Neal Asher - The Gabble

‘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.