A world called ocean, p.24
A World Called Ocean, page 24
The discovery of the existence of control clusters on the Ships had been exploited as proof by the first colonists that the Ships had been placed specifically on Ocean for Mankind by God. It seemed clear they were designed to be used, directed, controlled.
The attraction of the idea couldn’t be denied. The control cluster could be used to steer a Ship. Anyone could do it. It didn’t even, to Alis’s limited knowledge, require any real training. Anyone could do it.
“Don’t touch it,” Van Iendos warned from behind her. “If this Ship so much as even flinches it’ll be obvious there’s someone up here. We can’t take the chance that word might get back to the Sacred Fleet.”
Alis nodded and stepped back. She hadn’t intended to touch the cluster anyway.
No, that wasn’t true, she thought. She was lying to herself. She wanted to reach out, take the cluster between her hands, feel it respond, feel the Ship shudder and move beneath her feet …
She turned back to Van Iendos. “All right, I’ve waited long enough. I want some answers. Now.”
Van Iendos looked at her, then turned to one of the other men. “Go get him,” said Van Iendos. The other man nodded and disappeared into a room she hadn’t been in yet, casting a quick and nervous glance at her as he went.
He returned, seconds later, with another man, old and backbent. The old man nodded slightly to himself as he was led by the arm into the bridge. His hair was white and shaggy, and he seemed to be dressed in rags. Lines criss-crossed his face like a map. He mumbled slightly, and she had the feeling he wasn’t really aware of his surroundings.
Van Iendos stood, put one hand on the old man’s shoulder and looked at Alis. “Miss Dorican, may I introduce you to my good friend and host, Alexander Fulhaus.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was impossible. She stared at the old man’s rheumy eyes, looked at Van Iendos. He was watching her, waiting for her reaction. She stared impassively at the old man, thinking; that would make Fulhaus well over two hundred years old. How gullible does this idiot think I am?
There were life-extension technologies on Earth, it was true, but not advanced enough to keep someone alive for this long. The science was still in its infancy, hadn’t even existed when Fulhaus had been trapped on Ocean all those centuries ago. It was impossible that he would still be alive. The man must be an impostor, or Van Iendos was deluded, or, or …
Or was it possible? In his own way, Fulhaus was in the same league as an Einstein or a Newton. Or a Hitler, depending on your political viewpoint. Before he’d rejected Ceti technology outright and founded what became the Gaean Principle, he’d been part of the team that had deciphered the hundred lines of the Prometheus Code, purported to be in the language of the Cetis. Over the decades that code made possible connections between worlds separated by half a galaxy, all showing the telltale traces of Ceti species manipulation…
There was one other possibility.
She stepped forward, looked closely at the old man. He looked at her nervously and she smiled gently, to try and put him at his ease. He mumbled something incomprehensible under his breath.
“This isn’t possible,” she said to Van Iendos. “He—” she looked at the old man. She gestured to Van Iendos and he followed her out of earshot of the old man.
“Fulhaus died centuries ago,” she whispered to him. “This just isn’t possible. And frankly, he doesn’t look like him, either.”
“Doesn’t he?” Van Iendos didn’t seem overly concerned.
“No, he doesn’t,” she whispered fiercely.
Van Iendos glanced over at the old man. “It would be hard to tell after two centuries, I must admit. Still, if he did have access to the kind of drugs you people back on Earth have—?”
“Van—Jonathan, I want to ask you a question.” He looked at her attentively. “Do you really believe this old man is Alexander Fulhaus?”
He sighed and looked over her shoulder, seeming to contemplate the old man. “To be honest, I was rather hoping you might tell me.”
“For all you know, he’s just some delusional old man who’s escaped into a private fantasy world of his own making. I can’t believe you went to all this trouble to show me one old man who couldn’t possibly be who you claim he is.”
“There’s a little more to it than that, Alis. I’m no fool. It doesn’t make any sense that Fulhaus would still be alive, I’ll grant you that. We found him living up here, all alone. As far as I’ve been able to tell he’s been up here for decades, at least as long as this Ship has been part of Leviathan’s Fall. But he knows things, things that only Alexander Fulhaus could have known.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” she hissed.
“Why, would you have believed me? ‘Don’t trust this man Maquina, because I’ve got a half-senile, still breathing Alexander Fulhaus hidden away at the other end of the ‘Fall? You’d have thought I was crazy. He showed me things. Things like—here.”
He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small, crumbling lozenge-like object. Alis stared at it and comprehension slowly began to dawn.
“Memory book,” she said, gently reaching out and touching her finger to the surface of the tiny object where it nestled in the palm of his hand. It crumbled as she touched it; gone soft, its chemical structures beginning to break down after so long.
That it had survived so long—she stopped. That was only assuming it was old. And if it was truly old, it might have been packed in such a way that it wouldn’t have had a chance for the complex chemical bonds that held it together to break down.
He frowned. “Memory book? I don’t understand.”
“Like the things I make.” He still looked like he didn’t understand. “I’m an Observer, Jonathan. That’s my job.”
Something like comprehension dawned on his face. “Ah. I see. I’m only slightly aware of what that means.” A guarded look came over his face. “Doesn’t that mean you, uh, have something growing in your head?”
She nodded. “An Ceti device, rooted in the skull. It grows to enclose the whole brain. It allows me to record everything I see, hear, touch and taste, and reproduce the experience.”
“Everything?”
She smiled. “Everything.”
He looked down at the book nestled in the palm of his hand with a strange expression. “There are dozens of these,” he said. “Old Alex took me to them. Down below. Lian—your sister—seemed to know something about them.”
More memories, more mystery. “Do you have any more of these here?” she asked. Van Iendos nodded. “Then I’d like a few more, if I may,” she asked.
* * *
A little while later she took the old man by the arm and led him to a couple of chairs in a quiet corner, taking a seat across from him. Van Iendos’s men watched with guarded interest.
“Alex? Is that your name?”
He nodded, but his expression seemed far away. He mumbled and at first she thought he was either ignoring her or was unaware of her, but then the words began to come.
“- remember it all, everything, I remember, yes, down below. I-” he looked at her for the first time, focusing on her face. “Yes, Alex, that’s my name. Alex Fulhaus, no other, not for a long time. I…are you taking me there again?”
“Taking you where?”
“To down below, The Leviathans … Not what you think, you know, not at all. Down there, that’s where they had me. Yes.”
His voice was becoming stronger now, more powerful, less that of a harmless old man. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Are you a colonist?”
“No,” she replied. “I’m an Observer, from Earth.”
“Observer!” He stood, eyes glistening. “Like me, yes, I observe, I see everything. And I remember it. Here,” he said, tapping his forehead. “And here, yes.” He put one hand to a small satchel he carried over his shoulder. “And here also, yes. I keep my memories here. Everything.”
She glanced at the shoulderbag, and then she was sure. Absolutely sure. “May I see it?” she asked, pointing at the satchel. “The memories.”
The old man looked startled, backed away from her. “No, I won’t let you. They’re my memories, not yours. I remember everything. Not yours to remember. Hear me? From down below, I remember. I remember.”
She took his grimy, wrinkled hand in hers and lifted it to her forehead. He looked stricken at first and tried to pull away, but she held on firmly and pressed it to her skin.
“Here,” she said, “just like you. I have a device in me, to make the memories, like the ones you ate. Alex.” Of course, he wouldn’t be able to feel the memory device under her skin, but …
“Do you remember standing on the island, Alex? With the Ship passing beneath you and over the horizon and you felt so lonely, because you could never return home? Do you remember that, Alex?”
The old man’s mouth trembled and a dampness grew about his eyes. “Home, yes,” he said. “I remember. Long time ago. All gone.”
“The memories, Alex, may I see them?”
He didn’t answer, but she edged the satchel off his shoulder and he didn’t try to stop her. She motioned to Van Iendos and he came over.
“What was that all about?”
“He’s no more Alexander Fulhaus than you or me, Jonathan. He’s a memory addict. Ah, here we are.”
She pulled out a handful of coloured lozenges.
“More memory books,” she explained. “Memory addicts are usually pretty good at hiding their supply.”
“Memory what?”
“Memory addicts. People who become addicted to someone else’s memories. It happens, usually with people who have especially weak personalities, although sometimes it affects people who’ve undergone considerable trauma. It’s pretty rare, mind.”
He looked at her with new-found respect. “So…what you’re saying, is that he’s eaten so many of these things that he’s become somebody else?” He looked at the books with some revulsion. “I didn’t realise they were so—dangerous.”
“They’re not. At least, back on Earth, they aren’t if you’re used to them, and I’ve been trained how to use them and how to handle them. You’re not allowed to unless they’re very sure you can distinguish reality from an artificial but totally realistic experience. But sometimes, if somebody’s life experiences are exciting and interesting and frankly more consequential than those of somebody eating those memories, they can become delusional. Start to think they’re somebody else.”
He shook his head. “So he’s not really Alexander Fulhaus at all.”
She glanced at Old Alex. He had gone back to mumbling and seemed unaware of their presence. “It depends how you look at it. The memories, the experiences are real enough. It takes a pretty determined desire to not be whoever you started out as. As for who you are once you’re an addict, well, that’s as much an area to do with philosophy as it is to do with psychiatry. If he’s eaten enough of the one man’s memories, and if he’s convinced himself they’re his experiences and not somebody else’s, then he might as well be Alexander Fulhaus. To some extent.”
She frowned. “But he wouldn’t be able to use these books unless he had an implant.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Van Iendos.
“Mostly they’re inserted surgically, but they don’t have to be. I think there’s more control over the growth process if they put it directly into the brain tissue, but I don’t know if there’s even any real proof of that. The implants can find their way to where they need to go on their own. If you swallow one, it’ll burrow its way through your body until it reaches your brain.”
She glanced at Van Iendos and smiled; he looked pale, sick.
“Don’t worry, it’s not that bad,” she said. “There haven’t been any fatalities, at least as far as I know. It’s a technology thousands or millions or years ahead of our own, remember. So far advanced it might as well be magic.”
Van Iendos put his hand to his mouth. “I can’t understand why anyone or anything would create such a thing.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Alis. “I can see some pretty useful aspects to the things. If you landed on some strange planet you could put them inside the heads of a couple of dozen of the local species, come back in a couple of decades and extract the memories from them. Study them at your leisure. A very efficient way of drawing information about the ecology of a world without suffering any of the potential hazards.”
“God.” Van Iendos shook his head. “I had little idea such things existed. He must have found it down there.”
“Down there?”
“Under Leviathan’s Fall,” he explained. “That’s where he took me. There’s some kind of deep-sea base down there. It’s been abandoned for a very, very long time.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
He told Alis the story of what had happened.
The researchers Lian had joined on a Shipboard voyage had been primarily concerned with investigations into political relations between the different Fleets. At one point they had travelled on Van Iendos’s own Ship.
The majority of people on Ocean derived their sustenance from the sea. Fish had always, by necessity, been a large part of the diet, supplemented by crops grown deckside, and Terran livestock that the first colonists had brought with them.
But there was a problem.
The Ocean-borne species that humans could feed on were few and limited in numbers. The rest had sufficiently different biochemistry that they were either indigestible or entirely poisonous. And the number of species that were edible, were dropping in numbers.
Not only that, but the human population on Ocean was continuing to rise. In the early years of human occupation, the death rate had either equalled or, at some points, even exceeded the birth rate. But now that situation was beginning to change; the population was booming, filling the remaining Ships of Ocean. That population needed to eat, but resources were shrinking.
The seas were being drastically overfished to support that population. It had become clear to Lian and her team that the situation had to be reversed.
Then their Ship had been attacked.
A Leviathan had battered against its hull for days on end as it cruised towards a meeting with the flagShip of the Sacred Fleet. Outwith the usual public trading, a secret meeting had been arranged with Anton Maquina, functionally the ruler of the entire Sacred Fleet. It could not be known that he would be engaged in secret discussions with offworlders. If it had, it might have appeared to be a capitulation to the Collective.
Before this meeting had taken place, however, their Ship had stopped briefly, here, at Leviathan’s Fall.
Lian and her team, had heard a rumour about a still living Alexander Fulhaus. They had found Old Alex, escorted by Jonathan Van Iendos and a squad of guards in case they ran into trouble. If she had come to the conclusion that Old Alex was a memory addict, she had not enlightened Jonathan with this knowledge.
She had gone down, with Van Iendos, to an old research base on the seabed far below Leviathan’s Fall, long forgotten. Old Alex knew how to get there using a centuries-old submersible. Lian had found many memory books there, and more besides; notebooks full of research, a lifetime’s work deep under the surface of the ocean.
She had not told Jonathan what information the books contained, but had appeared to be seriously distressed upon her return. She had said, however, that a meeting with Anton Maquina had become of extreme importance. To the Collective, to everyone on Ocean. She had gone to her meeting with Maquina, and in the process had gone to her doom.
The Maquinas had gone after the ruling elite of the flagShip of the Fleet Van Iendos after that. Troops of the Sacred Fleet had boarded Jonathan’s Ship, killing everyone and anyone who got in their way.
“They didn’t want to leave any witnesses,” Van Iendos explained. “Not one. They only really wanted those who might be privy to whatever secrets Lian Dorican was carrying, and that could only be myself and those members of my family who might know.
“But the Fleet Van Iendos is large and powerful, and has many allies. If word had gotten out that Anton Maquina had committed an act of war against the flagShip of another Fleet, especially of the Fleet Van Iendos, even the Sacred Fleet might not be able to survive the ensuing conflict.
“With what happened next, I began to wonder if God really was on their side. Our flagShip began to sink, rapidly. So fast there were few survivors. Only a handful of us managed to get away by virtue of luck and cunning, myself and some of these men.” He looked angry, and as he spoke Alis could hear the bitterness in his voice.
“Any other survivors were picked off, one by one, or left to drown. I began to believe that somehow, the Leviathan that had been following us had played some part in destroying the Ship that had been my home.
“In the end, I found my way back here, to Leviathan’s Fall. I was ill, for a long time, and I was sure I was going to die. But the other survivors brought me here, to the Eyrie where we first found Old Alex. I tried to make contact with various sources of information, and at one point I did indeed enlist the help of Joseph Maquina, because I was under the impression—at that time, at least—that he was no friend of the rest of the Maquina’s.” Van Iendos shrugged. “At that time he wasn’t, but it took me a while to discover just how opportunistic the man is.” He smiled at his own comment. “But he did send me a message that he had met Lian Dorican’s sister in Hope, which interested me no end.”
“So why not send a message to St Brubaker or the House of Fleets, telling them your side of the story?”
Van Iendos looked pained. “I did, that’s the thing. I gave it to Maquina to deliver to Ambassador Straven.” He saw her expression of shock. “It described everything that I knew, everything that Lian had told me. I handed it in an envelope to Maquina and he swore on his honour as a member of one of the noble families that he’d deliver the message.”
“Big mistake.”
He glared at her. “I wasn’t to know. There wasn’t any suggestion or hint, at that time anyway, that he was up to anything else. Maybe I was naive, but I think I was just unlucky.
