‘A what?’
‘Space was different there, somehow. Don’t worry. I’ll get to the bottom of it eventually. There was another abnormality, too, but that was here on Bienvenido.’
‘There’s a Forest on the planet?’ she asked in alarm.
‘No, no. As I was coming down, the Skylady detected something unusual, way to the east of here, a sensor return that didn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t suppose you know where the original ships came down?’
‘Captain Cornelius landed where Varlan now stands. His palace was built over his ship.’
Nigel raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I wonder if another colony ship came down in the east. The sensor return showed processed metal and metalloceramics, a lot of it.’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said, then paused. ‘There is the Desert of Bone.’
‘The what?’
‘The Desert of Bone; that’s nearly at the east coast. Nobody goes into it. It’s supposed to be haunted. The first explorers who tried to cross it came back mad.’ She shrugged. ‘Just a rumour.’
‘Curioser and curioser. And why would you give that name to a desert? Is there a map anywhere in the house? I’d like to see if my signal came from around there.’
‘There’s an atlas in the library. I think the Desert of Bone is about three thousand miles away.’
‘That’s not a problem. We can visit the anomaly once I’m established here. I can set up a trading business; that’ll be good cover to travel anywhere.’
As they approached the farmhouse, she realized the man-doll on the roof had nearly finished repairing all the shingles. ‘Don’t they ever stop?’
‘No.’
*
They were sitting at the dining-room table that evening, eating the fish pasta supper Nigel had cooked. At first Kysandra thought something was flashing. Nigel had brought several slim solid boxes the size of his hand into the farmhouse. Modules, he called them. They didn’t seem to do anything. A couple of them had tiny lights shining out of insect-eye lenses. But they weren’t the source of the light. It seemed to be coming from inside her eyes.
The flashing steadied to five hazy stars in a simple pentagon formation, then they started to change.
‘Nigel!’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s happening?’
Patterns were forming out of the stars, patterns that had nothing to do with what Kysandra’s eyes were seeing. Like ex-sight, they hovered in the centre of her perception; unlike ex-sight, they were precise and coloured. Concentric circles that slowly expanded and deepened as if she was looking down into a cylinder with ring walls. Green lines blossomed, outlining a pyramid. Spheres made up of spheres that kept multiplying, like the soap bubbles in the Hevlin’s bath.
‘The pathways I inserted have established themselves. They’re activating, that’s all. Don’t panic. It’s perfectly normal.’ He held her hand.
The touch was a comfort, but she was still startled. Then someone whispered into her brain – soft nonsense words. She yelped in panic.
‘It’s okay,’ he said instantly. ‘Pay attention to the voice. It will tell you what to do next.’
She bit her lip, but nodded. Tried to calm down and stop jerking breaths into her lungs.
‘Can you understand this?’ the foreign, soundless voice asked. ‘If you can, please say yes out loud.’
‘Yes.’
‘I am the basic operational memory package for macrocell cluster operation. Follow these instructions. There is a red diamond icon positioned at the top of the display in your exovision. Please locate it.’
‘I can see it.’
‘In order for this package to download into your cluster, you must visualize the diamond expanding. When it has done this, rotate it one hundred and eighty degrees clockwise. To cancel the download altogether, rotate it the other way. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please make your choice.’
Choice? You’re crudding joking. Like I’d choose not to!
The diamond expanded and turned clockwise as if Kysandra had shot a ’path order into it.
Something like a cross between the fastest ’path gifting ever and a jet of ice-cold water shot into her mind. The strange thoughts broke apart and snuggled down into her memories. It was as if the operating icons suddenly came into proper focus. Every function snapped into alignment. And she understood them all. How to connect to datanets, how to call someone, how to accept data, how to receive entertainment forms, how to construct her own address code, how to . . . how to . . . how to . . . ‘Crud on Uracus,’ she grunted. Most of her body’s Advancer functions were registering inert, but a medium-level medical analysis was available. She could read her blood toxin content, oxygenation, nerve reception, muscle efficiency, heart status, hormone levels, neural activity.
‘So much,’ she exclaimed, her hands waving around like a flightless bird’s wings. ‘How do Commonwealth people live knowing so much all of the time?’
On the other side of the table Nigel was sitting back in his chair, watching her in amusement. Exovision icons were superimposed across him, yet they didn’t interfere with his image. It was very strange. A call icon flipped up, with a code identifying it as Nigel Sheldon. She allowed a connection – not really having to think how to make that happen, just willing it. Icons rearranged themselves as she thought of them.
‘It can be overwhelming,’ Nigel told her. ‘You just need to learn how to filter. The secondary routines will help you.’
She grinned in delight. His lips hadn’t moved, and he hadn’t ’pathed, either. This was new, a direct datalink. ‘It’s fantastic,’ she sent back. ‘I want to learn more now. I want to learn all about everything.’
‘I think we’d better begin with some primary grade educational packages, and move on from there.’
She laughed in delight. ‘Let’s get started.’
2
‘I can zoom,’ Kysandra declared loudly as she came running down the stairs. Her ex-sight showed her Nigel was in the library, trying to instruct the farm’s oldest mod-dwarf how to turn the pages of a book one at a time. The poor old thing didn’t have much dexterity left in its thin hands and kept turning several pages at a time. A simple memory module had been rigged above the table on a wooden frame, where its camera could scan in the text.
She and Nigel had taken a trip into Adeone yesterday to get a cartload of general supplies, food and other essentials. ‘We can’t use the ship’s semiorganic synthesizers for everything, even if they stay glitch free,’ Nigel said. ‘And I can’t afford Blair Farm to have a reputation for being the place where some odd rich bloke hides out. I don’t want to attract attention. We have to be accepted as just another farm.’
Maybe the ship couldn’t extrude absolutely everything from its neumanetic systems, but Nigel had certainly got it to counterfeit Bienvenido’s coins perfectly. Kysandra carried a huge heavy purse round the stores, choosing a dozen dresses and more practical clothes (no shoes, though; ship-produced footwear couldn’t be beaten). Then she showed him which merchant to order coal from, a decent timber yard, ironmonger, stables, the town’s livestock market . . . None of them had any connection to Ma Ulvon. Nigel had spent a small fortune on the kind of things they’d need to return the farm to productivity. People were pleased to hear it. So he was right; a rich newcomer settling in was interesting but not suspicious. They were happy for her, too. Old schoolfriends had stopped to congratulate her.
When they were done with spending, they went to the library; Nigel registered himself and borrowed a dozen books on history and law.
‘Why law?’ she’d asked. The farm library didn’t have any legal books; her father hadn’t been interested in that subject at all.
‘Building blocks of society. If you want to understand how a government works, the laws tell you.’
Now all he had to do was load all the text into the ship’s smartcore. The mod-dwarf was pleased at being given a job which involved sitting dow
n all day, but frustrated with its inability to perform as instructed. Nigel was spending half his time soothing its thoughts. He looked up as she rushed into the room. ‘Zoom where?’ he asked.
Kysandra wrinkled her nose up at his odd sense of humour. ‘My eyes, stupid. Their zoom function is working.’
‘Excellent. The resequencing is progressing nicely. Nice to confirm the Void allows genetic modification to work. How about infra-red function?’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed – though that image was just plain weird. Everything a different colour, with brightness depending on how hot an object was. Still it was better than light amplification for night use, which was even stranger than ex-sight perception. ‘Got it.’
‘Great.’
‘You’re good at calming mods,’ she said, indicating the dwarf, which was concentrating hard on the book.
‘I had a good teacher.’
‘I’m going out to take a proper look at the third barn,’ she told him. ‘I still think we’d be better off demolishing it and beginning again from scratch.’ Nigel had big plans for expanding the compound, starting with building a barn large enough to conceal the spaceship from casual sight. Developing a modest industrial base was all part of his mission to gather as much scientific data on the Void as he could. And Skylady was the key to it. The ship’s smartcore could control dozens of mods simultaneously, using them as remote manipulators. But the ’path its bioprocessor smartcore generated was range-limited. They needed the ship at the farm.
‘Sure thing,’ he said.
‘I had a carpentry memory implantation this morning,’ she assured him. ‘I should be able to tell which purlins and rafters are still solid, if any.’ Commonwealth memory implants were a complete revelation. She’d been accepting four a day – which was as many as Nigel would allow her. The first three days had been spent bringing her knowledge base up to the equivalent of teenagers in the Commonwealth. She understood so many concepts now, but details remained to be filled in. For the last couple of days she’d divided her allowance between practical skills like carpentry and general information.
‘Just go easy,’ he told her for the hundredth time. ‘You need time to assimilate all the new data. It has to settle in properly.’
‘I’m using my storage lacuna so I don’t get brainburn, like you said. I’ll be fine. Besides, I know all about native wood anyway; the carpentry knowledge just adds technique.’
‘Well, listen to the neural expert,’ he muttered sarcastically.
She grinned. An icon flipped up into her exovision. One of the sensors they’d placed round the valley was showing a big cart turning off the public road three miles away, turning down the track to the valley. With the Void distorting electromagnetic communications, bandwidth was poor over such a distance. She couldn’t get a clear picture of the people riding in the cart.
‘We weren’t expecting a delivery until next week,’ she said automatically. ‘The coal’s supposed to be first, and that isn’t old man Steron’s wagon anyway.’
‘That’s not a delivery,’ Nigel said.
Normally, Kysandra had some clue about a person’s emotions, even with a decent shell wrapping round their thoughts. But with Nigel’s impenetrable shell she was completely lost. Looking at him, sitting perfectly still as he sent out a stream of encrypted code to the smartcore, she was suddenly struck by how menacing this man from another universe could be.
A second sensor, further down the track, gave a better image of the cart and its three passengers as it trundled past. ‘Oh, no,’ she groaned. It was Akstan, Julias and Russell – another of the brothers.
‘My fault. I shouldn’t have left such a big loose end,’ Nigel said. ‘That was stupid of me. Maybe I have been a little cautious about exposing myself. Shock, I expect. Well, that ends now.’
‘Are you going to kill them?’ she asked quietly. The weapons available to the Commonwealth were truly astounding, even though half of them probably wouldn’t work in the Void. Ma’s boys with their pump-action shotguns and hunting knives wouldn’t stand a chance.
‘No. That would be a waste.’
‘Waste? So what are you going to do?’
‘Recruit them.’
‘Er, Nigel, they’re pretty loyal to Ma.’
‘Did I say I was going to offer them a choice?’
The cold intensity of his voice made Kysandra shudder. Her u-shadow accessed the feed from various sensors around the farmhouse, building their images to a single picture across her exovision.
*
The wagon came to a halt just outside the gate set in the compound’s ramshackle fence. Julias frowned at the farmhouse, taking in the repaired roof, freshly painted gable bargeboards, fixed windows, pruned climbing roses, the kitchen garden with rows of newly planted vegetables, the half-refurbished first barn.
‘It wasn’t like this a week ago,’ he said. ‘He might have brought in some help.’
‘So have we,’ Akstan said, and patted his shotgun.
The Skylady had a small flock of semiorganic ge-eagles stowed on board. Nigel activated one and downloaded a set of instructions which its small smartcore could follow easily enough. It loaded its ordinance and flapped up quickly into the sky.
Akstan primed his pump-action shotgun with a single powerful motion and climbed off the cart. His brothers followed him down, their own weapons held ready. They kept their shells strong, but neither made any attempt to fuzz themselves. None of the brothers noticed the big artificial bird swooping quickly and silently through the air towards them. To ex-sight, its semiorganic components were identical to living tissue. Only its controlling bioprocessor might have betrayed it, with routines that were fast and precise rather than a bird’s natural impulse-instinct thoughts. But the difference was so tiny that they probably wouldn’t have noticed even if they had examined the bird.
Akstan directed a strong ’path shout at the farmhouse. ‘Kysandra, hey, Kysandra, you want to come out here? Be easier that way.’
She didn’t even turn round.
Akstan looked at his brothers. Russell shrugged.
‘Come on now, girl, you belong to me. Everybody knows that. Your new man in there, we gonna see him off today. He ain’t gonna be around no more.’
A shadow flashed across the group of men as the ge-eagle passed five metres overhead. Julias frowned up at it, clearly puzzled by the strange powerful shape. He was completely unaware of the aerosol it released.
‘You come out here now, Kysandra,’ Akstan ’pathed, his thoughts colouring towards anger at the defiance. ‘If you don’t, we gonna come in and get you. Ain’t gonna be pretty.’
‘What—?’ Russell murmured, and fell unconscious.
‘Huh?’ Akstan grunted, then joined his brother in an inelegant heap on the ground.
‘Now what?’ Kysandra asked as the ANAdroids carried the three comatose men into the farmhouse and laid them out on the floor of the front room.
‘I used a mild domination on them last time, so they’d agree to giving me you and the farm,’ Nigel told her as he stared down impassively at the sleeping figures. ‘Too mild, apparently.’
‘Domination?’
‘It’s a kind of mind-control technique they developed on the other world. Someone called Tathal perfected it.’
‘Mind control? You mean you can order them round like mods?’
‘Not quite. You subvert their loyalty, which makes them want to do everything you ask.’
Kysandra hoped she was keeping her shell firm, because, if anything, that sounded even more unpleasant than simply ordering people around. ‘And you know how to do that?’
‘Oh, yes. I tried it out on Ma and her family when I followed you into town. I just wasn’t forceful enough, and I was in a hurry. This time I’ll get it right.’
An ANAdroid walked in carrying a large medical kit. Nigel selected an infuser and applied it to Akstan’s neck. ‘This will elevate his brainwave activity to borderline consciousness. We have a few
techniques in the Commonwealth to subvert personality, dating all the way back to the Starflyer War, some more brutal than others. I think I’ll start with a modified narcomeme; that’s soft enough. It should help subdue any instinctive resistance. Then I’ll use Tathal’s procedure.’
Kysandra watched Akstan moan feebly. Thoughts grew out of his unshelled sleeping mind. She perceived her own face tumbling through the phantasms his semi-conscious brain was producing, the disturbing sexual obsessions she featured in, his anger at being thwarted mutating into perverted revenge fantasies.
All the lingering doubts she had about what Nigel was going to do dried up like field dew in high summer. Instead, she stood above the insensate Akstan, and used her ex-sight to perceive the complex stream of ’path that Nigel directed into his naked brain. It was interesting.
*
Heavy clouds swept in from the south-west to cover Adeone at eleven o’clock at night, obscuring the nebulas and bringing a cold persistent rain. By two o’clock in the morning, the town was asleep; pubs and clubs had closed, the docks were silent, the teams of civic mod-dwarfs had gone back to their stables. The miserable rain had even curtailed the activities of its more nefarious citizens.
Oil lamps along Lubal Street flickered and went out one by one, allowing the shadows to swell out and embrace its entire length.
Standing at the end of Lubal Street, with her shell deflecting the swirling raindrops, Kysandra looked at the Hevlin Hotel. In infra-red, the broad white façade was a dull luminous blue as the rain washed down the walls, cooling the structure.
Nigel stood directly to her left. Her ex-sight couldn’t perceive him at all. Naturally, Nigel had a far superior fuzz technique than anyone, which he’d gifted her, too. Concealment, he called it. It was only infra-red which showed her where he was, a green and blue profile where the rain dripped off his big brown coat. Infra-red also allowed her to see the others they’d brought with them: Akstan, his brothers and three ANAdroids, standing motionless behind her.