‘I bet that smarts, you little fucker.’
Enough for voice recognition.
Complex pheromones, a fingerprint of the exudations of one human life—Crane even knew how Alston smelt. Pelter had not stinted on providing the information for recognition.
In another fragment of the Golem’s mind: a detailed library describing the numerous functions of the human body—how it lived—and in mirror image the numerous ways Crane could halt those functions. There was no emotional baggage attached. It comprised no more than a dry scientific description of how to turn off the human machine.
Pelter’s order acted across these two fragments. In the first: how to locate one specific human. In the second: how to cause that same human to cease functioning. ‘Anyone who gets in your way’ being unspecific was more problematic. And interaction with other partially disconnected fragments coloured Crane’s basic actions. ‘Gets in your way’ depended on Crane’s location. Pursuing order, Crane surmised: sea>island/ anyone>Alston.
He decided to be methodical.
The bottom abruptly dropped away and soon Crane was stumbling down a slope as if all this time he had been walking on the spoil heap from a seafood plant. Then he stepped from shell onto the clay bottom of a channel, sinking up to his calves before his boots hit something firm. The surge of current from one side carried silt in a jet stream away from where he stepped, shooting to his left and out of sight behind more mounded shell, but this current caused him no more problem than having to hold his hat in place. At each step, tubeworms emerged from the clay and gasped out their feeding heads like white daffodil flowers, as if Crane’s weight was bearing down on some soft, hidden, communal body lying underneath.
The dark-otter threw a shadow before it from the glittering surface above as it came hurtling up the channel against the current, probably tracking the cause of the silt disturbance. It was the limbless pelagic form, black as coal and ten metres from the tip of its long tail to the massive carp-gape of its toothless mouth. It dipped its head towards Crane and, perhaps knowing the shape he bore was poison to it, then swung up and circled above him. Many of its kind had, over the years, made themselves ill by trying to eat human corpses deliberately dumped into the sea precisely to teach that point. If it did attack him, Crane would define it as part of the mentioned ‘anyone’. But the creature soon lost interest and continued up the channel and out of sight.
Reaching the other bank, Crane climbed for ten metres up through tumbling shell the currents had mounded along the rim of an underwater stone plateau. This plateau provided a more stable environment for the life that preferred to inhabit the shallower waters near the island. To his right a fanfare of trumpet shells jutted and waved above a bed of penny oysters. Single kelp-like trees spread canopies in the waves, fracturing the sunset light, and in their tentacular branches pearl crabs fluoresced like Christmas lights. Slightly to the left of his current course, one such tree was particularly bright with nacreous luminescence. Crane changed his course to bring him there—this delay was acceptable as Pelter had given no time limits, only the vague instruction to be ‘swift’.
Caught, hanging in the convoluted branches, legs dangling down the spiral trunk, the burned and broken corpse seemed a crucified pearly king, or some macabre decoration in a casino town. Crane recognized Semper only after a recognition program propagated across five of his mind fragments, which connected to his library of human biology and physiology, and Crane then worked out how the man had looked. He reached up and tugged at one skinless foot. Semper dropped from the sea tree and, trailing pearl crabs and a small shoal of steel-blue fry, slowly sank to the bottom. What Alston had done to this man, Crane recognized. How could he not recognize Serban Kline’s gift to himself? How could he fail to recognize that thing he had fragmented himself to escape? He moved on.
What was it that coloured his actions when he finally reached the island shore? The emulation of the emotion—or rage itself?
16
A spaceship, even a clunker centuries old, is a complex and valuable piece of hardware, so most owners of such, including private individuals, ECS and the many other organizations gathered under the Polity AI umbrella, work on the principle of ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ and ‘If it works don’t throw it away.’ That is the reason for the wide variety of interstellar and in-system ships now prevalent. It is why you will see old ion-drive landing craft operating alongside craft exclusively using antigravity — and every evolution of landing craft in between. In interplanetary space, you’ll find ancient ion-drive liners operating beside the most modern fusion-drive craft, great ramscoop cargo haulers, or survey craft propelled by chemical rockets. Crossing interstellar space are ships centuries different in design using all the aforementioned engines for their in-system work, plus radically different U-space drives, too. In the most modern ships, that drive will be a discrete machine contained at the core. In the older ships, balanced U-space engines are in dual, triform or quadrate format. These are normally positioned outside the ship, on piers, to distance the mind-bending drive energies from the ship’s crew and passengers — who often need also to travel either in hibernation or sedated.
— From How It Is by Gordon
The plain was an ancient seabed scattered with salt pans left as, over many centuries, the sea had evaporated. Weathering had revealed fossil remains, boulders containing crystals of smoky quartz like inset windows to a cold furnace, and fields of stones sieved out of the ground by the perpetual wind. Arden, during her long sojourn here, had journeyed a great deal within the perimeter allowed her. She had found a wonderful fossilized twelve-metre ancestor of an apek, all glittering iron pyrites and opalized carapace, and, acceding to her request, Dragon had sealed it under a layer of some rough substance similar to chainglass. She had found diamonds, emeralds, star rubies and sapphires, as well as other nameless gems and, with the disquietingly organic mechanisms Dragon manufactured for her inside itself, had cut and polished them. For a woman whose lifetime areas of study had been xenobiology and xenogeology, it had been an interesting time, and only as a matter of principle had she regularly protested against Dragon’s imprisonment of her. She supposed her patience stemmed from having been born within the Polity. With all the benefits of a genetically enhanced body and a seemingly limitless lifespan, what was the hurry?
Because of Arden’s long and detailed study of the plain, she knew precisely when she reached the area Dragon had excavated and then replaced above itself—not because the land level was higher here, as there were many such areas across the plain, but because of the meticulousness of the geology. The boulders with their quartz inclusions were placed just so, the stone fields looked as if they had been raked, and single fossils were placed artfully on dusty surfaces. There seemed something akin to a Japanese stone garden about it all, or of some display in a Polity museum. Trudging back from the edge of the plain, her pack of light camping equipment slung from one shoulder, she recognized a particular boulder with a seemingly wind-excavated hollow under one side of it, and veered from this signpost to head for her home—the one she possessed here anyway. Then she jumped in surprise, dropping a lump of pale yellow beryl she had just found, when one of Dragon’s pterodactyl heads slid out from underneath that same boulder and rose above her with a hissing roar.