The Gabble

Acephalous Dreams

Having no head, or one reduced, indistinct, as certain insect larvae … Such things he considered as the pool spread to his foot and melded round the rubber sole of his boot. He would leave distinctive footprints: Devnon Macroboots, fifty-seven New Carth shillings a pair; they were only sold from one place and there was not much of a turnover in them. Carth was somewhat off the tourist route, religious fanaticism not being much of a draw in such enlightened times.

No resistance at all.

Daes stepped back from the pool and walked slowly round the corpse — the grub — his right boot leaving a bloody ribbed imprint and the incomplete DEV at each step. He was not a tall man, Daes, and his weightlifter’s physique made him appear shorter. He was exceptionally physically strong, and this strength had been sufficient to drive the carbide-edged machete through the flesh, bone and gristle of Anton Velsten’s neck. No resistance. The machete had not even slowed, and Daes had not even felt a tug. The head, Anton’s head, had not tumbled away spouting blood as it would have in most holodramas. It had remained balanced on Anton’s neck, displaced by only a fraction, unmoved by the hydraulic pressure of the blood that spurted out sideways until the head became fully detached when Anton, unstrung puppet fashion, collapsed to the floor in the shroud of his priestly robes.

Daes smiled to himself when he reached a position giving him clear sight of the severed neck. There was always plenty of blood flowing in the holodramas, but they did not often show this sort of thing: in the pool of blood there was a second immiscible pool of well-chewed Carthian prawns, special fried rice, that piquant sauce they made at the Lotus Garden, and bile.

Sniffing and wrinkling his nose, Daes was also made aware that Anton had emptied his bowels in his last moments.

‘Are you with your god now, Anton?’ Daes asked. The bowl of night over the roof-port made his voice sound flat and meaningless as it drank his words. Daes surveyed the ranked gravcars for any sign of movement, any sign that he had been observed, but there seemed to be none of either. It was late and the faithful were always early to bed and early to rise. Witnesses were not a requirement though, and few people got away with murder. He dropped the machete onto the corpse, turned, stooped, and picked up Anton’s head. It was surprisingly heavy. Holding it by the dark blood-soaked hair Daes studied Anton’s face. Nothing there. In death terror had fled and all that remained was the expression etched there by Anton’s vicious and debauched life. Daes dropped the head into the bag he had stolen from a ten-pin bowling alley — perfect for the task, waterproof too — then he squatted down by the corpse.

‘All done, but for one last sign,’ he said.

Reaching out, he dipped his finger in blood and drew on the ground a figure ‘8’ turned on its side. It was the sign for infinity, but meant so much else to him. He then took up the bag and headed for his own gravcar, quickly stepped inside, and with the turbines at their quietest and slowest, lifted the car from the roof.

Eight hours maximum. The corpse was sure to be discovered in the next two hours.

Fingerprints and DNA would be identified at the scene within the following hour, and access to runcible transport denied directly after. He reckoned the search would first be centred at the runcible facility. They would expect him to try to get off planet, to one of the Line worlds -

expected it of any murderer. He smiled to himself as he directed his cleverly stolen Ford Nevada gravcar out of the city and away from the facility, to a glow on the horizon that was not where the sun rose.

It was a place where godless Carthians came with mylar glide wings to have fun in the thermals above the volcano. This activity was frowned on by the Theocracy and attempts had been made to ban the sport, but the Theocracy only had power over those who voluntarily subjugated themselves to it. Polity law ruled on Carth and the monitors of Earth Central were never far away. With the Ford set on hover, Daes opened the door and dropped the bowling bag and its grisly contents into the caldera. As a necessity he was very high up and only able to discern a pinprick, near subliminal in its brevity, as the head struck the lava and incinerated.

‘Resurrect the fucker now,’ said Daes, and wondered if he might be going insane. Perhaps a plea of insanity … no, he felt completely and utterly sane, as always. When they finally caught him he would be tried with all fairness and sympathy. His memories would be read by an AI; his life rolled out, dissected, and completely understood by a mind quite capable of such. What made him what he was would be discovered, recorded, and perhaps be the subject of lengthy study. He would be gone by the time that study reached any conclusions; taken to a disintegrator and in less than a second converted into a pool of organic sludge and flushed into the Carthian ocean for the delectation of its plankton. There was a kind of poetry to such an ending. Daes didn’t like poetry. He closed the door of the Ford, his eyes watering from the sulphur fumes, then turned the vehicle back towards the city.

‘Do you want to live?’

The Golem Twenty-seven that had entered his cell was only identifiable as an android by her deliberately flawed perfection. The artificial skin and flesh of her right arm was transparent and through it Daes could see her gleaming ceramal bones, the cybermotors at her joints, and the tangles of optic cables. Otherwise she was completely beautiful; a blonde-haired teenager with wide amber eyes and a pertly nubile body clothed in a short silk toga. Daes remained on his bunk and waited for her to continue.

‘Very well,’ she said, and turned to go.

Daes sat up. ‘Wait, wait a minute. Of course I want to live.’

She turned. ‘Then please be civil enough to reply when I ask a question.’

‘Okay. Okay.’ Daes waved her to a seat.

She sat and smiled briefly at him before continuing. ‘Your memcording has been analysed and those memories you attempted to conceal have been revealed and intensively studied. We even know why you drew the sign for infinity beside his body.’

Daes stared at her — he had not expected this.

She continued. ‘Yet, despite the years of abuse you suffered at the hands of Anton Velsten while in the theocratic college, you are still considered sane and culpable, simply because you could have later reported him and had him sent for readjustment.’

‘I preferred how I readjusted him.’

‘Apparently.’

‘And so, nothing can stop me going to the disintegrator,’ said Daes.

‘The intervention of the AI Geronamid can.’

Daes shivered at the mention of the name. Geronamid was the sector AI. What the hell interest would it have in a minor criminal like himself?

‘Why would Geronamid want to get involved?’

‘AI Geronamid has need of a subject for a scientific trial. This trial may kill you, in which case it would be considered completion of sentence. Should you survive, all charges against you will be dropped.’

‘And the nature of this trial?’

‘Cephalic implantation of Csorian node.’

‘Okay, I agree, though I have no idea what Csorian node is.’

The Golem stood and as she did so the door slid open. Daes glanced up at the security eye in the corner of the cell and stood also. She nodded to the door and he followed her out. In the corridor a couple of policemen glared at him with ill-concealed annoyance but showed no reaction beyond that. Outside the station she led him to a sleek gravcar styled after one of the twenty-second-century electric cars. He thought, briefly, about escape, but knew he stood no chance. His companion might look like a teenage girl but she was strong enough to rip him in half. Once they were seated in the gravcar it took off without her touching the controls and sped away at a speed well above the limit. He wondered if some minuscule part of Geronamid was controlling it.

‘You didn’t tell me. What’s a Csorian node?’

‘If we knew that with any certainty we would not be carrying out this trial,’ replied the Golem.

‘You know it’s some sort of implant.’

‘We do, but only because it was found in the body of a Csorian.’

‘A Csorian has been found?’

‘Oh yes, underneath the ruins on Wilder. The body is about a hundred thousand years old.

The node was attached to its hindbrain.’

Daes turned that over in his mind. The Csorians were one of the three dead stellar races: the Jain and the Atheter being the other two. They supposedly died out a hundred thousand years before the human race had set out for the stars. All that remained of their civilizations were a few ruins of coraline buildings and the descendants of those plants and creatures to survive from their biotechnology.

‘It was one of the last of them then,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He considered for a moment before going on. ‘Surely Geronamid should have been able to work out what this node is.’

‘Perhaps he has. Who can tell?’

Daes noted that the gravcar was well above the traffic lanes and still rising. He heard the door seals lock down and wondered where the hell they were going. When he turned to the Golem to ask her, he saw that she had called up something on the screen. Here was a creature much like a praying mantis only without the long winged abdomen. From the back of its thorax extended a ribbed tail that branched into three. At the branch point was a pronounced thickening from which grew a second pair of insectile legs.

‘It was about a metre long. We think the hindbrain had something to do with reproduction,’ said the Golem.

‘That’s a Csorian?’ asked Daes.

‘It is. We are reasonably sure that their society was much like that of the social insects of Earth; wasps, ants, hornets and the like.’

‘They had hive minds just the same?’

‘This is what we suppose.’

Daes smiled to himself. It had come as one shock in many when arrogant humanity had discovered it wasn’t the only sentient race on Earth, it was just the loudest and most destructive.

Dolphins and whales had always been candidates because of their aesthetic appeal and stories of rescued swimmers. Research in that area had soon cleared things up: Dolphins couldn’t tell the difference between a human swimmer and a sick fellow, and were substantially more stupid than the animal humans had been turning into pork on a regular basis. Whales had the intelligence of the average cow. When a hornet built its nest in a VR suit and lodged its protests on the Internet it had taken a long time for anyone to believe. They were stinging things, creepy crawlies, how could they possibly be intelligent? At ten thousand years of age the youngest hive mind showed them. People believed.

‘So a hive mind got into space long before we did. I find that gratifying to hear,’ said Daes.

The Golem gazed at him speculatively. ‘Your misanthropy is well understood. You do realize that if you’d had it corrected you would not be in the situation you are now in.’

‘I liked my dislike of humanity. It kept me sane.’

‘Very amusing,’ said the Golem, turning back to the screen. The picture she now called up was of a small ovoid with complex mottling on its surface. Daes noted it, then gazed through the windows and saw the sky becoming dark blue and stars beginning to show. The planet had now receded. He pushed his face to the window to try and get a look down at it and saw only a shuttle glinting like a discarded needle far below.

‘This is the node. We know that it contains picotech and likely biofactured connections to its host’s brain. We first thought it some kind of augmentation.’

‘Well that seems the most likely,’ said Daes, turning back.

‘Yes, but this node is three centimetres long, two wide and has a density twice that of lead.’

‘So?’

The Golem looked at him. ‘Every cubic nanometre of it is packed with picotech. Under scan we have so far managed to identify two billion picomachines with the ability to self-replicate. They also all cross-reference. There is a complexity here that is beyond even Geronamid’s ability.’

There was a sound, slightly like a groan, from within the workings of the gravcar. Daes felt the artificial gravity come on and when he gazed out the windows now saw nothing but starlit space. As he turned to fire another question at the Golem his seat slapped him lightly on his back and the gravcar surged towards a distant speck. He decided to be annoyed.

‘Am I supposed to be impressed by all this?’

‘No,’ said the Golem. ‘You are just supposed to be thankful that you are still alive.’

Daes grimaced and peered ahead at the speck as it drew closer. ‘When can I speak to Geronamid?’

The Golem looked at him.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You never told me your name.’

‘It is my conceit to name this part of myself Hera,’ said a very small part of the AI Geronamid.

The speck resolved into a flat disc of a ship whose size did not become evident until they drew very close. What Daes had first taken to be panoramic windows set in the side of the vessel soon resolved into bay doors the size of city blocks. The ship had to be at least two kilometres in diameter.

‘This is where you are,’ said Daes.

‘Yes, the central mind is here,’ replied Hera.

The bay doors drew aside and the gravcar sped in then landed on a wide expanse of gridded bay floor. The moment the doors closed behind there came a boom of wind as atmosphere was restored in the bay. The car’s seals automatically disengaged and Geronamid’s Golem opened her door. Daes quickly opened his door and followed.

‘Is the node here?’ he asked as they approached a dropshaft.

‘It is, as are the remains of the Csorian, and much of their recovered technology.’

They stepped into the irised gravity field and it dropped them down into the ship. Ten floors down they stepped out into a wide chamber filled with old-style museum display cases.

Hera led him past an aquarium containing corals in pastel shades of every colour, past a tank containing plants that bore translucent fruit like lumps of amber, a case containing pieces of coral with something like circuitry etched or grown on their inner faces. She brought him finally to the tank containing the remains of the Csorian — whole and almost lifelike.

‘It wasn’t in this condition surely?’ he said.

‘No, only four per cent of it was recoverable.’

‘What about DNA?’

‘Scraps only. Not enough to build up a large enough template.’

‘AIs did it with dinosaurs.’

‘In that case there was more material to work with. What is in this case is all we have of the Csorians.. Here, this is what we have come to see.’

She led him past the Csorian to a small bell jar over a jade pedestal. Underneath the jar lay the node — in appearance a simple pebble. Daes stepped closer. As he did so he felt a slight displacement, a sense of dislocation, and from this he knew that the ship was on the move.

‘Where are we going?’

‘A living world without sentient life. You must be isolated while the node does whatever it does.’

‘What?’ Daes turned to her to protest. Her hand moved so fast he hardly registered it moving. Fingertips brushed his neck and from that point he felt his body turning to lead.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll be with you,’ said Hera, as he slipped into darkness.

Something huge was poised on the edge of his being, not inimical, but dangerous and vast and ready to drown him out of existence. Anton was a small and insignificant thing on the ground at his feet even though armies were marching out of his severed neck. Daes decided to laugh and leap into the sky, and this being his wish he did so, for he knew this was a dream. When he woke, though, that huge something was still there.

‘How do you feel?’ asked Hera.

Daes opened his eyes and stared at the domed ceiling. He turned his head aside and saw the Golem sitting in a form chair beside the sofa he lay upon. They were in a comfortably furnished house of some kind. Greenish light filtered in through the wide windows.

‘Where are we?’ he asked.

‘The world only has a number.’

‘I thought you said this was uninhabited,’ said Daes, sitting up and studying their surroundings.

‘Geronamid prepared this place for you some time ago,’ said Hera.

‘For me?’

‘Well, for the next person under a death sentence when it decided to implant the node.’

‘I was lucky that time occurred when it did.’

‘Yes, five seconds later and someone else would have been chosen.’

Daes stood and stretched his neck. ‘It’s in me then?’

‘Yes, you will not know it is there until the picotech starts to work.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘We do not know. It is not working at the moment, though.’

‘How can you be sure of that?’

‘I am taking readings from numerous detectors implanted in your body.’

‘I didn’t give permission for that,’ said Daes.

Hera shrugged. ‘To put in a suitable parlance,’ she said, ‘tough.’

Daes stared at her for a long moment. It was all perfectly clear to him: Geronamid could do with him what it liked now.

‘What do I do while I wait for this node to. . activate?’

‘Explore, sleep, eat, all those things you would not be doing had your sentence been passed either five seconds later or earlier.’

‘Do you need to continually remind me?’

‘Yes, it would seem that I do.’

Without responding to that Daes turned and walked to the window. He gazed out at a wall of jungle twenty metres away. The intervening area had been scorched to grey ash, but even there the ground was scattered with reddish-green sprouts, and fungi like blue peas. A bewildering surge of feeling hit him: he wanted to be out there, to drive his fingers into the black earth, and to see and feel growing things.

‘You say that picotech isn’t working yet?’ he said.

When Hera did not reply he turned to her.

‘No, I said it wasn’t working, now I say that something is happening,’ she replied.

Daes swallowed a sudden surge of fear. What the hell was he doing here? He should have gone to the disintegrator. At least that would have been clean and quick, and right now he would know nothing, feel nothing.

‘What’s happening?’

‘I do not know,’ said Hera. ‘The node is reduced in size and picomachines are diffusing through your body. What they are doing will become evident in time.’

Daes pressed his hands against the thick glass of the window, and noted that the skin on the backs of them was peeling.

‘I want to go outside,’ he said.

The air was frigid in his mouth. He had expected it to be warm and humid.

‘This equates to the Jurassic period on Earth,’ said Hera.

‘How do you work out that equation then?’ Daes asked sarcastically.

‘Quite simply really. The ecosystems have not evolved to the complexity of mutualism between species.’

‘And that means?’

‘No flowers and no pollinators. The equations are more complex than that, obviously, but my explanation stands.’

‘You mean it will do for a stupid human like me,’ said Daes. ‘Why the hell is it so damned cold? This looked like jungle from in there.’

‘It is jungle, and for this place it is unseasonably hot.’

‘Couldn’t you have chosen a warmer planet?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean? You are Geronamid.’

‘I am a part, and now a separate part.’

Daes turned to study her, then damned himself for a fool. If she gave anything away in her expression that would be because she wanted to. It was so easy to forget what she was.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because my direct link has been severed, it being possible to use such a link for direct informational attack on Geronamid itself. This planet is in quarantine for the duration of this trial. The only link we do have is a comlink to a second isolated submind of Geronamid’s in orbit.’

‘Is Geronamid that scared then?’

‘Cautious, I think would be a better term.’

Daes turned away from her and regarded the cold jungle. There was a path of sorts, probably beaten by one of the AI’s machines. He headed for it, ash caking his boots, and little fungi bursting all around where he stepped. The vegetation on either side of the path sprouted from thick cycad bodies and bore a hard and sharp look. On the slimy root-bound ground scuttled arthropods like skeletons’ hands, which he watched hunting long black beetles that sobbed piteously when caught and eaten alive. He had gone only ten metres into the jungle when he suddenly felt sick and dizzy. He went down on his knees and before he knew what he was doing he was pushing his fingers into the black and sticky earth. Immediately his dizziness receded and he suddenly found himself gazing about himself with vast clarity of vision. On the bole of a scaled trunk nearby he observed an insect bearing the shape of a legged stiletto with a head in which eye-pits glinted like flecks of emerald. Then he found himself gazing up the bole of the tree; vegetation looming above him. Then he was feeling his way along the ground with a familiar heat shape ahead of him. He leapt on it before it could escape and bit down and sucked with relish, filling himself but never assuaging the constant hunger. Then. . then he was back.

‘What the hell is happening to me?’ he said, blinking to clear strange visions from his eyes as he stared into the jungle.

‘You would be the best one to answer that question,’ said Hera. ‘Tell me what you are feeling.’

Daes stumbled to his feet and turned back towards the residence Geronamid had provided. He saw now that it was one of those instant fold-out homes used by ECS for refugees and the like. It seemed sanctuary indeed for him.

‘I want to go back,’ he said, walking quickly towards it.

‘What happened?’ Hera asked, quickly moving to his side.

Daes gestured to the creatures that swarmed on the jungle floor. ‘I saw through their eyes, and when they didn’t have eyes, I felt what they felt.’ He stepped through the door that opened for him and moved to a sink unit before one of the panoramic windows. Resting his hands on the composite he saw that the skin on the back of them had ceased to peel, but when he lifted those hands up to inspect them more closely he saw that his palms left, along with the black mud, white smears on the edge of the sink. He was about to say something about this to Hera when he saw that the smears were fading. Also, something bulked behind his eyes and he felt himself almost stooping under its weight. Involuntarily he turned and surveyed the room.

Centring on the Golem he strode towards her and grasped her transparent wrist, and of course she easily pulled away. Now she held up her arm and observed the white smear on her wrist as it faded.

‘Picotech leeching from your body. Outside it-’

Hera froze and Daes found himself gazing out of her eyes at himself. He lifted her arms and opened and closed her hand, sensing as he did so the surge of optic information packages and diffusing electrons in her solid-state core. And he understood it all.

‘-was obviously sending out probes to sample and test its environment.’

He was back in himself as Hera paused. She tilted her head.

‘By my internal clock I can only presume I went offline for fourteen seconds.’ She looked at Daes queryingly. But he had no reply, for now he was closely studying and understanding the workings of his own mind — taking apart all his memories and all his motivations and sucking up every dreg of information it was possible to find. A flower he had seen as a child, named as an adolescent, and found dried and pressed in the pages of a book in the theocratic college library, was tracked in all its incarnations through his life as a straight line of information. And there were millions of these lines. He felt an analytical interest whenever he encountered anything in his mind that related to the Csorians, and anything related to the prehistory of Earth. At the last he experienced the bleed-over of alien memory, and its huge logic and utterly cold understanding terrified him. Then suddenly it was all over and he was standing in a room, on a planet, being watched by a Golem android.

‘I know what the node is,’ he said to Hera.

Anton Velsten never sneered. He left that to the others, just as, in the end, he left it to them to hold Daes across the table. That he used a gel on Daes’s anus was not indicative of any concern for the boy. Velsten just found it more pleasurable that way, and less likely for him to hurt himself. When the others took their turns, Velsten stepped back and gave a running commentary — his voice devoid of emotion.

‘And Pandel is at the gate. And he’s in and getting up to speed. Oh dear, Pandel loses it in the first ten metres. What’s this? What’s this? Damar is leading with a head. .’

So it went on, and when they were all done, Anton scrawled the sign of infinity on Daes’s forehead, with Daes’s own semen-diluted shit.

The others who watched, beyond this room and beyond this incarnation, dissected every increment of every moment and understood the event utterly. They saw that it was the culmination of Velsten’s power game. Of course Velsten had to die at Daes’s hand. The shame could not be admitted — the shame of being unable to fight. How could he expose those memories to AI inspection? Then there was vengeance, and that was oh so sweet.

‘Hello, Anton,’ said Daes, strolling from his gravcar out towards the man.

Velsten was tall, and with his mild ‘I am listening to you’ expression, and dressed as he was in his flowing robes, he was — it could not be avoided — priestly. He halted and regarded Daes estimatingly before moving his hands into a supplicating gesture, perhaps to apologize and explain about pressing business.

‘You don’t even recognize me, do you?’ Daes asked.

Velsten now put on the pose of deep thoughtfulness as he watched Daes come to stand before him.

‘I feel we have met,’ said Anton, pressing his hands together as if in prayer. ‘But I’m afraid I have a terrible memory for names and in my ministry I meet so many people. What was it? Amand? Damar?’

‘I was one of the first to receive your ministry, Anton,’ said Daes.

Velsten now started to become really concerned.

‘I’m so sorry, but as pleasant as this meeting is I do have pressing business,’ he said turning away.

‘It’s remiss of you not to remember someone you buggered, Anton.’

Velsten froze, and slowly turned back. The transformation in his expression surprised even Daes. Now Velsten gazed at Daes with superiority as he folded his arms. He nodded his head as he no doubt wondered what to do with this inconvenient little roach.

‘Daes,’ he said, and sighed.

Daes watched him for a moment then he unzipped the bag he had stolen from the bowling alley and took out the machete. Velsten’s expression changed to one of contempt.

‘Do you really think you would get away with using that?’ he asked.

‘Oh no, you wrong me. I don’t expect to get away with this. I don’t really care.’

Velsten’s expression changed once again and his fear showed. He held out his hand as if to push Daes away. Daes swung the machete across and the hand thumped to the plascrete a couple of metres away. Velsten stared at his jetting wrist and made a strangled whining sound before capping his other hand over it.

‘That probably doesn’t even hurt yet, and it won’t get a chance to,’ said Daes, relishing the expression of horror on Velsten’s face. He stepped in and pirouetted with the machete and for one strange instant thought he had missed, that was until he once again faced Velsten. The man was a statue for a moment, before blood jetted out sideways from his neck, then he went over, his head separating from his body as he fell.

No resistance at all.

Daes inspected his hands for the nth time and saw that there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. Now, when he touched objects, he left no white smear. He reached out for his coffee cup, took it up, and sipped.

‘Restful night?’ Hera enquired.

‘Not really. I had some very strange dreams when I wasn’t being woken by those weird noises. What the hell was that?’ said Daes.

‘It doesn’t have a name as yet. It’s a large arthropod that deposits its egg-sacs high in the trees. It is apparently a painful process,’ Hera replied.

‘Apparently.’ Daes sipped some more coffee and wondered at the Golem’s seeming impatience. All emulation, but it did need to know.

‘You said you knew what the node is,’ said Hera. ‘Then, having grabbed my attention, you claimed great weariness and just had to go to bed.’

‘That is very true.’

‘Perhaps, now you are rested, you can tell me what you know.’

Daes shook his head. ‘Sorry, can’t do that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I cannot.’ By stressing the personal pronoun he hoped Hera would really get the picture. There were things he simply could not do and things he could not say. That his mind had been reformatted he had no doubt, but he was not too upset by this. There were the things he could do. . Looking out of the window he surged up high and gazed out through a cluster of eyes at spiky treetops. Scanning round he found another example of the creature he had hunted, clinging to a flower spike like an upright bunch of giant blue grapes. This creature was a white spider with a dagger of a body and mouthparts that appeared complex enough to dismantle a computer… and put it back together again. It clung with those mouthparts as its body heaved and strained and dripped transparent sacs on the foliage. The creature he was in could not hear the sounds the one in view nor itself made, but through other ears he could hear the hootings and raspings. Fleeing on with his awareness he found it diffusing into an ice-crusted sea in which finned silver footballs fed on air-plant sprouts of weed.

‘Will you ever be able to tell?’ Hera asked.

An island chain revealed to him multilegged creatures like the skeletal spider-things, but these possessed bat wings and the superb vision of aerial predators. But they were no good -

their simple light bodies would take millennia of adjustment to carry a greatly enlarged braincase. His awareness now snapped back to something on the other side of the continent he presently occupied. Here he observed a herd of grazing beasts: six-legged and reptilian. The braincase below the three eye-stalks possessed complexity in control of the creatures’ complex digestive system — a chemical laboratory in itself. It would be necessary to push them into a predatory lifestyle, thus freeing up cerebral space — again a task taking millennia. However, near the house, he had observed a better option than this. And of course, inside the house was the best option of all. He would continue to search though — for the moment. The smallest fraction of his awareness studied the Golem.

‘I want you to contact the second Geronamid submind.’

‘I am in com-’

Daes wholly occupied all her systems in an instant. He found the open comlink to the submind in orbit and probed up to it, tried to widen that link. In seconds he had created computer subversion routines and used them to try and get a hold, to control. The comlink immediately shut down. Within him there was a calmness — this had been expected, and in the process he had learnt much. Next time he would not be so brutal. He withdrew from Hera.

‘-munication with the … I see … I hope you understand now that your quarantine is total.

You have no way of leaving this planet without Geronamid’s intercession.’

‘I understand,’ said Daes, and everything else that he was. ‘I want information.’

‘You realize that if you do manage to take control of the submind above, it will be instantly obliterated?’

‘I require information,’ was all he said.

‘What information?’

‘Everything you have on the Csorians and all related research.’

‘That is a lot of information.’

‘I have the capacity.’

‘Then link to me again, but do not drown me out this time,’ she said.

Daes eased into her, carefully circumventing those areas from which her awareness evolved: her ego, self-image — what she was.

Through the comlink Hera spat the request into orbit, and the response was immediate.

Daes realized that this had been expected as there was no delay whilst the information was trawled from the AI net. As he scanned and sorted this information, calmly noting that all of the Csorian civilization discovered was but archaeological remains, he realized that whilst he could be just Daes, in truth he was now some other entity. Daes was in fact now a submind of himself, and his whole self was centred on the node in which he felt a crammed multitude. However, through vast and spreading awareness he observed picotech chains of superconductor spearing across the surface of the planet, spreading their informational network through the ocean depths, and flailing in the air like cobwebs as they connected with every life-form, insinuated themselves into every niche of the biosphere. One third of the planet now lay under this net, this awareness, and within hours only this network would meet on the other side and he would be able to observe all, and be ready. That was it though. He felt a flush of fear that was his own and the crying of that multitude. Upon completion of the network, dispersion and implantation became a necessity, for thereafter the network would begin to degrade as does all life — with the accumulation of copying errors, the degrading of the basic templates — only faster, because of its complexity, and the delicacy of its picoscopic strands. One time only: one chance.

‘You don’t know what wiped out my race,’ said Daes.

‘Your race?’ enquired Hera.

‘You, submind, do not know what I am. . become. Geronamid certainly does. I want to communicate with the AI directly.’

‘You can only communicate with the submind directly. Who will communicate with Geronamid when you have withdrawn,’ said Hera. ‘But you know that.’

Daes felt the network gathering behind him like a looming shadow. Geronamid had chosen this location because of the spider creatures outside. He saw in an instant that their braincases possessed sufficient room for primitive intelligence, and that their mouthparts were sufficiently complex for the fast development of tool-using ability. Nothing would be lost, as the bulk of each of the thousands of Csorian intelligences he contained could be stored as a picotech construct in each insectile mind. But those intelligences would be unable to immediately bloom.

Transferred down the generations whilst the creatures were subtly impelled towards development of more complex brains, it would be millennia before the Csorian race could be reborn. This option was unacceptable to the multitude whilst such viable intelligences as Daes himself and these AIs were available. He must take Geronamid, subsume that AI.

‘Yes, I do know that,’ he said.

The planetwide network had stalled, all his mentality now focused on this moment. He felt the link establish to the orbital submind, and replayed Hera’s words: Who will communicate with Geronamid when you have withdrawn. This meant that the submind possessed some way of linking with the AI Geronamid in total. There had to be a way for himself to get through before the submind was destroyed.

The comlink to the orbital submind opened, and Daes slid into it like syrup into a sore throat. The safety controls and trips he had observed on his first attempt, he easily circumvented as his awareness flooded up into orbit, subversion programs uncoiling in the silicon logic of the submind like tight-wound snakes. In a nanosecond he found the underspace link to Geronamid in total and prepared himself to storm that bastion. Then something flooded out of the link; vast and incomprehensible. His subversion programs began to consume themselves. He felt a huge amused awareness bearing down on him with crushing force. Then that force eased.

I offer you only two choices.

Through allowable awareness Daes saw the massive geosat poised above the planet.

There was no possibility of mistaking its purpose. It was one long internally polished barrel ringed by the toroid of a giant fusion reactor. In some areas the weapon had acquired the name ‘sun gun’, which seemed an inadequate description for something that could raise square kilometres of its target to a million degrees Celcius in less time than it took to blink — a blink that would see all the stored intelligences gone.

Destruction?

Geronamid replied: Is one choice. I have known for long enough that the Csorian node contains the zipped minds of some members of that race, ready to be implanted and unzipped in another race that has the capacity to take them. That second race will not be the human race. I could have destroyed the node, but that is not my wish. When you reattain your full capability the human race will be on an equal if not superior footing to you.

It will take thousands of years, Daes replied.

You have slept for longer than that.

Almost with a subliminal nod Daes drew back down the informational corridor of the comlink, flooded through Hera, and back into his human body. For a moment he gazed at Hera, then he turned to the door of the house and stepped through and outside. She followed him as he walked into the jungle and stood observing the spider creatures in the trees.

‘This then, is completion of my sentence,’ said Daes.. just him.

‘More life than you would have enjoyed,’ she replied.

He inspected his hand as the skin began to peel and the substance of his flesh began to sag. Quickly seating himself he pushed those hands into soft cold ground. Inside him the intelligences separated and began transmitting into the network established in the area. In the transference they took with them the substance of his body, widening channels through the ground to the nanoscopic then microscopic, up the trunks of the trees, penetrating the hanging spider creatures through clinging complex feet. His own awareness breaking apart, Daes felt the subliminal agony he would have felt at his execution, as he similarly disintegrated. Csorian minds occupied primitive braincases, and spider creatures crawled down from the trees with ill-formed ideas, hopes and ambitions.

Hera gazed up into the sky at the descending shuttle, then returned her attention to the creature crouching by the scaled bulb of a large cycad. It was gnawing away with the intricate cutlery of its mouthparts — behaviour that had never before been observed. But then there was a lot of that now. Some had begun to build spherical nests around their egg-clusters and to defend them from other predators whilst the eggs ripened and hatched, still others plucked hard thorns from the leaf tips of cycads and used them to spear their prey.

As the shuttle landed in the jungle behind her, she watched the creature back off from what it was doing and turn towards her, waving its forelimbs in the air. The noise of the shuttle engines then sent it scuttling into the undergrowth. She walked over to the cycad and inspected the creature’s work. Neatly incised into the scales of the cycad was an ‘8’ turned on its side — the sign for infinity.

She did not know if that was a suitable remnant to bequeath.

‘Goodbye, Daes,’ she said, and turned away.