Neal Asher: The Voyage of the Sable Keech

‘How many shells now?’ Janer asked.

‘One hundred and twenty—all minds older than myself.’

Janer winced. It was well to be reminded that this particular mind—the youngest—had been around for about ten thousand years. There were many more even older ones: strange minds seemingly incapable of communicating with humans, or perhaps just disinclined.

‘Most older minds still keep to Earth, though,’ he observed.

‘It’s what they know, though to me Earth seems more alien than other worlds I’ve visited.’

‘Yes, we saw many together.’ Janer was starting to get irritated. Over the last few hours the mind had just been rambling: it wasn’t getting to the point. The mind must have sensed this, again causing him to wonder just how close the hivelink keyed in to his thoughts.

‘You are independently wealthy,’ it said.

‘Certainly, and all due to you. But it wasn’t my fault you didn’t establish nests on Spatterjay. Is that what this is all about? Is that why you called me here?’

‘Spatterjay,’ the mind repeated.

In the background of that word arose an angry buzzing. Janer knew it to be mere theatre, since individual hornets might buzz, but the mind itself was a disperse and not easily definable entity, and it certainly did not make any noise it did not want to. He considered the strange and lethal world just named.

Second on Janer’s list of weird places he had visited was Spatterjay. A virus there toughened human bodies to nigh indestructibility, and there were people sailing the seas of that world, Old Captains, who had lived perhaps a thousand years. A strange place. A place where the most valuable commodity for the Hoopers—as the people there were called—was death. Death came in the form of a poison obtained at great risk from sea-going leeches the size of whales. Sprine, they called it. Sprine was what this hive mind had once paid him to obtain for it, so it could adapt its hornets to carry the stuff in their stings and thus become the ruler of that world. Their mission had failed.

‘I do hope you’re not expecting to get your money back,’ said Janer, eyeing the hornets on his shoulder—which gave him at least something to address. ‘The Earth Central ruling was not open to interpretation. I did what you asked of me, even though I only did it so we could finally kill that damned skinner creature. And you were warned that your actions, though they might not be illegal under human law, would nevertheless not be tolerated.’

‘I do not want my money back,’ the mind sulked.

‘Then what do you want?’

‘Many people infect themselves with immortality,’ the mind told him.

Ah…

‘Yes,’ Janer agreed, ‘Spatterjay has become a big attraction for Polity citizens. We live in an age when you can choose your route to eternal youth, and some of those choices become quite esoteric’ Janer mulled that over. In the Polity, that political unit ruled by artificial intelligences and now spread across a considerable portion of the galaxy, death could quite often just be a matter of choice. ‘Are you going after the sprine again?’ he added. He studied the circular leech scar on the back of his hand through which he had been infected with the Spatterjay virus. Soon, before that virus started breaking down inside him and causing him some major problems, he would have to return to Spatterjay for reinfection. It was thus he himself had been infected with immortality.

‘I am not.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. For I suspect that, if you were to try, this partial home of yours might end up subject to an accidental meteor strike. Polity AIs tend to get a little tetchy when their warnings aren’t heeded.’

‘But someone else is,’ the mind added.

‘Due to the lower gravity here and some minor tinkering with the trees’ genome, our redwoods can grow half a kilometre tall,’ explained Hannister, the tour guide. ‘They reach maturity very quickly—a hundred years—and that is when they are harvested.’ She turned from gazing up at the forest giants to survey her party.

Three were not easily identifiable. They were clad in grey enviro-suits, their faces concealed by domino masks. Two of them also wore short hooded flak jackets, while the other wore a tighter-fitting long black coat, which was also hooded. There seemed something unsavoury about them. The rest of the party consisted of a catadapt, an ophidapt, and five standard-format humans. The little girl, who was clearly the apple of her parents’ eye while an all-round pain in the arse to everyone else, was the first to pipe up.

‘But surely that’s not ecologically sound,’ she said in a kid’s voice seeming to contain a hint of fingernails on blackboard.

‘That would be the case if they were part of the local ecology, but they are not. Firstly the biota here is incapable of breaking down that quantity of cellulose, secondly, a falling mature tree often takes others down with it, and thirdly they are a valuable resource to the economy here.’

‘You make money out of them,’ said the girl.

Hannister hated talking to children, which made her particularly unsuited to this job. She turned to the rest. ‘Harvesting is also necessary because once the trees reach maturity they begin to produce viable seed. We do not want any of that seed germinating outside the plantations.’

‘Because a competitor might acquire seed or saplings,’ said the girl.

Hannister frowned at her, then decided it was about time she checked her aug. Her augmentation—a piece of computer hardware that nestled behind her ear and linked into both her brain and into vast informational networks—displayed some text in her visual cortex:

Smile Pettifor, 8 years solstan, Solsystem Abraxis Station…

She did not need to go any further. For a moment she thought the girl might be one of those people who preferred perpetual childhood to perpetual adulthood.

‘Are we to proceed to a harvesting now?’ hissed the masked individual in the black coat.

Hannister finally soft-linked to his ident and auged again:

Taylor Bloc, reification incept special request Anubis Arisen, Klader Alpha—

Reif?

Hannister suddenly felt her mouth go dry. She was not entirely clear about the details. On some world it had been fashionable to reanimate murder victims, using implanted technology, and send them after the murderers. These reanimations had possessed no intelligence, merely rough memcordings from their dead minds and programs to follow. In later years, as memcording from dead brains was perfected, people could live again. Some of them chose to live on in their own corpses—some cult had arisen out of it all. Reifications were high-tech zombies. Hannister felt it all very well for her to be showing around adapted humans, and brats, but she was not sure how she felt about acting as a tour guide to the dead. It was then she recognized a slight whiff of spoilt meat and realized it had been in the air all along.

‘Drave, do you know there are reifications in my group?’ she sent.

Drave replied: ‘ Yes, I do, and, being as they are buying a whole tree from us, I suggest you treat them with the utmost consideration.’

‘Shall we move on?’ said Hannister, smiling.

They rode up on a supervisor’s platform to observe the harvesting. Other platforms, holding other tour groups, hovered in the forest nearby. Hannister gazed at the arboreal giants all around and felt a familiar loosening in her chest. They were awesome, and she was part of all this. Glancing back to her group she felt a flash of irritation. The tourists were surrounded by all this yet they were waiting to be entertained. She stooped and opened the locker to one side of the platform’s control column and began passing round disposable image intensifiers, glad they would not be returned because no way was she again handling the ones the reifs took.