Without even thinking about it, Cormac found himself flexing his muscles rhythmically against the hard structure that bound him, just as he would have worked against any conventional bonds. He considered stopping doing this, but didn’t—had to try every possibility.
‘I don’t know enough. I don’t know why you came here in search of Dragon. I don’t know if your main motivation is survival or aggression, or if it is something else now utterly alien to me.’
‘Suppose it is aggression, what should I do?’
‘I don’t think I should give you any ideas you might not have had already.’
The renewed pain slammed him about, writhing against the entrapping structure. He had freedom to scream. Locked his jaw against it. Eyes open wide, he saw the world with startling clarity: like a blind man achieving vision whilst being burnt at the stake. An age passed, and then another.
‘Answer the question.’ Skellor’s voice came out of some dislocated reality.
It took some seconds for Cormac to realize that the pain was gone, and to reassume control of his organic brain, emerging from those places he had retreated to within his gridlink. Briefly he experienced one of his captor’s memories: a market stall on a world undergoing terraforming, a plastic box containing pieces he recognized as Jain tech, and something else—an egg… Cormac dismissed this memory to storage. It was no help to him now.
‘I would attack…’ he began, then paused as he lost the thread for a moment. ‘You should attack using manufactured viruses, disease, plague, biological warfare. You have the capability to create something to kill people faster than boosted immune systems, autodocs or Al-manufactured counteragents can prevent it. You could also send the virtual versions of all of these against AI.’
Cormac felt no guilt in saying this to Skellor. If the man had not already thought of these methods of attack, then he had been severely overestimated. And anyway, the Polity had been preparing for as well as countering such attacks from Separatist organizations for centuries now.
‘But how would I distribute such plagues? I could never get such things past the biofilters and scanners of the runcible network.’
‘You have a ship.’
The colony ship now appeared as a curved metal horizon viewed through the front screen of the lander and, even as the pain hit again, Cormac heard the hiss and whine of hydraulics, felt the lander judder, and heard docking clamps thump home.
‘So I should personally visit each world in turn for the purpose of biological and virtual attack?’ Skellor detached his hand from the console, pushing himself up and away from it. ‘Just how many worlds do you think I’d manage to attack before I ended up with ECS sitting on top of me?’
Cormac closed his eyes. It felt to him as if someone was sequentially smacking each of his vertebrae in turn with a hammer. He writhed and fought, then suddenly, unbelievably, the Jain substructure binding him began to loosen and move. Hope surged in him as the pain also faded. Then he saw Skellor grinning at him.
‘Come with me,’ said the biophysicist.
Cormac pushed out of the chair, the substructure moving plastically around him like an alien exoskeleton. He turned and propelled himself after Skellor towards the airlock. He had not wanted to move or to obey; it was the structure itself moving him—an exoskeleton controlled from elsewhere. In the lock he stood immobile whilst Skellor subverted the door’s controls. He then wondered why Skellor had used this method to control him, and not simply attached another of those aug insects.
Hearing his thoughts, Skellor said, ‘Your body is just a machine that I can rebuild any time I like. Your mind I have decided to keep sacrosanct for now. If I destroy it, how can it appreciate its own suffering?’
The man was lying, Cormac realized that in an instant, but it was knowledge that availed him nothing. The airlock opened and they propelled themselves out of it into the body of the ship. Cormac’s first breath was a dry gasp from the inside of a rusting pipe. In seconds, he was gasping for oxygen. Nevertheless, perpetually on the point of suffocation, he followed Skellor up into the control bridge.
‘Of course I won’t allow your body to die for the present, as I don’t want to take the trouble to rebuild it,’ Skellor told him. ‘You’ll not suffocate, though that’s how it feels.’
On the bridge, Skellor impelled Cormac to clean the captain’s chair of the dead man’s sticky remains. Still gasping, he carried out his grim task, glimpsing Skellor inspect the cancerous scar tissue at his own waist. The biophysicist then looked up in irritation and allowed Cormac more freedom. Cormac immediately pulled up the hood of his environment suit, closed the visor, and breathed real air. Skellor had obviously tired of that game. Stacking bones and dried-out skin to one side, the agent observed Skellor remove his thin-gun from some hidden pocket and place it on a nearby console—another more subtle torture. Then the rogue bio-physicist pressed his hand down on the main computer console. After a hiatus, he tilted his head back and issued a sound somewhere between a scream and a snarl.
23
It has ever been an instinct to abhor the different and hate the alien, and like many of those human drives stemming directly from ‘selfish genes’ it is one easily controlled or even banished. Human history is littered with hideous crimes, decades of strife and near-genocides because of such drives. It should be different now. Planetary national borders are nonexistent, most people are of evidently mixed race, and they can change their racial appearance and sex at will, or even simply cease to be human. One would suppose this has rendered reasons for hate impotent. Not so. Catadapts will detest rodapts, who in turn are hostile to ophidapts, for no more reason than reflecting a pale imitation of terran predator-prey cycles. Many humans consider AIs an abomination, and many loathe them—as the superior, or rulers, have always been loathed. Pure-bred humans can find haimans repugnant, and haimans can consider pure humans primitive animals. To dispense with these hatreds, we need not to want them. Unfortunately, people cherish their bigotry, misanthropy and animosities, and they don them like well-worn and well-loved clothes.
— From How It Is by Gordon
Tanaquil wanted to rage at the strange oldster because he saw Fethan as part of Jeelan’s death and the current metallier disaster. Did this now also mean that Tanaquil’s dream was dead, that the entire metallier dream was dead? Would he ever get to stand on the bridge of the Ogygian?
He wanted to reject the alien—the interfering outside. But Tanaquil had been well educated and was harshly intelligent and, believing the man’s claim to have caused the demise of the horrible enslaving creatures, he could not allow anger to triumph over reason. So only one task remained.
A short walk from where so many broken corpses lay scattered brought him to an abandoned metallier house. He searched the storage areas underneath it and found a couple of spades. Without question, the old man took the one Tanaquil passed him. In silence, they returned to the charnel house and began to dig. Out of the drifting smoke walked a skinny youth with blond hair, who gaped at his surroundings with raw and horrified eyes.
‘Sir, what do we do now?’
Tanaquil wanted to scream at him—just scream wordlessly.
‘Bury them,’ he growled.
Other people arrived, some to help dig and others carrying weapons to guard against the things shifting in the dark of the Undercity, no doubt lured by the smell of fresh meat. Tanaquil gave no more than that initial instruction. That those who had not heard it carried out his orders anyway he reckoned was due to some residue of that enslaving bond they had all recently felt. The corpses must also be buried or burnt before nightfall, else the place would be crawling with sleers. For Tanaquil the task was endless horror. His head ached horribly, and a liquid kept seeping out of the hole behind his ear. But he wanted Jeelan in the ground, safe from hard mandibles, and a fast closure so that he could again rule his people. It was cold, but otherwise… he would just fail.