The Skinner Read online

  Keech stared for a moment at the wound that had killed him before snicking his aug back into place with a wet click, then reaching down to press some pads on the metal enclosing his side. This shell lifted with a slight hiss and he detached it completely and put it on top of his trunk. The side of his body now exposed was mostly transparent synthetic skin under which could be seen organs repaired with synthetics, a network of blue tubes spreading from the two nozzle orifices, and rib bones that had been burnt black. After a brief visual inspection, he swabbed this area down too. When he had finished, he replaced the metal shell, then returned to the bed to don the clean overalls and his lozenge pendant. After yet another inspection of himself in the mirror, there sounded that dry click from his throat, and he spoke.

  ‘Hotel AI, I wish to take a sum of a thousand New Carth shillings from my account, in hard currency. Do you have this facility?’

  ‘I do,’ replied the hotel. ‘There is an auto till in the wall to your left. You are aware that a thousand shillings may be much more than you will require here. The exchange rate against the Spatterjay skind is very high.’

  ‘I am aware,’ said Keech, ‘but I may be here some time.’ He took a smart card from his pocket and inserted it into the slot in the wall. A hatch immediately slid open and the auto till poked his card back out at him. Behind the hatch rested a stack of hundred-, fifty- and ten-shilling notes. There was also a cloth bag containing coins. He opened this and took out one transparent octagonal coin, which he brought up to his eye. In an approximation of surprise, he raised the brow of this eye. He hadn’t seen one-shilling pieces in a very long time – centuries in fact.

  Janer lay back on his bed with hands folded comfortably behind his head. He thought about Erlin and felt a vaguely pleasurable buzz at the prospect of getting to know her. She was classically and strangely beautiful, with her white hair, black skin, and blue eyes, yet Janer felt sure her appearance was not due to cosmetic alteration. These combined features were too much at odds with each other to be anyone’s natural choice. In his experience cosmetic alteration fell into two camps: the extreme where people went all the way into something like catadaption or ophidaption, or the subtle one, where they just had some small alteration made to their appearance to make it more pleasing. More likely, he suspected, her appearance was the result of a past genetic alteration in her family line, as no doubt was her intelligence. This was how it was for most people now. He closed his eyes and summoned up an image of her to contemplate. This didn’t last though, and his mind began to wander.

  Nothing from the link at the moment – which meant that the Hive mind was preoccupied. That was good, as he didn’t feel much like talking. There had been no communication from it for a number of hours now, but that was nothing unusual. The mind controlled a huge conjoined hive of something like a billion individuals, so it had plenty of other tasks on which to focus its attention. Janer considered how things had changed since the days of paper nests and maybe just a few hundred hornets.

  Back then 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 cute 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 dolphin, and were substantially more stupid than the farm animal humans had been turning into bacon on a regular basis. As for whales, they had the intelligence of the average cow. When a hornet had first built its nest in a VR suit and lodged its protests on the Internet, it had taken a long time for anyone to believe what was happening. They were stinging things, creepy-crawlies, so how could they possibly be intelligent? At ten thousand years of age, the youngest Hive mind eventually showed them. The subsequent investigation had proven, beyond doubt, that groups of nests thought as a single mind, not with the speed of synapses, but with the speed of slow pheromonal transfer. The nest in the VR suit had been linked, at that rate, to many other nests. It had communicated using the anosmic receptors inside the suit, and this had taken it many months. Now, every hornet carried a micro-transmitter, and the speed of Hive-mind thought had become very fast indeed.

  Of course, immediately after this revelation, there had been a scramble to find more of the like, and all the other social insects of Earth were intensively studied. Disappointment after disappointment finally brought home the fact that hornets, like humans, were a bit of an oddity. The only social insects that came close to them were the wasps, but they came in at the level of a chimpanzee as compared to a human. Bees, it turned out, did have Hive minds, but they were alien beyond the interpretation of the most powerful computers; their communication was limited to the ‘now’ – the concepts of past and future being beyond them. Ants had no Hive minds at all.

  Janer considered how he himself had been plunged into this strange world: his payment – his service to this mind – for killing a hornet that had tried to settle on his shoulder in a crowded ringball stadium. It had been tired, that hornet, searching for somewhere to land and take a rest, tempted by the beaker of Coke Janer had been drinking. His reaction had been instinctive; the phobic horror of insects had risen up inside him and he had knocked the hornet to the ground and stamped on it. The court judgement had come through the following day, and not having the funds to pay a fine, he had signed up for two years’ indenture. Killing a hornet was not precisely murder, as each creature was just one very small part of the mind. There were stiff penalties, though.

  Janer sat up, swung his legs off the bed, then stood and moved over to the window of his room. The view was a mildly interesting one, between tower blocks and across crop fields and hydroponics houses, towards the wall of the Dome. It wasn’t the view he wanted, though. Now he wanted to see outside the Dome, now he wanted something of more interest. In his two years of being indentured, there had been no shortage of that, and it was the main reason he had gone directly from indenture-ship to paid service for this particular Hive mind.

  ‘What’s out there?’ he asked.

  When there came no response from his Hive link, he shrugged and returned to his bed. He knew something about what lay beyond the Dome itself, and anything else there was to know he would find out soon enough.

  2

  The others, clustering like sheep on the small islet, fed by leaping into the sea and sinking through passing shoals of boxies, snapping up one or two of the creatures during the descent, but that was not enough for this particular whelk. Perhaps more intelligent and adventurous than its fellows, it had found an excellent feeding-ground some distance from the islet. Here, opposing faces of rock walled a passage through an undersea ridge, and the whelk had learnt that at certain times this passage swarmed with shoals of boxies. It did not know anything about tides or how it was that, when the moon was not in the sky, the apex of the ridge broke the surface so it acted as a barrier to the eternal migration of the strange little fish. Nor did it understand that the passage was the only way through the ridge. All it did know was that if it waited for long enough on one of the rock faces, there would be a cornucopia of mobile dinners just about when it was beginning to feel hungry again. It also found that by leaping from face to face through passing shoals, it could gobble up many more boxies – before it reached the bottom – than by simply falling through a shoal. Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch – someone is keeping a tab. The whelk grew faster than its own shell, and soon its tender pink body was bulging out around the lid-like clypeus that had otherwise kept it safe. A small leech, which had also discovered the bounty of the passing boxy shoals, eventually dropped on to the dispeptic whelk, wound around its shell and, extruding mouth-parts like the head of a rock drill, reamed in through tender flesh and fed.

  Ambel had nightmares of a sea of shifting leeches, and dreams of a thousand years of better days. The wind from Deep-sea bulged the sail, and the sail w
as content with the lumps of rhinoworm it had eaten that evening. Dawn’s green light threw those lumps into silhouette, where they were being digested in the sail’s transparent gut, and it brought Peck hammering at Ambel’s door.

  ‘There’s turbul coming under! Turbul coming under!’

  Ambel sat upright and distinguished the distinctive thumping coming from the hull, as the shoal of turbul passed under it, from the usual ratchet and clack of the ship’s mechanisms. In something of a daze, he gazed around his cabin and inspected the meagre requisites of his existence. His blunderbuss was secured with hide straps in one corner, next to the cupboard containing powder, shot, and the extensive toolkit for the weapon’s maintenance. A narrow wardrobe contained his plasmesh shirts, trousers, and reinforced boots – the only clothing that satisfied his requirements of durability. Below the oval brass-rimmed portal was a shelf on which he had stuck a few ornaments with clam glue: an ancient piece of re-entry screen polished like a gem, a miniature human skull of faceted flint, and a cut slave collar. His gaze slid across his desk strewn with maps held down with a satlink position-finder fashioned in the shape of a preruncible calculator, and came to rest on his sea-chest. So easy to accumulate so much in the course of a long life. He stared long and hard at the chest then gave a half-shrug as he tossed his covers back.

  ‘Turbul!’ shouted Peck again. ‘Turbul!’

  ‘One moment,’ Ambel replied.

  He put his feet over the side of his bunk, stood and walked to the wardrobe to take out his neatly folded clothing. Back at the bed, he dressed, then sat down and carefully pulled on and laced up his boots. Standing once again, he walked to the door and carefully opened it. He had to do everything carefully, did Ambel. A moment’s inattention could have him inadvertently ripping off someone’s arm or putting his elbow through the ship’s hull.

  Peck was hopping from foot to foot in his excitement to get back to the lines. He had a piece of rhinoworm in one hand and a bait-plug cutter in the other. Purple blood was dribbling from the meat and in his agitation he was spattering his long hide coat, canvas trousers, and the surrounding woodwork. Ambel gestured for him to get on. Peck eagerly nodded his bald head, a crazy look in his greenish eyes, and then he turned back to his fellow crewmen on the deck. Here there was much yelling and swearing, and there were many heavy wet creatures thrashing about. Ambel looked past Peck just as Pland hauled in a turbul the size of a canoe and leapt on top of it to stop it from flicking itself over the side again. The turbul was much the shape of a canoe, in fact. Its head was the head of a caiman, and all around its dark-green body, bright-blue fins seemed to have been scattered at random. Its tail was a whip ending in a fin that resembled a hatchet.

  ‘Yahoo!’ yelled Pland as the turbul bucked underneath him and tried to throw him off, then, ‘Keep still, yer bugger.’ He was indifferent to the wide gash the turbul had opened in his back with the lashing of its tail. Ambel stepped over and caught hold of the turbul’s snapping jaws in one hand, then with his other hand reached over and flicked it firmly between the eyes with his forefinger. There was a dull thud as of an iron bar hitting a log. The turbul’s eyes crossed and its body went limp.

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ said Pland as he dismounted. ‘Reckon you can pull this’n? He’s a bit big for me.’

  Ambel shrugged, took a firmer grip on the turbul’s jaws with his right hand and put his left hand on the flesh behind its head. He pulled, and with a ripping sound the head pulled out of its socket with the spine following. As he continued to pull, the tail and fins drew into the turbul’s body, finally to disappear. When Ambel repositioned his grip halfway down the turbul’s spine for one last heave, the creature’s flesh came off like an old sock, leaving him holding a straggly mess of head, spine, a baggy sack of internal organs, and the fins and tail – all still joined. He held this up in front of himself for a moment and gave it a couple of shakes. The eyes uncrossed and the spine, fins and tail began to writhe. The end of the tail whipped at Ambel’s face but he easily caught it.

  ‘Naughty,’ he said, then tossed the turbul over the side. In the water the skeletal creature swam around for a moment before sticking its head out above the surface and issuing a noisy, snorting neighing. It then dived and swam onwards with the rest of its shoal.

  ‘Remember, lads, we only need enough for fifty pickle barrels!’ Ambel shouted to the rest of his crew as they hauled in smaller turbul and pulled them similarly. One after another, stripped turbul swam away making those indignant snorting noises. Soon the deck was scattered with slippery tubes of meat sliding about on the acrid turbul chyme. While baiting a gleaming hook Ambel contemplated how so very slowly Polity technology was filtering into their lives. Ceramal hooks that never seemed to get blunt now, when he could remember the days of carving them out of bone. At least the bladder floats were still the same. Stepping back a little so that he had room to cast his line out, he nearly tripped over on a sliding turbul body.

  ‘Anne! Barrels and vinegar!’ he bellowed – but not too annoyed as he knew his crew tended to get distracted at moments like this.

  Anne shot him an irritated look, reeled in her line and hung it on a hook fixed to the rail, then called a few of the junior crew to join her. Hopping over turbul bodies, she led them to the hatch leading to the rear hold, slid it aside then swiftly climbed down. Two others followed her down into the hold, and two remained on deck to swing across a winch arm and feed the rope down.

  ‘Reckon that’s it,’ said Pland, holding up his latest catch. This turbul was long and thin, its body pocked with leech holes. The thumping against the hull of the ship was abating now and becoming difficult to distinguish from the clunking of the mast chains. Ambel pulled up his own latest catch, inspected it for a moment, then unhooked it and tossed it back.

  ‘End of the main shoal now,’ he said. ‘Just the leech-hit.’

  Peck reluctantly pulled in his own line and coiled it, then, from a locker below the rail where most of the ship’s hunting gear was stored, he removed a long and lethally sharp panga. Ambel moved over to join the juniors and help them swing across the barrels Anne and the others had loaded into a cargo net. Once the net was on the deck, they rolled the empties to one side. Ambel then broke open a sealed barrel and the rich smell of spiced vinegar wafted out, almost drowning the acrid smell of turbul. Meanwhile, Peck had started cutting the turbul tubes into neat rings of flesh.

  ‘Good run,’ he said, sawing away enthusiastically.

  ‘Good run,’ agreed Ambel, taking up the lacework of rhinoworm steak, which was all that remained of their bait, and heading towards his cabin. Peck watched him go, his knuckles whitening around the handle of the panga. When he returned his attention to the turbul meat, he hacked at it savagely.

  The Line, in this case, was a glassite strip set in the ground, running across under the arched exit from the Dome. Janer had a puzzled expression as he stood staring at this strip, his identification card held loosely in his hand.

  ‘No real barrier here, nor any form of customs. All that was at the runcible installation on Coram,’ said Keech.

  ‘But what about the other side – the Spatterjay side?’

  ‘The Hoopers don’t give a shit about things like that,’ said Erlin.

  On the Polity side of the Line, a neatly slabbed path ran between fields of giant maize and plantations of pomegranate trees. Janer looked round at the trees, then down at the Line again. On the black earth of the Spatterjay side lay the burnt husks of this planet’s equivalent of vermin: the stinking remains of some kind of bird, a spiral shell the size of a man’s head, and some flat decaying remains the size of a man’s leg, which had to be one of the famous leeches. Janer took this all in. He glanced up at the small laser mounted in the apex of the arch, then at the hornets in their carry-case on his shoulder.

  ‘It’s monitored,’ said Erlin. ‘I don’t think an AI would like to end up indentured to a Hive mind, do you?’

  ‘The mind has never v
iewed this world before,’ said Janer. ‘Its worry was not about its units crossing the Line now, with me, but about them returning across it, should the mind wish to send one back alone.’

  ‘I would think the automatics could distinguish, but you can ask at the gate. There’s sure to be one of the Warden’s subminds in attendance.’ Erlin gestured to the side of the arch as the three of them advanced. At the gate itself, Janer looked up in the air, as most people did instinctively when addressing a non-visible AI.

  ‘Warden, my Hive mind has expressed some reservations about your automatic bug-zapper. Will it distinguish between hornets and Spatterjay life forms?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course it will,’ replied a somewhat irritated voice. ‘Only humans make that mistake.’

  Janer muttered something obscene and stepped out of the Polity. With her amusement barely concealed, Erlin followed him. Keech had no expression on his half face, even when the laser and attached eye swivelled to follow his progress.

  Beyond the gate was a wide street lined with peak-roofed wooden buildings, many of which were shops and drinking dens. A market sprawled across the earth road, and Hoopers were enthusiastically hawking their wares to other Hoopers, and to the Polity citizens who had dared to come across the Line. Erlin gestured to a stall where wide green-glass terrariums contained the writhing and glistening shapes of leeches.