The Bosch: A Novella (Polity Universe) Read online

  THE BOSCH

  A NOVELLA

  BY

  NEAL ASHER

  Previously unpublished.

  This edition published by Neal Asher on

  Amazon Kindle.

  Copyright © Neal Asher.

  The right of Neal Asher to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  THE BOSCH

  Yoon swims towards the lake of the Progenitors. It is forty miles away and, though she vaguely knows the figure, it means little to her. She encompasses the world and it lies within her and, while she looks youthful and fresh, the silver hairs on her head number her years. Conventional time and distance measures of the base-format humans are not useful to her.

  In the pellucid waters of the tail lake she ceases swimming, a stream of silver bubbles rising from her lips. She surfaces and strokes leisurely for a shore, stones touch her feet, ribbons of pink and emerald weed brush her legs as she stands and walks up onto a beach of nacre and limestone sand, scattered with the jewelled shells of ammonites and brown carapaces shed by moulting trilobites. She takes a long breath through her nose and on the out-breath ejects the water from her lungs, then looks up at the sky. Evening twilight has rendered it in shades of deep violet and blue, some stars showing between swathes of dark cloud. She can feel something out there that is not immediately visible, but her senses range and connect, and she gazes with her whole self.

  An object like a child’s spinning top hangs in orbit, scaled with the mica flecks and protruding numerous spines like the sensory tendrils of her trilobites. Around it other objects attach and float as if this thing might be infested with amphipod parasites. She feels an almost nostalgic twist of recognition that links to large portions of her mind that have remained inert for so long, then a partial connection within that raises the spectres of words of definition and communication.

  Non-recognition of another object, nearby, or far – she cannot tell – draws her attention. Stone. The word rises into her consciousness attaching mental threads to the world around her, then begins to fade for lack of context, thought somewhere inside she knows it is not quite right. With the whole of her perception she sees it flake off part of itself, which drifts across towards the first object, as she sits on the sand, picks up a shell to study its intricacies. Those inert portions of her mind now shift and seek to draw her attention, her connection. Suppressing this seems to take more effort than before, and such is her concentration that too late does she realise she is no longer alone.

  The body shell of the first figure flickers with cooling rings she briefly recognises as the aftereffects of concealment. They appear above the short mud and slate cliff at the back of her small beach even as she stands, brushing the sand from her behind. They make noises and she sees in them the shape of her own reflection in still water and of the others of the world, but deep inside knows they are not of the world. One of those portions of her mind springs open like a spring flower, and sounds and shape take on meaning.

  ‘Looks like we got ourselves one,’ says a man with skull of polished opal and a face all ridges and whorls, as the other four come up behind him. Three are men with cropped hair rainbow coloured from underlying tattoos. Their shell coverings have a tight almost organic look and black sheen. The woman with them, for Yoon now recognises her as such, is slim elfin and sickly pale, and wears a glassy carapace over some other sand-coloured material. When she grins she reveals the fangs of a snake.

  Yoon looks to the lake, uncomfortable with this encounter, ready now to return to the waters and flee old knowledge rising in her mind, but the big man raises an object. Bright flashes scar purple across her vision and punch down into the depths behind her raising explosions of steam. With just a slight whine she knows issue from his covering he jumps down, feet thumping deep into the sand. The woman follows, leaping way over both their heads to land ankle deep in the water, and turns to point another object at Yoon’s face. Threat is evident, but any kind of response is not. She just stares at them.

  ‘Nothing to say?’ asks the man.

  Word meanings flicker in her skull. She continues studying them, identifying objects and actions in a growing lexicon: armour, laser carbine, snake gun, servo assist, while the three in black she identifies as Batian mercenaries. But these float in a gulf of incomprehension. She makes a noise – a rusty croaking from vocal cords so long unused – and words of response dart like fishes from her grasp.

  He reaches out fast and grabs her forearm, fingers closing with bruising force. Dropping his carbine to hang from its strap he pulls a manacle attached by a chain to his belt and closes it about her wrist.

  ‘Sure you can handle her, Ibruk?’ says one of the Batians, which seems a source of amusement to the others.

  The man, Ibruk, glances at the Batian and shows what seems to be overdramatic annoyance, then tugs on the chain. She follows him across the strand. Danger is here and she becomes aware she must act. She stoops, comes up with a handful of sand and throws it in his face. As he flinches back she reaches down with her free hand and crushes the manacled one, bone and gristle crunching, pain intense. Slipping the manacle free she leaps for the water, but the pale glass-armoured woman hits her mid-flight and they fall to the shallows. Yoon claws at her opponent, toxin-laced nails sliding off glass. With a hiss the albino’s jaws open too wide and she bites. Yoon recognises the poison flooding in even as the paralysis spreads and unconsciousness ensues.

  Sunlight beams in through the cave mouth. Rage rises up inside Yoon around blank spots in her mind, like burns too painful to touch. But she knows she has been violently assaulted. Wounds penetrate through her wrists and ankles, broken bones grate against each other sending sick waves of pain through her, skin and muscle are torn and bruised and her poisoned claws have been ripped out. Aware that the assault extended beyond these injuries, she lies in filth with blood leaking from her vagina. A ball of pain sits between her legs, while four compartments of her womb have closed about distinct seed so violently expended.

  Yoon sits up, slowly stands, and makes her way out into the sunlight. She gazes longingly at the waters beyond the strand. But she cannot return, not now, the anger and the insult require response, and to respond, she must return to all of herself. Urgency is also a factor, because the perpetrators were not of the world and so might depart it. She dips her head and closes her eyes, internal vision upon her simplified mind that even now is becoming more complex because some of those inert portions strain for activation. Reaching into herself she also reaches out, to the world and its storage. Fragments of mentality open and connect. Memory rises:

  Yoon opens her eyes, aching all over, teeth broken in her mouth. She recognises the cave by the fossil clams in the roof and the yellow and green calcite streaking the walls. It is not far from where they captured her. Further pain makes itself known and she looks aside at her manacled wrist. They have pulled her claws and ensured the manacles cannot come free by dint of spikes driven through them and her wrists. They have chained her spread eagled – all manacles similarly fixed and their chains leading to pegs hammered into the floor.

  ‘And it’s just this?’ says one of the Batians. ‘A punishment?’

  ‘Does it bother you?’ asks the snake woman.

  ‘Just seems a lot of effort, but you pay so you say.’

  Yoon clamps down on that. She is not ready to encompass the rest because in her simplified state it might break her. Instead she circumvents recent memory and slides into what went before. The century of just living in the world,
without complex thought, rolls away and all her previous life begins to fall into place. She drops to her knees, weakened by blood loss certainly, but mostly by a history her mind cannot contain and does not contain, for it is etched into her world. Millennia of memory open to her. Time passes, but now she can measure it. Within this she finds the correct responses, the old responses, and the necessities.

  Yoon stands and with her whole self she gazes at the sky. The first object she earlier saw from this beach resolves as a space station five miles across that has sat there for longer than living memory – for most living memory. The amphipods are the ships of the traders, travellers and seekers of novelty, docked around this structure, or in the process of arriving or leaving, here to bring the beads and toys they hope to exchange for the biologicals her people make, only to learn that hard currency or transfers to the her world bank will do. This is all as usual but, as she noted in her more simplified state, something else has come.

  Yes, it looks to be made of stone but is almost certainly some other material. The mega-ship is a frozen thick-armed orrery, or perhaps gimbals for there are no representations of worlds or moons in it. It is opaque to her as so many things are not, and a curiosity. Those aboard looking down on her home will see the Mandelbrot patterns of lakes across its surface, each swirl of them like, as someone once said, a string of anal beads coiled on itself. The object she saw flake away was a shuttle heading to the station, but it is no longer there and she traces it down to the surface – to the human city and its space port. Perhaps, despite being docked to the station all the while, this arrival has something to do with the attack upon her? She flinches away from that as suppressed memory threatens to rise. No matter. Her law is what it is and she will act as she acts.

  Aware now of the extent of herself, and the facilities of the body she wears, she powers up the organic circuitry in her skull and reaches out to the space station and works around the connections to an AI long turned to dust to find the warden. He is a descendent of the family that has ruled there for millennia – the dregs of a human polity that either no longer exists, or has moved on somewhere else. Though his cerebral additions are mechanistic, contact establishes quickly. He recognises her at once even though his grandfather was the last she spoke to there.

  ‘It is you,’ he says. ‘Rumours were that you died long ago.’

  ‘I am alive,’ she says. ‘What ships have departed the surface in the last ten hours?’

  ‘None, goddess,’ he replies. Even through his primitive cerebral implants she feels his desperation to speak further – to expand the contact – and his frustration with the long-established protocols that do not permit this.

  ‘Allow none to depart until I give permission – there has been an incident,’ she tells him.

  ‘This is . . . unexpected. The rules are understood. What sort of incident?’

  ‘I have been assaulted and the culprits must make restitution.’

  ‘Assaulted! You!’ His shock breaks the contact for a moment, but then he comes back with, ‘If you could give me detail on the assailants. . .’

  ‘That will not be necessary. Now tell me about the new vessel?’ she enquires.

  ‘A new Krodor ambassador has arrived and, like so many, of course seeks audience.’

  ‘On what matters?’ As she asks this she acknowledges a connection, for the man Ibruk is a krodorman.

  ‘He did not feel inclined to tell me.’

  ‘He will have to wait.’

  ‘Many have been waiting for a very long time,’ he observes.

  ‘And they will have longer to wait yet,’ she replies, the hint of reprimand in her tone.

  ‘Your will,’ the Warden agrees quickly. ‘Can I assist you in other matters?’

  She decides to throw him a bone. ‘When I have dealt with this particular matter I will contact you again.’ Then she breaks the link.

  Yoon walks across the sand to the water, and wades in. Human time and distance are a factor here so she will not swim all the way to the Progenitors. Her rapists will be in the city and unable to leave now she has given her orders. The Warden will inform all those below and, if that is not enough, use station weapons against any who try to depart. However, the rape was so calculated; the knowledge of the response so widely understood. There must be machinations behind it, escape routes and contingency plans and human politics she cannot yet parse. She pauses, remembering the response of this Ibruk to one of the Batians, and surmises that either he did not want his name spoken, or he wanted her to know that he did not want it spoken. There is some subterfuge here she cannot yet see. Yoon grimaces. No matter. The Progenitor must come first and events will proceed from there. Placing her hand the water, she swirls it, blood dissolving and spreading a message already written.

  Next diving in, she swims out and tends to other needs. Internal vision gives the extent of the wounds and accelerated response raises her body temperature until hot swirls of water depart her skin. Her finger ends close and generate new nails, peaking through with curved points, muscle reforming until she can extend them a half inch from her fingertips. Inside her vagina, tears heal and knit. Bruises darken and shrink leaving yellow in their wake, and that fades. Abrasions shudder, shedding slivers of dead skin.

  She focuses on her belly, seeing carvings there in some opaque script. A scrap of memory surfaces and integrates before she can stop it:

  . . . the pale woman is the worst, carving patterns on her belly with a glass knife and playing with herself the while. . . Finally it is over. The woman looks up to Ibruk, who stands expressionless. She nods to herself then bites, and Yoon’s world goes away. . .

  Yoon shudders back into the present and the practicalities of her aims. No seed from the woman – no source of a Bosch – but Yoon will find her. She closes the cuts on her belly and erases what the albino ophidapt woman wrote. In her womb Yoon holds miserly onto the precious cargos, separate and living. Breathing water she hangs in clear depths, dives to bivalves, sheep-huddled on the bottom, waves a hand over them and they open. She pulls out their offering of flesh leaving the living and soon-to-regenerate animal behind, feasts under water and steadily renews her resources. Finally she surfaces and sees the great fin approaching. A Progenitor has come, sensitive to her blood, great mouth agape and full of triangular teeth, the great white shark of its ancestry writ large: one of the engines of the biology of her world.

  Kicking water she waits until it passes close, one of the human arms growing from behind its lower jaw reaching out and brushing her with shark skin fingers. Turning, she swims with it for a while then reaches out and clasps the big hand, towed along by the shark. Gently, rhythmically in the language of touch and timing, she strokes its side in four distinct areas. The shark shudders with pleasure – the message reaching down through its nervous system and eliciting the expected response. Its tail stops flicking and it shudders again. The egg package – a worm with four clear spheres inside – oozes out of its back end and twitches in the current of the next flick of its tail. She releases her hold as the shark turns. Sculling back to the package she cups it in her palm. It is smaller than her little finger. Bringing it down between her legs she pushes it into the mouth of her vagina and feels it eagerly squirm inside. She tracks its progress to her compartmentalised womb where it implants each egg, its body deflating to a wisp that will fall out of her later. Fertilization is marked by four small shocks transmitted through her autonomics, and ensuing growth is fast and hot. She doesn’t know what Bosches this will produce, though she can guess and knows they will be appropriate, and swims down to the clams again to feed the process.

  She eats and burns, heating the water around her again as she did during healing. Her stomach bubbles with strong acid quickly digesting the clam protein, fats and minerals. Blood runs thick to her endometrium as eggs grow fast into masses of cells and then zygotes enwrapped in fleshy cauls. Her torso expands as she swims to the surface to breathe oxygen and recharge her cells,
for that in the water is not enough. Swimming down again she clutches clamshell and squats. Her underwater moans send away a shoal of ammonites in inkjet panic. Trilobites that had been attracted by the debris from her feeding scuttle away too. She dilates, moaning still, and the first zygote sac slides out, trailing cord, then the next and the next, sticking themselves to the bottom. She rests for a while before dispelling the fleshy placenta. They will feed on that after they have eaten their cauls. A wave of her hand and its output of pheromones open clams on the bottom all across the lake. The same pheromone brings the crustaceans and molluscs back, and then catfish, black tuna and shoals of other fishes. None of these feed though there is food aplenty. They are bent to her will and waiting – food themselves. She swims for the shore.

  Yoon pulls herself from the water, sniffs the air to detect the drift of cooking smoke. She must prepare now to venture into civilization and, for that, she must first go to her own people. They have not seen her up close for some decades, and even back then just a simplified creature swimming the tail lakes, but they always remember because she is written into their code.

  Petod and Imhran threat display, their ink flushing blooms of red against the intricate blue, and sometimes orange fire in the charcoal skeletons of buildings. They circle closer and closer to violence, muscles taut and oiled and sweating the hormones of sex. They have drunk the Progenitor milk as is custom, but their genetics are not customary. Lactose intolerance takes its toll as they stamp and gesticulate. Imhran farts like a fog horn and Petod replies with the drawn-out quack of a duck dobblering past. Their tense expressions twist as they segue into the ridiculous, fall together in giggles and guffaws and collapse to the dust.

  The tribe is disappointed by the lack of injury and subsequent demonstrations of self-healing. Females shrug amusement at yet another mating fight without conclusion. All move away – some to their cyst houses, others out into the Fen and still others taking the road to the city, loaded down with packs of biologicals for the off-worlders. Petod smiles to himself.