The Abyss Beyond Dreams (54 page)

‘It can be overwhelming,’ Nigel told her. ‘You just need to learn how to filter. The secondary routines will help you.’

She grinned in delight. His lips hadn’t moved, and he hadn’t ’pathed, either. This was new, a direct datalink. ‘It’s fantastic,’ she sent back. ‘I want
to learn more now. I want to learn all about everything.’

‘I think we’d better begin with some primary grade educational packages, and move on from there.’

She laughed in delight. ‘Let’s get started.’

‘I can zoom,’ Kysandra declared loudly as she came running down the stairs. Her ex-sight showed her Nigel was in the library, trying to instruct the farm’s
oldest mod-dwarf how to turn the pages of a book one at a time. The poor old thing didn’t have much dexterity left in its thin hands and kept turning several pages at a time. A simple memory
module had been rigged above the table on a wooden frame, where its camera could scan in the text.

She and Nigel had taken a trip into Adeone yesterday to get a cartload of general supplies, food and other essentials. ‘We can’t use the ship’s semiorganic synthesizers for
everything, even if they stay glitch free,’ Nigel said. ‘And I can’t afford Blair Farm to have a reputation for being the place where some odd rich bloke hides out. I don’t
want to attract attention. We have to be accepted as just another farm.’

Maybe the ship couldn’t extrude absolutely everything from its neumanetic systems, but Nigel had certainly got it to counterfeit Bienvenido’s coins perfectly. Kysandra carried a huge
heavy purse round the stores, choosing a dozen dresses and more practical clothes (no shoes, though; ship-produced footwear couldn’t be beaten). Then she showed him which merchant to order
coal from, a decent timber yard, ironmonger, stables, the town’s livestock market . . . None of them had any connection to Ma Ulvon. Nigel had spent a small fortune on the kind of things
they’d need to return the farm to productivity. People were pleased to hear it. So he was right; a rich newcomer settling in was interesting but not suspicious. They were happy for her, too.
Old schoolfriends had stopped to congratulate her.

When they were done with spending, they went to the library; Nigel registered himself and borrowed a dozen books on history and law.

‘Why law?’ she’d asked. The farm library didn’t have any legal books; her father hadn’t been interested in that subject at all.

‘Building blocks of society. If you want to understand how a government works, the laws tell you.’

Now all he had to do was load all the text into the ship’s smartcore. The mod-dwarf was pleased at being given a job which involved sitting down all day, but frustrated with its inability
to perform as instructed. Nigel was spending half his time soothing its thoughts. He looked up as she rushed into the room. ‘Zoom where?’ he asked.

Kysandra wrinkled her nose up at his odd sense of humour. ‘My eyes, stupid. Their zoom function is working.’

‘Excellent. The resequencing is progressing nicely. Nice to confirm the Void allows genetic modification to work. How about infra-red function?’

‘Yes,’ she confirmed – though that image was just plain weird. Everything a different colour, with brightness depending on how hot an object was. Still it was better than light
amplification for night use, which was even stranger than ex-sight perception. ‘Got it.’

‘Great.’

‘You’re good at calming mods,’ she said, indicating the dwarf, which was concentrating hard on the book.

‘I had a good teacher.’

‘I’m going out to take a proper look at the third barn,’ she told him. ‘I still think we’d be better off demolishing it and beginning again from scratch.’
Nigel had big plans for expanding the compound, starting with building a barn large enough to conceal the spaceship from casual sight. Developing a modest industrial base was all part of his
mission to gather as much scientific data on the Void as he could. And
Skylady
was the key to it. The ship’s smartcore could control dozens of mods simultaneously, using them as
remote manipulators. But the ’path its bioprocessor smartcore generated was range-limited. They needed the ship at the farm.

‘Sure thing,’ he said.

‘I had a carpentry memory implantation this morning,’ she assured him. ‘I should be able to tell which purlins and rafters are still solid, if any.’ Commonwealth memory
implants were a complete revelation. She’d been accepting four a day – which was as many as Nigel would allow her. The first three days had been spent bringing her knowledge base up to
the equivalent of teenagers in the Commonwealth. She understood so many concepts now, but details remained to be filled in. For the last couple of days she’d divided her allowance between
practical skills like carpentry and general information.

‘Just go easy,’ he told her for the hundredth time. ‘You need time to assimilate all the new data. It has to settle in properly.’

‘I’m using my storage lacuna so I don’t get brainburn, like you said. I’ll be fine. Besides, I know all about native wood anyway; the carpentry knowledge just adds
technique.’

‘Well, listen to the neural expert,’ he muttered sarcastically.

She grinned. An icon flipped up into her exovision. One of the sensors they’d placed round the valley was showing a big cart turning off the public road three miles away, turning down the
track to the valley. With the Void distorting electromagnetic communications, bandwidth was poor over such a distance. She couldn’t get a clear picture of the people riding in the cart.

‘We weren’t expecting a delivery until next week,’ she said automatically. ‘The coal’s supposed to be first, and that isn’t old man Steron’s wagon
anyway.’

‘That’s not a delivery,’ Nigel said.

Normally, Kysandra had some clue about a person’s emotions, even with a decent shell wrapping round their thoughts. But with Nigel’s impenetrable shell she was completely lost.
Looking at him, sitting perfectly still as he sent out a stream of encrypted code to the smartcore, she was suddenly struck by how menacing this man from another universe could be.

A second sensor, further down the track, gave a better image of the cart and its three passengers as it trundled past. ‘Oh, no,’ she groaned. It was Akstan, Julias and Russell
– another of the brothers.

‘My fault. I shouldn’t have left such a big loose end,’ Nigel said. ‘That was stupid of me. Maybe I have been a little cautious about exposing myself. Shock, I expect.
Well, that ends now.’

‘Are you going to kill them?’ she asked quietly. The weapons available to the Commonwealth were truly astounding, even though half of them probably wouldn’t work in the Void.
Ma’s boys with their pump-action shotguns and hunting knives wouldn’t stand a chance.

‘No. That would be a waste.’

‘Waste? So what are you going to do?’

‘Recruit them.’

‘Er, Nigel, they’re pretty loyal to Ma.’

‘Did I say I was going to offer them a choice?’

The cold intensity of his voice made Kysandra shudder. Her u-shadow accessed the feed from various sensors around the farmhouse, building their images to a single picture across her
exovision.

*

The wagon came to a halt just outside the gate set in the compound’s ramshackle fence. Julias frowned at the farmhouse, taking in the repaired roof, freshly painted gable
bargeboards, fixed windows, pruned climbing roses, the kitchen garden with rows of newly planted vegetables, the half-refurbished first barn.

‘It wasn’t like this a week ago,’ he said. ‘He might have brought in some help.’

‘So have we,’ Akstan said, and patted his shotgun.

The
Skylady
had a small flock of semiorganic ge-eagles stowed on board. Nigel activated one and downloaded a set of instructions which its small smartcore could follow easily enough. It
loaded its ordinance and flapped up quickly into the sky.

Akstan primed his pump-action shotgun with a single powerful motion and climbed off the cart. His brothers followed him down, their own weapons held ready. They kept their shells strong, but
neither made any attempt to fuzz themselves. None of the brothers noticed the big artificial bird swooping quickly and silently through the air towards them. To ex-sight, its semiorganic components
were identical to living tissue. Only its controlling bioprocessor might have betrayed it, with routines that were fast and precise rather than a bird’s natural impulse-instinct thoughts. But
the difference was so tiny that they probably wouldn’t have noticed even if they had examined the bird.

Akstan directed a strong ’path shout at the farmhouse. ‘Kysandra, hey, Kysandra, you want to come out here? Be easier that way.’

She didn’t even turn round.

Akstan looked at his brothers. Russell shrugged.

‘Come on now, girl, you belong to me. Everybody knows that. Your new man in there, we gonna see him off today. He ain’t gonna be around no more.’

A shadow flashed across the group of men as the ge-eagle passed five metres overhead. Julias frowned up at it, clearly puzzled by the strange powerful shape. He was completely unaware of the
aerosol it released.

‘You come out here now, Kysandra,’ Akstan ’pathed, his thoughts colouring towards anger at the defiance. ‘If you don’t, we gonna come in and get you. Ain’t
gonna be pretty.’

‘What—?’ Russell murmured, and fell unconscious.

‘Huh?’ Akstan grunted, then joined his brother in an inelegant heap on the ground.

‘Now what?’ Kysandra asked as the ANAdroids carried the three comatose men into the farmhouse and laid them out on the floor of the front room.

‘I used a mild domination on them last time, so they’d agree to giving me you and the farm,’ Nigel told her as he stared down impassively at the sleeping figures. ‘Too
mild, apparently.’

‘Domination?’

‘It’s a kind of mind-control technique they developed on the other world. Someone called Tathal perfected it.’

‘Mind control? You mean you can order them round like mods?’

‘Not quite. You subvert their loyalty, which makes them want to do everything you ask.’

Kysandra hoped she was keeping her shell firm, because, if anything, that sounded even more unpleasant than simply ordering people around. ‘And you know how to do that?’

‘Oh, yes. I tried it out on Ma and her family when I followed you into town. I just wasn’t forceful enough, and I was in a hurry. This time I’ll get it right.’

An ANAdroid walked in carrying a large medical kit. Nigel selected an infuser and applied it to Akstan’s neck. ‘This will elevate his brainwave activity to borderline consciousness.
We have a few techniques in the Commonwealth to subvert personality, dating all the way back to the Starflyer War, some more brutal than others. I think I’ll start with a modified narcomeme;
that’s soft enough. It should help subdue any instinctive resistance. Then I’ll use Tathal’s procedure.’

Kysandra watched Akstan moan feebly. Thoughts grew out of his unshelled sleeping mind. She perceived her own face tumbling through the phantasms his semi-conscious brain was producing, the
disturbing sexual obsessions she featured in, his anger at being thwarted mutating into perverted revenge fantasies.

All the lingering doubts she had about what Nigel was going to do dried up like field dew in high summer. Instead, she stood above the insensate Akstan, and used her ex-sight to perceive the
complex stream of ’path that Nigel directed into his naked brain. It was interesting.

*

Heavy clouds swept in from the south-west to cover Adeone at eleven o’clock at night, obscuring the nebulas and bringing a cold persistent rain. By two o’clock in
the morning, the town was asleep; pubs and clubs had closed, the docks were silent, the teams of civic mod-dwarfs had gone back to their stables. The miserable rain had even curtailed the
activities of its more nefarious citizens.

Oil lamps along Lubal Street flickered and went out one by one, allowing the shadows to swell out and embrace its entire length.

Standing at the end of Lubal Street, with her shell deflecting the swirling raindrops, Kysandra looked at the Hevlin Hotel. In infra-red, the broad white façade was a dull luminous blue
as the rain washed down the walls, cooling the structure.

Nigel stood directly to her left. Her ex-sight couldn’t perceive him at all. Naturally, Nigel had a far superior fuzz technique than anyone, which he’d gifted her, too. Concealment,
he called it. It was only infra-red which showed her where he was, a green and blue profile where the rain dripped off his big brown coat. Infra-red also allowed her to see the others they’d
brought with them: Akstan, his brothers and three ANAdroids, standing motionless behind her.

‘He’s good,’ Nigel admitted as the ex-sight swept along the street, as it did every couple of minutes. Their fuzz deflected it easily, but they were still forty metres
away.

Someone was awake in the Hevlin’s lobby, faithfully watching out for trouble. Ma had too many enemies to leave the place unguarded, even on a night like this.

‘Akstan?’ Nigel queried.

‘It’s probably Snony,’ Akstan said. ‘He’s got good ex-sight. Reliable, too.’

‘We need to get inside without anyone raising the alarm.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Akstan said eagerly.

Kysandra had to press her teeth together and strengthen her shell so her feelings didn’t betray her. It had taken Nigel twenty minutes to turn the surly Akstan into an over-friendly
eager-to-please disciple. She’d watched all of the sullen, sulky brothers start to behave with the kind of adoration that a puppy would exhibit.

Akstan and his brothers deserved no less; she wasn’t arguing that. But it was a sharp reminder than the man who treated her so kindly could also be completely ruthless. It made her glad
she had been shown trust. But equally, she wondered if that appreciation was all her own. Had he used domination on her while she slept that day after their wedding?
But . . . if he’d
done that, would I ever question if he had? Unless that was part of it, making me doubt so I think I am free . . . Uracus
.

‘Did you do that to me?’ she blurted as Akstan walked steadily towards the Hevlin.