Free Polity Agent by Neal Asher Page A

kind.’
     
    ‘That’s how Lucifer felt?’
     
    ‘Yes,’ Chaline said staring at him, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
     
    ‘Like the dreams—there’s that telepathic link. Lucifer would have been under some stress then, and not shielding himself from you so well . . .’
     
    ‘There was a lot of stuff. We were all “under some stress”. I felt anguish, and incredible anger—I don’t know how much of it was my own.’
     
    ‘Anything else?’
     
    ‘He felt guilty. We’d brought him home and because of that put ourselves in such danger. Many of us died. I guess the guilt was understandable.’
     
    ‘Thank you,’ said Cormac, standing. ‘I think it’s time for me to look at those downloads now.’
     
    Chaline remained in her seat, watching him go. Once he was through the shimmer-shield and the irised door closed behind him, he asked, ‘How moral a creature was Lucifer, do you think?’
     
    ‘Neither more nor less than any human being, I would suggest,’ replied Jerusalem.
     
    ‘So the Makers were “consolidating”, and they’d also sent an organic probe, which later named itself Dragon, to the Milky Way. I reckon they were getting ready for a massive expansion.’
     
    ‘That would seem plausible.’
     
    ‘And they’d been working with Jain tech for some time . . .’
     
    ‘So it would seem. Coincidental that during the expansion of the Polity we found nothing but the mere remnants of Jain technology. Then, within a few decades of the Maker’s arrival and Dragon’s dramatic reaction to that arrival, a working Jain node somehow ended up in the hands of a biophysicist quite capable of knowing how to use it.’
     
    ‘I think we need to have a long talk with Dragon.’
     
    ‘Yes, I agree,’ replied Jerusalem.
     
    * * * *
     
    The soil under his feet was a deep umber, scattered with nodules of dark green moss and speared by the occasional sprout of adapted tundra grass. Some growth clung to rock faces and exposed boulders in defiance of the dusty gales that scoured here twice each Martian year. However, the red hue of Mars was discernible in this place as in few others now. Horace Blegg walked to the edge of a declivity that descended in tiers and steep slopes for five miles. Far down in Valles Marineris there seemed the gleam of some vast still lake. It was no lake, however, but the chainglass ceiling of the Greenhouse, which had been the first step in an early terraforming project and now contained forested parks. How things had changed during Blegg’s enormously long life.
     
    Cormac believed Blegg to be something created by Earth Central—an avatar of that entity—and not really an immortal survivor of the Hiroshima nuclear detonation. However, Blegg knew himself to once have been a boy called Hiroshi who walked out of that inferno. A boy who grew into a man with the ability to transport himself through U-space. A man who could turn inner vision on his body and had learned how to change its appearance at will, just as he had so many times changed his name. At the time when they built that edifice on the shore of Lake Geneva to house the Earth Central AI, he was calling himself Horace Blegg, and so he remained ever since that entity woke for the first time and perceived him.
     
    ‘So, Hal, let’s talk scenarios,’ Blegg said abruptly.
     
    After a pause, when there came no reply, he gazed in a direction few other humans could perceive, and stepped there. Mars faded around him, and momentarily he existed in a realm without colour, distance, or even time. Then he was pacing towards a runcible gateway on that same world, curious faces turned towards him. He ignored them, stepped through. Another transit lounge, gravity even lighter and his steps bouncing. He located himself, then transported himself again into a very secure chamber in the Tranquillity Museum on Earth’s moon.
     
    At the centre of this chamber rested a hemispherical chainglass case covering innocuous looking