Neal Asher: Prador Moon

Moria gazed at herself in the mirror beside the door to Sylac's surgery. The polished copper aug nestled neatly behind her left ear, complementing the copper scarab in her right earlobe. She pushed back her short, black hair and smiled at herself. After shaking Sylac's still-gloved hand, she took her leave. Stairs led down to the street door and out from air-conditioned asepsis into a muggy Trajeen evening.

One of Trajeen's three moons, Vina, hurtled across the sky in one of the five transits it made throughout the night. A second moon, Sutra, sat just above the horizon and Abhid had yet to rise. Beside Sylac's surgery, Moria's hydrocar awaited, but she decided to walk for a while. She didn't think it would be a good idea driving, even though her car was linked to city control and would be shut down if she did anything stupid. She decided to stroll to the centre of Copranus City and there enjoy a glass or two of greenwine to celebrate—Sylac had not warned her not to do anything like that.

On the street she noticed two examples of what Sylac had referred to as an untoward result of the clement weather they'd been experiencing. Two groundskate were hunching and flopping along the damp foam-stone, leaving slimy trails behind them. They were small examples—about a metre from wing tip to wing tip—but best avoided nonetheless. In themselves they weren't dangerous, but numerous people were injured each year after slipping on their trails, and sometimes if you got too close you ended up spattered with their slime.

Genfactored tulip trees lined the verges. They were in flower: yellow, blue and deep purple—the colours still evident in the fading light. In the street beyond Sylac's, jasmine hedges filled the air with a heavy, almost sickly perfume and, glancing beyond them, Moria observed microcosms of weird flora—genfactored and just plain alien. The houses behind these gardens were constructed of a local sandstone the colour of pine wood and similarly striated, their high-peaked roofs clad like lizard skin with shiny solar tiles. Bulbous chainglass windows occasionally revealed glimpses into luxurious homes, but then luxury was a standard in the Polity and people only lived impoverished lives as a matter of choice.

NET CONNECTION MADE

TUTORIAL LOADED >

Moria surveyed her surroundings, walked further until she came to a small park area in which a fountain cut cursive lines through the air above a wide pool containing giant lilies with flowers like purple claws, and shoals of small, blue flatfish in pellucid depths. All around her the scented air filled with the chirruping and occasional flutter of flying frogs. Finding a stone bench Moria seated herself and told her aug, Go.

VIRTUALITIES SELECT >

FANTASY REALMS

MODELLING REALITY

PREDICTION

EXPERIMENTAL

MANUFACTURING

The list scrolled endlessly down, but the tutorial chose the second on the list. Immediately, Moria found herself gazing into a blank white realm of infinite depth.

SELECT YOUR PLANETARY SYSTEM USING VOICE scrolled across her vision. In her head spoke the words: Trajeen planetary system — present moment .

Starlit space filled the void, with the Trajeen system truncated to fit within her perception. She observed the planet she stood upon and the relative positions of the three moons around it—Vina being the only one visibly moving. The sun seemed close and she could see the arch of a solar flare. A quarter-orbit round and twice the distance from Trajeen as that planet was from the sun, the gas giant Boh lay tilted and swirled through with bands of blue, orange and yellow, seven of its eight moons hanging like steel ball bearings around it and the much larger moon, Tangie, with its internal living ocean packed full of exotic seaweeds, was a jade sphere coiled with pearly cloud.

SELECT CONSOLE AND CHOOSE CURSOR.

Console and square expandable cursor.

Numerous icons and virtuality controls sprang into being, framing her present view. The square that appeared at the centre of her vision moved with the motion of her third eye, though the view itself remained fixed. She brought it over to one of the icons and a text box appeared: THIS CONTROL ALTERS YOUR POV IN THE SYSTEM. Of course, when Moria began to try out the icon, with the prompting and frequent intercession of the tutorial program, she discovered it was nowhere near that simple. She could call up a three-dee map and place her point of view on that, she could input coordinates, she could whip through the planetary system as if aboard some craft travelling at any speed she chose, she could also select the time of this POV, moving back into recorded images—when available—or into modelling mode in both the past and future. Moving on to try out the endless layered icons and controls she realised there seemed nothing she could not do, she just needed to find out how. She could place objects in the system, track and alter vectors, play "what if" by moving a planet, moving anything, changing, reformatting, adding or taking away. She could work out how to bring about certain events and track back to reality to see the many scenarios that could bring them about. It was endless.

"Aug trance," someone said.

Briefly she surfaced into the real world and saw a woman stabbing a thumb at her as she and a man strolled past. Both of them wore augs themselves and the man grinned at her knowingly.

The tutorial took her on to explore applied mathematics, chemistry, though she sidelined the vast potential in organic chemistry with its programs for modelling genfactored life forms. Two hours later, with her neck stiff and the sky purple-black and flecked with stars above her, she paused the tutorial.

SUBCONSCIOUS LEARNING? > the tutorial program suggested. Finding out what that was about took her a further ten minutes. The tutorial could cycle at a level just below consciousness, almost like sleep-teaching. She chose that and stood. Walking then in a strange fugue in which she could interact with the real world around her while the tutorial played just at the edge of perception, she went to find those glasses of greenwine. In a bar in the city centre she chatted with two runcible technicians who recognised her from the Trajeen runcible project. When they headed off she found herself a niche and called up images of the two cargo runcible gates, one tracking a slow orbit about Trajeen itself and the other lying in orbit about Boh, the gas giant.

Thus far it had only been possible to transmit small objects through runcibles—nothing larger than a twenty-person shuttle—and mostly they were planet based and used to transport humans. Now over Trajeen and Boh they had built gates which, in theory, should be able to expand their Skaidon warps like the meniscus of a bubble. It should be possible to send through large spaceships, even asteroids should their ore value be worth the effort. The project received much criticism: Why transport large ships through a gate when such vessels could use their own underspace drives to enter that continuum anywhere? Why transport ore asteroids when they can be refined in situ and the product from them transported? Moria's answer to those who asked her such questions was always, why not?

RUNCIBLE TECHNOLOGY? > the tutorial suggested, and Moria lost herself for a further two hours. When she finally went to find her hydrocar and instructed it to take her home on automatic, she understood why it was necessary for her to take time off. Two more weeks of this, and by then she would have acquired the basics, the very basics.

The area beyond the armoured wall had been smashed by explosions and scoured by fire. The walls, floor and ceiling were torn apart, insulation bulged like moss from the rents, and power cables and fried optics hung sizzling. Some of the jags of metal protruding nearby still glowed red and kicked out oven heat, and smoke hung thick and acrid in the air. This all became more disorientating because no grav-plates were functioning here, and Jebel lost any perception of up and down. Urbanus paused for a moment, then abruptly stooped and flung Jebel over his shoulder. Jebel closed his eyes as the Golem began negotiating his way, fast, through the lethal chaotic jungle of hot metal and smoking plastic. At some point pain and blood loss impinged, and Jebel lost consciousness.