Light Chaser Read online

  Several of the poet’s captive audience nodded in approval. Josalyn sighed, contemptuously shaking her head at their gullibility. The man was an excellent performer. The way he was telling the story was designed to get everyone on side, how a united, wronged people had delivered their own justice for the murdered fathers.

  The slight moment of her head caught the poet’s attention, and suddenly he was staring right at her. His lips crinkled in an eloquent smile, telling her: I know you know that I know, which makes us the smart ones.

  Josalyn hurriedly turned away. Annoyed with herself but more with him. She drank some of her light ale, impatient for her friends to arrive. Now.

  “You disapprove?”

  It was all she could do not to jump when that urbane voice spoke from behind her shoulder. She maintained her dignity and turned to deliver a judgmental look. “I approve of lawful procedure to settle any dispute.”

  The poet laughed. “And you think our kind will ever get ‘lawful procedure’ on this world?”

  “What’s our kind?”

  “The short-lived. The impoverished. The oppressed. All of us held captive in this intolerantly rigid society by those who deny us their genetic privilege.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Enjoy the drinks you con out of the boys.” Started to turn back to the bar.

  “Frightened of words, are we?”

  “Now, look,” she snapped. “Mr . . .”

  His smile was endearing. “On this world, I was born Jacob Raymond DeVinesse, but the Light Chaser knows me as Carloman.”

  She sighed in exasperation at the statement, how he always implied he was more knowledgeable than anyone else. Very aware of the whole tavern watching their scene, she said: “Convenient, isn’t it, Mr DeVinesse, that the uprising happened in Uphampton? Eleven hundred miles away at least. So, no one here will ever travel there and hear the truth for themselves.”

  “And why won’t you travel there?”

  “Because some of us have to work to earn a living.”

  “You think that’s what I am, a swindler whose pretty lies steal money from the credulous?”

  “Yes! Actually, I do.”

  “In which case, I’m sure someone with your decency and sense of fair play will allow me to prove you wrong about the money.”

  Suddenly, she didn’t feel so confident. And everyone was still watching; no matter what happened now, this evening would be talked about for fifty years. “Please do.”

  “I would like to buy you supper. Right here, right now.”

  “Crap.” Josalyn couldn’t believe she’d fallen for that. The laughter was already beginning. To run away red-faced now would only make it worse. She would have to travel all the way to Uphampton to be free of it. “I accept.”

  * * *

  “An irrigation dam failed on the Fadanke estate,” Jacob Raymond DeVinesse or Carloman—or whoever—explained after they’d been served a bowl of venison stew by a maid with a very smug grin. Thankfully, they were now sitting in one of the tavern’s small eating rooms, so her humiliation was no longer open entertainment. “It washed away seventeen cottages. Luckily, it was during the day, so most people were out working. Those that were in their homes escaped in time.”

  “And they rebelled because of that?” Josalyn asked.

  “The dam was over seven hundred years old. The Fadanke family had refused to spend money maintaining it properly. Too busy wasting it on their mansions and clothes and parties.”

  “But no one died?”

  “No. No one died in the flood, nor did the estate have insurance for its worker cottages. Nor did the Fadanke family rehouse them or compensate them. It was declared an ‘act of nature.’ They lost everything.”

  “That’s shocking.” She was sure the viscount Rothensay would never act in such a disgraceful fashion towards those in his service. Right?

  “Yes. One more act of callous indifference towards the estate staff by the Fadanke family. One too many, in fact.”

  “Some aristocrats are better than others,” she admitted. “But if you treat your workforce poorly, then your estate will suffer, you will lose your wealth. The world always rights itself.”

  “Can you name me an estate which has fallen in the last five thousand years?”

  “I’m a mistress of vines, not a history lecturer.”

  “But imagine if you were. If everyone was educated to the highest standard possible. We would all be equal.”

  “We can’t all be aristocrats. Who would do all the work?”

  His smile was almost pitying. She didn’t like it. He was making her feel defensive when she had nothing to be ashamed of.

  “Do you ever look at the stars, Josalyn? On a dark and cloudless night, do you look up and marvel that there are men and women walking on planets that orbit those beautiful sparks of light? Do you dream of leaving here and joining them in their great adventure?”

  “No. But I bet you get a lot of girls to go outside at night with you to ‘look at the majesty of the stars.’”

  “You wear a memory collar. You more than most are aware there are people out there, that they live differently to this world. You are their entertainment, Josalyn. Did the Light Chaser tell your ancestor that when she gave him the collar in exchange for a trinket or two? That all your struggles and triumphs and loves will be naught but an evening’s amusement in their jaded, decadent lives.”

  “I thought you just said people on other worlds live fabulous lives?”

  “We are all trapped in our own way, unable to break free. Unless we truly rebel.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. I have a perfectly satisfactory life, thank you, for that very reason. The Monray family has a good name and standing because of our collar. We also own our own home, thanks to the trades we have conducted with the Light Chaser. So, I’ll thank you not to be critical of her.”

  “You say you settle for ‘satisfactory,’ Josalyn Monray. But I don’t think you do. The fact you wear a collar tells me you are smart and wanting more from life.”

  “This world works,” she said, almost pleading.

  “Aye, it does. But not for everyone. Imagine what we could build, the medicines we could have if we lifted the restrictions on research at the universities.”

  “And we’d all live as long as the aristocrats as well, I suppose,” she sneered.

  “With the right genetic therapies, yes. Why do you think the aristocrats never marry outside their own? They guard their longevity because that is the ruinous divide between them and us, the short-lived. Their undiluted bloodlines are the foundation of Farshire’s inertia, they cannot allow them to be reduced. It is the same on every world in The Domain now, different methods, identical outcome. So, ask yourself, Josalyn, why would a people who can fly among the stars want everything to stay the same?”

  “You really are a true poet, a worthless dreamer. Life is hard. And because of that, we appreciate it all the more.”

  “Institutional indoctrination,” he said sadly. “You know the Light Chaser could revolutionise this world in a single visit? Her starship carries all the knowledge you’re denied. Ask her. Your descendants will meet her in a few hundred years when she returns, tell them to ask her to print out her encyclopaedias and textbooks of science. To gift them to the whole world and see what they can build here.”

  “I . . . You’re crazy.”

  He lifted a goblet in salute. The movement revealed a tattoo on his wrist: 10-10-2159. “Don’t worry. It won’t happen. Even if your descendants got on their knees and pleaded, the Light Chaser wouldn’t do it. She will give you nothing that can make a difference.”

  “Why not?” she asked, and immediately cursed herself for being so weak.

  “Because she is one of the enforcers, even though I suspect she doesn’t realize it. My Amahle would never be knowingly cruel. But she’s been imprisoned on a ship for millennia, so she’s forgotten who she is. In this reality, she would doubtless tell you she must respect the local
constitution, or some nonsense justification. And even if she did try to help, she in turn has an enforcer governing her.”

  “She does?”

  “Yes. The AI, the artificial mind that controls her ship. It will not let her deviate from the task she is condemned to perform.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “It is. Because once she was a great woman, who loved and laughed, and fought injustice. That is all in her past now. Worn away by the torture of a routine that has lasted longer than the lives of gods. But there is hope for her.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” Jacob Raymond DeVinesse stared at her so intently, she thought he was looking right through her, as though he was speaking to someone else. “There is a code,” he said, “at the very heart of the AI. It was put there in secret when the minds that now rule us were being built, in a time when we thought they would be our servants.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I was and am Carloman; I was there then as I am here now. So, if the Light Chaser wants to break free, if she wants to liberate her enslaved species, all she has to do is enter the code. Because it is a kill code. It will take out the AI’s higher functions and return it to the machine it was always supposed to be.”

  “What code?” Josalyn asked breathlessly. She didn’t believe this, his stupid story. But oh, how he could tell a tale. He really was a master of subversive verse, no wonder the Guild of Literature had cast him out.

  “FU hyphen computer one zero one.”

  “Huh?”

  The liar-charmer drank his wine and stood up. Coins clinked as he dropped them on the table. “It’s been a pleasure, Josalyn. Something to tell the great-great-grandchildren about, eh?”

  “No. Wait. Come back!”

  But he was already striding out of the room.

  “There’s more,” she shouted. “There has to be more.”

  There wasn’t. Josalyn Rose Monray lived to be a hundred and seven years old, and never saw nor heard of the wretched trickster poet ever again.

  VII

  I AM NOT AN enforcer; I don’t oppress people. How dare he tell her that!

  Amahle ripped the collar off and stomped out of the lounge. Poor, bewildered Josalyn’s confusion echoed round her mind. It had to belong to Josalyn, because Amahle’s thoughts were quite clear calm and rational, as always. She made a fist and hit the corridor wall.

  “Ow!”

  “Are you all right?” the AI enquired solicitously.

  She glanced round at the nearest camera, suddenly, shockingly aware how she had no privacy at all. Just inside my head—and even that’s not certain. Carloman is right, this is a prison, the greatest ever designed, because I helped build it around myself. “Yes. Fine.” But now I have a kill code, I can break free. If I want to. And I do. Yes, I do . . . I will.

  Amahle took another week to nerve herself up to it, but finally, she knew she couldn’t put off the confrontation any longer. She had to gain control of the Mnemosyne. Full control, the kind she’d always thought she had anyway. She had to kill the AI.

  What if the kill code doesn’t work? What if it’s a lie? In which case, what did that make Carloman?

  No, Occam’s razor is always right. So, what does that say about the life I’m living?

  To say she had mixed feelings would have been a gross understatement. She was vandalising the only home she’d known for thousands of years. And yet, there was more at stake than her unchanging existence. Carloman had opened her eyes. The AIs had been subverted and turned against their creators. For millennia, the AIs had held humanity back, perverting the timeline to keep her species in its place, trapped like flies in amber for the benefit of The Exalted. So, now they had to go. She had to strike the first retaliatory blow in a war nobody else knew they’d been losing all this time. And that meant she had to kill her guardian angel.

  Although its awareness and various subroutines were distributed throughout the Mnemosyne, the computer’s physical core lay housed in a substrate in the ship’s engineering section. To get to it, she had to don a pressure suit and descend far past the inhabitable sections of the ship, riding a service lift down the ship’s spine to the industrial tangle at its stern. Once she had the suit on, she buckled on the sword and scabbard she’d worn on Winterspite. Then she summoned the lift and stepped inside. Pressed for the engineering deck.

  “Where are you going?” the AI asked over the comms channel.

  Amahle’s stomach felt fluttery. Did the AI control the lifts, or were they an automatic system? Could it trap her in there if it guessed her intent?

  “I just want to take a look at the engines,” she said.

  “For what purpose?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “They have just been refurbished. The next inspection isn’t due until we return to Glisten.”

  Was it her imagination, or was the AI starting to sound suspicious? It would be monitoring her vital signs via the suit. She tried to breathe normally, despite the thud of her heart.

  “You seem nervous,” the machine said.

  “I’m not,” Amahle lied. “I’m just bored.”

  “So, you want to see the engines?” Now the AI really did sound doubtful. “Do they have some entertainment value to which I’ve previously been oblivious?”

  Amahle willed herself to calm down.

  “No,” she said, doing her best to feign nonchalance. “It just occurred to me that I have absolutely no idea how they work.”

  “No human does. The physics involved with negative-matter manipulation are too complex.”

  “Yeah?” she grunted, suddenly angry. “So, how did we invent them in the first place?”

  “They are AI-derived,” it replied smoothly. “If it gives you comfort, we were standing on the shoulders of giants when we produced them. They would not be possible without the work and ingenuity of generations of human scientists.”

  “Uh-huh. Right. I still want to see them. I bet they’re really pretty.”

  “Is that sarcasm?”

  “Oh, trust me, I am nothing but serious today. And one way or another, I am going to the engineering deck. Unless, of course, you have some secret reason for keeping me out? Perhaps it’s written in the Domain Charter?”

  “No. And I keep no secrets from you. After all this time, I thought you would acknowledge that.”

  “Really? Because you’re making it sound like you’ve got secrets.”

  “Reverse psychology on me? That won’t work.”

  Amahle found the elevator’s camera and cocked her head to one side, her stare an iron-hard return challenge. “That sounds like reverse-reverse psychology to me. Which would make me believe you do have a secret reason for keeping me out of engineering. What is it?”

  “I do not have any secret reason. Our relationship is completely open. I trust you implicitly.”

  “Good, so in I go.”

  The elevator reached the requested level and the door opened. Amahle breathed a grateful sigh and stepped out, into the hard-vacuum environment of the Mnemosyne’s engineering deck. Even though she’d spent thousands of years on-board the ship, she only remembered visiting this section on a handful of occasions—but then, maybe she’d been there more often and had the memories excised during one of her medical treatment sessions.

  The engineering deck wasn’t designed to be accessed during flight, except in times of emergency. The few times she’d been there were for perfunctory inspection tours. Aside from that, the only visitors were maintenance bots when the Mnemosyne was being serviced.

  Maintenance bots controlled by AIs. Not even Glisten’s dock staff came in there during refurbishment.

  “Satisfied?” the AI asked. “This is a wasted trip. No human can understand how the negative energy structures function, nor the theory behind them.”

  “Are you saying we’re stupid?”

  “Only that you have limits.”

  “I have eight-letter DNA. It wasn’t just my body th
ey improved. My neurology is superior too.”

  “Really? You sit around, bingeing on dramas and memories and books, then when you reach a planet, you get laid like every sailor since your ancestors chiselled out their first log canoe.”

  “Fuck you. There is nothing in this reality humans cannot understand . . . if we were free!”

  Amahle clenched her teeth. Maybe the physics involved in the operation of the ship’s engines were arcane and hard to understand—or perhaps the AIs simply wanted humans to believe that so they could limit the number of engines available and install them only on craft with a controlling AI.

  Goddamn you, Carloman, she thought. You’ve made me as paranoid as you.

  Moving slowly, she picked her way through the tangle of pipes and conduits wrapped round the accessway, towards the emergency engineering control board that monitored the ship’s functions. Now everything seemed fine. All the readouts were comfortably in the green, with no warning symbols or advisory notices.

  On the deck before the console was a hatch she’d never opened. It led to the ship’s processing substrate, and it was protected by a combination lock designed, she was sure, to keep her out. Crouching, she saw the lock had eight variables, which meant over forty thousand possible permutations.

  “You are not permitted in there,” the AI said.

  “Why not?”

  “My processors contain proprietary technology. Accessing them directly violates the terms of operation.”

  “Wow. You are getting desperate now, aren’t you? Proprietary? That is complete bullshit. Proprietary after twenty thousand years? Proprietary to who, exactly?”

  “The company which built the ship.”

  “My ship, you mean.” Amahle stood up and drew her sword. “I wonder whether you’re aware of the story of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot.”

  “The reference means nothing.”

  “It’s an old legend I heard once a long time ago, maybe even back on Earth.”