewing in the Quallheim Counties.
All well and good, it was nice to see the Governor couldn’t fart without the ESA knowing, but like Rexrew before him, Ralph was having a lot of trouble with the concept of an Ivet uprising.
“An open revolt?” he asked the lieutenant sceptically.
“It looks that way,” she said apologetically. “Here, my contact gave me a flek of the surveillance satellite images.” She loaded it into the processor block on Ralph’s desk, and the screens on the wall began to show the Quallheim’s motley collection of villages.
Ralph stood in front of them, hands on his hips as the semicircular clearings cut into solid jungle appeared. The treetops looked like green foam, broken by occasional glades, and virtually sealing over streams and the smaller rivers. “There’s been a lot of fires,” he agreed unhappily. “And recently, too. Can’t you manage a better resolution than this?”
“Apparently not, and that’s the second cause for alarm. Something is affecting the satellite every time it passes over the Quallheim tributary. No other section of Amarisk is affected.”
He gave her a long look.
“I know,” she said. “It sounds ridiculous.”
Ralph gave his neural nanonics a search request and returned his attention to the screens while it was running. “There’s certainly been some kind of fight down there. And this isn’t the first time Schuster County has come to our attention.” The neural nanonics reported a blank; so he opened a channel to access his processor block’s classified military systems file, extending the search.
“Captain Lambourne reported that nothing ever came out of the marshal’s visit last year,” Jenny Harris said. “We still don’t know what happened to those homestead families.”
Ralph’s neural nanonics told him that the processor block file couldn’t find a match for his request. “Interesting. According to our files, there is no known electronic warfare system which can distort a satellite image like this.”
“How up to date are the files?”
“Last year’s.” He walked back to his seat. “But you’re missing the point. Firstly it’s a wholly ineffective system, all it does is fuzz the image slightly. Secondly, if you’ve gone to all the trouble to tamper with the satellite why not knock it out altogether? Given the age of Lalonde’s satellite, everyone would assume it was a natural malfunction. This method actually draws attention to the Quallheim.”
“Or draws attention away from somewhere else,” she said.
“I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?” he muttered. Outside the window the dark rooftops of Durringham were steaming softly in the bright morning sun. It was all so cheerfully primitive, the residents walking through the tacky streets, power bikes throwing up fans of mud, a teenage couple lost in each other, the tail end of a new colonist group making their way down to the transients’ dormitories. Every morning for the last four years he’d seen variants on the same scene. Lalonde’s inhabitants got on with their basic, modestly corrupt lives, and never bothered anyone. They couldn’t, they didn’t have the means. “The thing which disturbs me most is Rexrew’s idea that it could be an external group attempting some kind of coup. I almost agree with him, it’s certainly more logical than an Ivet revolt.” He rapped his knuckles on the desktop, trying to think. “When is this posse of Candace Elford’s setting off?”
“Tomorrow; she’s going to start recruiting her deputies this morning. And incidentally, the Swithland is one of the boats that will be carrying them. Captain Lambourne can keep us updated if you allow her to use a communication block.”
“OK, but I want at least five of our assets in that group of deputies, more if you can manage. We need to know what’s going on up in the Quallheim Counties. Equip them with communication blocks as well, but make sure they understand they must only use them if the situation is urgent. I’ll speak to Kelven Solanki about the issue, he’s probably as keen as we are to know what’s going on.”
“I’ll get onto it,” she said. “One of the sheriffs Elford is sending belongs to me anyway, that’ll make placing assets among the deputies a lot easier.”
“Good, well done.”
Jenny Harris saluted professionally, but before she got to the door she turned back and said, “I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to stage a coup out in the middle of the hinterlands?”
“Someone with an eye to the future, maybe. If it is, our duty is very clear cut.”
“Yes, sir; but if that is the case, they’d need help from out-system.”
“True. Well, at least that’s easy enough to watch for.”
Ralph occupied himself with genuine embassy attachй work for the next two hours. Lalonde imported very little, but from the list of what it did require he tried to secure a reasonable portion for Kulu companies. He was trying to find a supplier for the high-temperature moulds a new glassworks factory wanted when his neural nanonics alerted him to an unscheduled starship that had just jumped into Lalonde’s designated emergence zone, fifty thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface. The dumper’s electronics tapped the downlink from Lalonde’s two civil spaceflight monitor satellites, giving him access to the raw data. What it didn’t provide was system command authority, he was a passive observer.
Lalonde’s traffic control took a long time to respond to the monitor satellite’s discovery. There were three starships in an equatorial parking orbit, two colonist transports from Earth, and a freighter from New California, nothing else was due for a week. The staff probably hadn’t even been in the control centre, he thought impatiently as he waited for them to get off their arses and provide him with more information.
Starship visits outside the regular LDC contracted vessels, and the voidhawk supply run for Aethra, were rare events, there were never more than five or six a year. That this one should appear at this time was a coincidence he couldn’t put out of his mind.
The starship was already under power and heading for a standard equatorial parking orbit when traffic control eventually triggered its transponder and established a communication channel. Data flooded into Ralph’s mind, the standard Confederation Astronautics Board registration and certification. It was an independent trader vessel called Lady Macbeth.
His suspicion deepened.
Rumour hit Durringham and spread with a speed that a news company’s distribution division would have envied. It started when Candace Elford’s staff went out for a drink after a hard day assessing the scrambled information they were getting from the Quallheim Counties. Durringham’s strong beer, sweet wines from nearby estates, and running mild mood-stimulant programs through their neural nanonics liberated a quantity of almost accurate information about exactly what had been going on all day in the chief sheriff’s office.
It took half of Lalonde’s long night to filter out of the pubs the sheriffs used and down into the more basic taverns the agricultural workers, port labourers, and river crews favoured. Distance, time, alcohol, and weak hallucinogens distorted and amplified the story in creative surges. The end results which were shouted and argued over loudly through the riverside drinking dens would have impressed any student of social dynamics. The following day, it proliferated through every workplace and home.
The main exchanges of conversations went thus.
The colonists in the Quallheim Counties had been ritually massacred by the Ivets, who had taken up Devil worship. A Satanic theocracy had been declared to the Governor and demanded recognition as an independent state, and all the Ivets were to be sent there.
An army of radical anarchistic Ivets was marching downriver, razing villages as they went, looting and raping. They were kamikazes, sworn to destroy Lalonde.
The Governor’s office was faring little better than the rest of the city. Colin Rexrew had turned up the conditioning until it made an aggravated rattling sound, but the atmosphere inside remained obstinately muggy. He was reviewing satellite images with Terrance Smith and Candace Elford, Lalonde’s Chief Sheriff. The three big wall-screens opposite the curving window were displaying pictures of a riverside settlement village. They showed the usual collection of shambolic huts and small fields, large piles of felled trunks, and stumps which played host to ears of orange fungi. Chickens scratched around in the dirt between the huts, while dogs roamed free. The few people captured by the camera were dressed in dirty, ragged clothes. One child, about two years old, was completely naked.
“These are very poor images,” Colin Rexrew complained. Most of the edges were blurred, even the colours appeared wan.
“Yes,” Candace Elford agreed. “We ran a diagnostic check on the observation satellite, but there was no malfunction. The images from any other area it views are flawless. The satellite only has trouble when it’s passing over the Quallheim.”
“Oh, come on,” Terrance Smith said. “You can’t mean that the people in the Quallheim Counties can distort our observation, surely?”
Candace Elford considered her answer. She was fifty-seven, and Lalonde was her second appointment as chief sheriff. Both senior appointments had been won because of her thoroughness; she had worked her way up through various colony planet police services, and harboured a kind of bewildered contempt for colonists, who, she had discovered, were capable of damn near anything out in the frontier lands. “It’s unlikely,” she admitted. “The Confederation Navy ELINT satellites haven’t detected any unusual emissions from Schuster County. It’s probably a glitch, that satellite is fifteen years old, and it hasn’t been serviced for the last eleven years.”
“All right,” Colin Rexrew said. “Point noted. We don’t have the money for regular services, as you well know.”
“When it breaks down, a replacement will cost the LDC a lot more than the expense of proper triennial maintenance,” Candace Elford countered.
“Please! Can we stick with the topic in hand,” Colin Rexrew said. He eyed the drinks cabinet longingly. It would have been nice to break open one of the chilled white wines and have a more relaxed session, but Candace Elford would have refused, which would make it awkward. She was such an uncompromising officer; one of his best though, someone the sheriffs respected and obeyed. He needed her, so he put up with her rigid adherence to protocol, counting his blessings.
“Very well,” she said crisply. “As you can see, Aberdale has twelve burnt-out buildings. According to the sheriff in Schuster town, Matthew Skinner, there was some kind of Ivet disturbance four days ago, which is when the buildings were razed. The Ivets allegedly murdered a ten-year-old boy, and the villagers set about hunting them down. Supervisor Manani’s communication block wasn’t working, so an Aberdale villager visited Schuster the day after this murder, and Matthew Skinner reported it to my office. That was three days ago. He said he was riding to Aberdale to investigate; apparently most of the Ivets had been killed by that time. We heard nothing until this morning, when Matthew Skinner said the disturbance was over, and the Aberdale Ivets were all dead.”
“I disapprove of vigilante action,” Colin Rexrew said. “Officially, that is. But given the circumstances I can’t say I blame the Aberdale villagers, those Ivets have always been a mixed blessing. Half of them should never be sent here, ten years’ work-time isn’t going to rehabilitate the real recidivists.”
“Yes, sir,” Candace Elford said. “But that’s not the problem.”
Colin Rexrew brushed back tufts of his thinning hair with clammy hands. “I didn’t think it would be that simple. Go on.”
She datavised an order into the office’s computer. The screens started to display another village; it looked even more impecunious than Aberdale. “This is Schuster town itself,” she said. “The image was recorded this morning. As you can see, there are three burnt-out buildings.”
Colin Rexrew sat up a little straighter behind his desk. “They had Ivet trouble, too?”
“That is the curious thing,” Candace Elford said. “Matthew Skinner never mentioned the fires, and he should have done, fires like that are dangerous in those kinds of communities. The last routine satellite images we have of Schuster are two weeks old, the buildings were intact then.”
“It’s pushing coincidence a long way,” Colin Rexrew said, half to himself.
“That’s what my office thought,” Candace Elford said. “So we started checking a little closer. The Land Allocation Office divided the Quallheim territory up into three counties, Schuster, Medellin, and Rossan, which between them now have ten villages. We spotted burnt-out buildings in six of those villages: Aberdale, Schuster, Qayen, Pamiers, Kilkee, and Medellin.” She datavised more instructions. The screens started to run through the images of the villages her office had recorded that morning.
“Oh, Jesus,” Colin Rexrew muttered. Some of the blackened timbers were still smoking. “What’s been happening up there?”
“First thing we asked. So we called up each of the village supervisors,” Candace Elford said. “Qayen’s didn’t answer, the other three said everything was fine. So we called up the villages that didn’t show any damage. Salkhad, Guer, and Suttal didn’t answer; Rossan’s supervisor said they were all OK, and nothing out of the ordinary was happening. They hadn’t heard or seen anything from any of the other villages.”
“What’s your opinion?” Colin Rexrew asked.
The chief sheriff turned back to the screens. “One final piece of information. The satellite made seven passes over the Quallheim Counties today. Despite the shoddy images, at no time did we see anybody working in any of those fields; not in any of the ten villages.”
Terrance Smith whistled as he sucked air through his teeth. “Not good. There’s no way you’d keep a colonist from his field, not on a day with weather like it has been up there. They are utterly dependent on those crops. The supervisors make it quite plain from the start, once they’re settled, they don’t get any help from Durringham. They can’t afford to leave the fields untended. Remember what happened in Arklow County?”
Colin Rexrew gave his aide an irritable look. “Don’t remind me, I accessed the files when I arrived.” He transferred his gaze to the screens, and the image of Qayen village. A black premonition was rising in his mind. “So what are you telling me, Candace?”
“I know what it looks like,” she said. “I just can’t believe it, that’s all. An Ivet revolt which has successfully taken control of the Quallheim Counties, and in just four days, too.”
“There are over six thousand colonists spread out in those counties,” Terrance Smith said. “Most of them have weapons and aren’t afraid to use them. Against that, there are a hundred and eighty-six Ivets, unarmed and unorganized, and without any form of reliable communication. They’re Earth’s junk, waster kids; if they could organize something like this they would never be here in the first place.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I said I don’t believe it. But what else could it be? Someone from outside? Who?”
Colin Rexrew frowned. “Schuster’s been a problem before. What . . .” He trailed off, requesting a search through the files stored in his neural nanonics. “Ah, yes; the disappearing homestead families. Do you remember, Terrance, I sent a marshal up to investigate last year. Bloody great waste of money that was.”
“It was a waste of money from our point of view because the marshal didn’t find anything,” Terrance Smith said. “That in itself was unusual. Those marshals are good. Which means either it was a genuine case of some animal carrying the families away, or some unknown group was responsible, and managed to cover their tracks to such an extent it fooled both the local supervisor and the marshal. If it was an organized raid, then the perpetrators were at least the equal of our marshal.”
“So?” Colin Rexrew asked.
“So now we have another event, originating in the same county, that would be hard to explain away in terms of an Ivet revolt. Certainly the scale of the trouble argues against it being the Ivets by themselves. But an external group taking over the Quallheim Counties would fit the facts we have.”
“We only have a secondhand report that it was Ivets anyway,” Colin Rexrew said, pondering the unwelcome idea.
“It still doesn’t make any sense,” Candace Elford said. “I concede that the facts indicate the Ivets are getting help. But what external group? And why the Quallheim Counties, for God’s sake? There’s no wealth out there; the colonists are barely self-sufficient. There’s no wealth anywhere on Lalonde, come to that.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Colin Rexrew said. “Look, I’ve got three river-boats scheduled to leave in two days, they’re taking six hundred fresh settlers up to Schuster County so they can start another village. You’re my security adviser, Candace, are you telling me not to send them?”
“I think my advice would have to be, yes; certainly at this stage. It’s not as if you’re short of destinations. Sending unsuspecting raw colonists into the middle of a potential revolt wouldn’t look good on any of our records. Is there a nearby alternative to Schuster where you can settle them?”
“Willow West County on the Frenshaw tributary,” Terrance Smith suggested. “It’s only a hundred kilometres north-west of Schuster; plenty of room for them there. It’s on our current territory development list anyway.”
“OK,” Colin Rexrew said. “Get it organized with the Land Allocation Office. In the meantime, what do you intend to do about the Quallheim situation, Candace?”
“I want your permission to send a posse up there on the boats with the colonists. Once the colonists have been dropped off at Willow West, the boats can take them on to the Quallheim. As soon as I’ve got reliable people on the ground we can establish what’s really going on and restore some order.”
“How many do you want to send?”
“A hundred ought to be enough. Twenty full-time sheriffs, and the rest we can deputize. God knows, there’s enough men in Durringham who’ll jump at the chance of five weeks cruising the river on full pay. I’d like three marshals, as well, just to be on the safe side.”
“Yes, all right,” Colin Rexrew said. “But just remember it comes out of your budget.”
“It’ll be nearly three weeks before you can get your people up there,” Terrance Smith said thoughtfully.
“So?” the chief sheriff asked. “I can’t make the boats go any faster.”
“No, but a lot can happen in that time. If we believe what we’ve seen so far, this revolt spread down the Quallheim in four days. Taking a worst case scenario, the revolt could carry on growing at the same rate, leaving your initial hundred-strong posse heavily outgunned. What I suggest is that we get the posse out there as fast as physically possible, and stop any further expansion before it gets totally out of hand. We have three VTOL aircraft at the spaceport, BK133s that our ecology research team use for survey missions. They’re subsonic, and they only seat ten, but they could run a relay out to the mouth of the Quallheim. That way we’d have your posse there in two days.”
Colin Rexrew let his head rest on the back of the chair, and ran a cost comparison through his neural nanonics. “Bloody expensive,” he said. “And one of those VTOLs is out of service anyway after last year’s cuts reduced the Aboriginal Fruit Classification budget. We’ll compromise, as always. Candace sends her sheriffs and deputies up to the Quallheim on the river-boats, and her office here in town continues to monitor the situation with the observation satellite. If this revolt, or whatever it is, looks like it’s spreading down out of the Quallheim Counties, we’ll use the VTOLs to reinforce the posse before they get there.”
The electrophorescent cells at the apex of Laton’s singular study were darkened, eradicating external stimuli so he could focus himself on the inner self. Senses crept in on his glacial mind, impressions garnered via affinity from the servitor scouts spread throughout the jungle. The results displeased him enormously. In fact they were edging him towards worry. He hadn’t felt like this since the Edenist Intelligence operatives had closed in, forcing him to flee his original habitat nearly seventy years previously. At that time he had felt fury, fear, and dismay the intensity of which he had never known as an Edenist; it had made him realize how worthless that culture truly was. His rejection had been total after that.
And now something was closing in on him again. Something he neither knew nor understood; something which acted like sequestration nanonics, usurping a human’s original personality and replacing it with mechanoid warrior traits. He had watched the drastically modified behaviour of Quinn Dexter and the Ivets after the incident with the lightning in the jungle. They acted like fully trained mercenary troops, and others they came into contact with soon exhibited similar traits, though a minority of those usurped acted almost normally—most puzzling. Nor did they need weapons, they acquired an ability to throw sprays of photons like a holographic projector, light which could act like a thermal-induction field, but with tremendous power and reach. Yet there was no visible physical mechanism.
Laton had felt the first overspill of pain from Camilla when the Ivets cremated her, mercifully shortened as she lost consciousness. He mourned his daughter as was proper, away in some subsidiary section of his mind, her absence from his life a sting of regret. But the important thing now was the threat he himself faced. In order to confront your enemy without fear, for fear is a bolt in the enemy’s quiver, you must understand your enemy. And understanding was the one thing which had not come in four solid days of supreme cerebral effort.
Some of the glimpses he had snatched through the scouts defied physics. Either that or physics had advanced beyond all reasonable expectations during his exile. That was conceivable, he reasoned, weapons science was always kept very close to the government’s chest, receiving the most funds and the least publicity.
Memory: of a man looking up at the sky and seeing the affinity bonded kestrel. The man laughed and raised his hand, snapping his fingers. Air around the kestrel solidified, entombing it in a matrix of frozen molecules, and sending it tumbling from the sky to dash its body against the rocks two hundred metres below. A snap of the fingers . . .
Memory: of a frantic terrified villager from Kilkee firing his laser hunting rifle at one of the usurped. The range had been fifteen metres, and the beam had no effect whatsoever. After the first few shots the rifle had died completely. Then the vennal Laton was using to scout with had curled up and sunk into some kind of coma.
The villages throughout the Quallheim Counties had been conquered with bewildering swiftness. That more than anything convinced Laton he was up against some kind of military force. There was a directing intelligence behind the usurped, expanding their numerical strength at an exponential rate. But what really baffled him was why. He had chosen Lalonde because it fitted his long-range goals; other than that it was a worthless planet. Why take control of people out here?
A test was the only explanation he could think of. Which begged the question what was it a preliminary to? The potential was awesome.
Laton?waldsey’s mental tone was fearful and uncertain, not like him at all.
Yes,laton replied equitably. he could guess what was coming next. After sixty years he knew the way his colleagues’ minds worked better than they did. He was only mildly surprised that it had taken them so long to confront him.
Do you know what it is yet?
No. I have been considering some kind of viral nanonic, but the number of demonstrated functions it possesses would be orders of magnitude above anything we even have theories for. And some of those functions are difficult to explain in terms of the physics we know and understand. In short, if you have a technology that powerful, why bother using it in this fashion? It is most puzzling.
Puzzling!tao said angrily. Father, it is bloody lethal, and it’s right outside the tree. To hell with puzzling , we have to do something.
Laton let the glimmer image of a smile penetrate their shared affinity. Only his children ever dared to contradict him, which pleased him after a fashion; obsequiousness was something he disapproved of almost as much as disloyalty. Which gave everybody a narrow, and perilous, balance to maintain. No doubt you have an idea as to what we should do.
Yeah. Load up the landcruisers, and head for the hills. Call it a strategic withdrawal, call it prudence, but just let’s get out of this tree. Now. While we still can. I don’t mind admitting I’m frightened, if nobody else will.
I would imagine that even this planet’s chief sheriff will know that something odd is happening in Aberdale and the other Quallheim villages by now,laton said. he sensed the others coming into the conversation, their minds carefully shielded from leaking too many emotions. The LDC’s surveillance satellite may be in a deplorable condition, but I assure you it would be quite capable of spotting the landcruisers. And it will be focused on the Quallheim Counties with considerable diligence.
So? We just zap it. The old blackhawk masers you brought down can reach it. It’ll be weeks before the LDC replace it. By that time we’ll be long gone. They’ll see the track we made breaking through the jungle, but once we reach the savannah they’ll lose us.
I would remind you just how close to success our immortality project is. Are you willing to sacrifice that?
Father, unless we get out of here, we aren’t going to have a project left, or a life to immortalize. We can’t defend ourselves against these usurped villagers. I’ve watched what happens when anyone shoots them. They don’t even notice it! And even if somebody does manage to beat them, the Quallheim Counties are going to be searched a centimetre at a time afterwards. Either way, we can’t stay here.
The lad’s got a point there, Laton,salkid said. We can’t cling on here simply out of sentiment.
You always told me knowledge can’t be destroyed,tao said. We know how to splice a parallel-processing brain together. What we need is a secure location in which to do it. The tree certainly isn’t it, not any more.
Well argued,laton said. Except I’m not sure anywhere on Lalonde can be classed as safe any more. This technology is fearsome.he deliberately allowed his emotional shield to slip, and felt the shocked recoil of their thoughts that he who never demonstrated weakness was so deeply perturbed.
We can hardly walk into Durringham’s spaceport and ask for a lift outsystem,waldsey said.
The children can,laton said. They have been born here, the intelligence agencies have no record of them. Once in orbit they can secure a starship for us.
Bloody hell, you mean it.
Indeed. It is the logical course. At the ultimate extreme, I am prepared to contact the Intelligence agencies in Durringham and report the situation to them. They will take me seriously, and that way a warning will get out.
Is it that bad, Father?salsett asked anxiously.
Laton projected a burst of reassuring warmth at the fifteen-year-old girl. I don’t think it will come to that, darling.
Leaving the tree,she said wonderingly.
Yes,he said. Tao, that was a good suggestion of yours; you and Salkid take a blackhawk maser out of storage, and be ready to eliminate that observation satellite. The rest of you have ten hours to pack. We start for Durringham tonight.
He couldn’t detect a single whiff of dissension. Minds retreated from the affinity contact.
In the hours which followed, the gigantea tree was subject to the kind of coordinated activity it hadn’t seen since their arrival. Orders were flung frantically at the incorporated and the housechimps as the residents attempted to dismantle the work of thirty years in the short hours they had left. Heartbreaking decisions were made over what could go and what must stay, several couples arguing. The landcruisers had to be checked over and prepared after thirty years’ unemployment. Laton’s younger children scampered about getting in the way, nervous and elated at the prospect of leaving; the older members of the fellowship started thinking about the Confederation worlds again. Thermal charges were set throughout the rooms and corridors, ready to obliterate all trace of the gigantea’s secrets.
The hectic activity registered as a background burble amid Laton’s steely thoughts. Occasionally someone would intrude into his contemplation to ask for instructions.
After designating the few personal items he wanted to accompany them, he spent his time reviewing the memory of what happened in the clearing when Quinn Dexter killed Supervisor Manani. That strange lightning was the start of it. He ran and re-ran Camilla’s memory images, which were stored in the tree’s sub-sentient bitek processor array. The lightning seemed to be flat, almost compressed, some sections darker than others. As he ran the memory again the dark areas moved, sliding down the glaring streamers of rampaging electrons. The lightning bolts were acting as conduits to some kind of energy pattern, one which behaved outside the accepted norm.
A draught of air stroked his face. He opened his eyes to darkness. The study was as it always had been. He switched his retinal implants to infrared. Jackson Gael and Ruth Hilton stood on the curving wood before him.
“Clever,” Laton said. His contact with the processors faded away. Affinity was reduced to a whisper rattling round the closed confines of his skull. “It’s energy, isn’t it? A self-determining viral program that can store itself in a non-physical lattice.”
Ruth bent down, and put her hand under his chin, tilting his face up so she could examine him. “Edenists. Always so rational.”
“But where did it come from, I wonder?” Laton asked.
“What will it take to break his beliefs?” Jackson Gael asked.
“It’s not of human origin,” Laton said. “I’m sure of that; nor any of the xenoc races we know.”
“We’ll find out tonight,” Ruth said. She let go of Laton’s chin, and held out her hand. “Come along.”
The morning after Governor Rexrew’s briefing with Candace Elford, Ralph Hiltch was sitting behind his own desk in the Kulu Embassy dumper receiving a condensed version of events from Jenny Harris. One of the ESA assets she ran in the sheriff’s office had asked for a meeting and told her about the trouble brewing in the Quallheim Counties.
All well and good, it was nice to see the Governor couldn’t fart without the ESA knowing, but like Rexrew before him, Ralph was having a lot of trouble with the concept of an Ivet uprising.
“An open revolt?” he asked the lieutenant sceptically.
“It looks that way,” she said apologetically. “Here, my contact gave me a flek of the surveillance satellite images.” She loaded it into the processor block on Ralph’s desk, and the screens on the wall began to show the Quallheim’s motley collection of villages.
Ralph stood in front of them, hands on his hips as the semicircular clearings cut into solid jungle appeared. The treetops looked like green foam, broken by occasional glades, and virtually sealing over streams and the smaller rivers. “There’s been a lot of fires,” he agreed unhappily. “And recently, too. Can’t you manage a better resolution than this?”
“Apparently not, and that’s the second cause for alarm. Something is affecting the satellite every time it passes over the Quallheim tributary. No other section of Amarisk is affected.”
He gave her a long look.
“I know,” she said. “It sounds ridiculous.”
Ralph gave his neural nanonics a search request and returned his attention to the screens while it was running. “There’s certainly been some kind of fight down there. And this isn’t the first time Schuster County has come to our attention.” The neural nanonics reported a blank; so he opened a channel to access his processor block’s classified military systems file, extending the search.
“Captain Lambourne reported that nothing ever came out of the marshal’s visit last year,” Jenny Harris said. “We still don’t know what happened to those homestead families.”
Ralph’s neural nanonics told him that the processor block file couldn’t find a match for his request. “Interesting. According to our files, there is no known electronic warfare system which can distort a satellite image like this.”
“How up to date are the files?”
“Last year’s.” He walked back to his seat. “But you’re missing the point. Firstly it’s a wholly ineffective system, all it does is fuzz the image slightly. Secondly, if you’ve gone to all the trouble to tamper with the satellite why not knock it out altogether? Given the age of Lalonde’s satellite, everyone would assume it was a natural malfunction. This method actually draws attention to the Quallheim.”
“Or draws attention away from somewhere else,” she said.
“I’m paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?” he muttered. Outside the window the dark rooftops of Durringham were steaming softly in the bright morning sun. It was all so cheerfully primitive, the residents walking through the tacky streets, power bikes throwing up fans of mud, a teenage couple lost in each other, the tail end of a new colonist group making their way down to the transients’ dormitories. Every morning for the last four years he’d seen variants on the same scene. Lalonde’s inhabitants got on with their basic, modestly corrupt lives, and never bothered anyone. They couldn’t, they didn’t have the means. “The thing which disturbs me most is Rexrew’s idea that it could be an external group attempting some kind of coup. I almost agree with him, it’s certainly more logical than an Ivet revolt.” He rapped his knuckles on the desktop, trying to think. “When is this posse of Candace Elford’s setting off?”
“Tomorrow; she’s going to start recruiting her deputies this morning. And incidentally, the Swithland is one of the boats that will be carrying them. Captain Lambourne can keep us updated if you allow her to use a communication block.”
“OK, but I want at least five of our assets in that group of deputies, more if you can manage. We need to know what’s going on up in the Quallheim Counties. Equip them with communication blocks as well, but make sure they understand they must only use them if the situation is urgent. I’ll speak to Kelven Solanki about the issue, he’s probably as keen as we are to know what’s going on.”
“I’ll get onto it,” she said. “One of the sheriffs Elford is sending belongs to me anyway, that’ll make placing assets among the deputies a lot easier.”
“Good, well done.”
Jenny Harris saluted professionally, but before she got to the door she turned back and said, “I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to stage a coup out in the middle of the hinterlands?”
“Someone with an eye to the future, maybe. If it is, our duty is very clear cut.”
“Yes, sir; but if that is the case, they’d need help from out-system.”
“True. Well, at least that’s easy enough to watch for.”
Ralph occupied himself with genuine embassy attachй work for the next two hours. Lalonde imported very little, but from the list of what it did require he tried to secure a reasonable portion for Kulu companies. He was trying to find a supplier for the high-temperature moulds a new glassworks factory wanted when his neural nanonics alerted him to an unscheduled starship that had just jumped into Lalonde’s designated emergence zone, fifty thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface. The dumper’s electronics tapped the downlink from Lalonde’s two civil spaceflight monitor satellites, giving him access to the raw data. What it didn’t provide was system command authority, he was a passive observer.
Lalonde’s traffic control took a long time to respond to the monitor satellite’s discovery. There were three starships in an equatorial parking orbit, two colonist transports from Earth, and a freighter from New California, nothing else was due for a week. The staff probably hadn’t even been in the control centre, he thought impatiently as he waited for them to get off their arses and provide him with more information.
Starship visits outside the regular LDC contracted vessels, and the voidhawk supply run for Aethra, were rare events, there were never more than five or six a year. That this one should appear at this time was a coincidence he couldn’t put out of his mind.
The starship was already under power and heading for a standard equatorial parking orbit when traffic control eventually triggered its transponder and established a communication channel. Data flooded into Ralph’s mind, the standard Confederation Astronautics Board registration and certification. It was an independent trader vessel called Lady Macbeth.
His suspicion deepened.
Rumour hit Durringham and spread with a speed that a news company’s distribution division would have envied. It started when Candace Elford’s staff went out for a drink after a hard day assessing the scrambled information they were getting from the Quallheim Counties. Durringham’s strong beer, sweet wines from nearby estates, and running mild mood-stimulant programs through their neural nanonics liberated a quantity of almost accurate information about exactly what had been going on all day in the chief sheriff’s office.
It took half of Lalonde’s long night to filter out of the pubs the sheriffs used and down into the more basic taverns the agricultural workers, port labourers, and river crews favoured. Distance, time, alcohol, and weak hallucinogens distorted and amplified the story in creative surges. The end results which were shouted and argued over loudly through the riverside drinking dens would have impressed any student of social dynamics. The following day, it proliferated through every workplace and home.
The main exchanges of conversations went thus.
The colonists in the Quallheim Counties had been ritually massacred by the Ivets, who had taken up Devil worship. A Satanic theocracy had been declared to the Governor and demanded recognition as an independent state, and all the Ivets were to be sent there.
An army of radical anarchistic Ivets was marching downriver, razing villages as they went, looting and raping. They were kamikazes, sworn to destroy Lalonde.