Hendricks said, ‘The original colonist miners here were virtual slaves to the Company. In the end they were working the mines for one drug patch a month. Kelly’s great-grandfather wrote all this down, and took signed statements from over five hundred miners. Kelly’s deposition told us this, but we’d yet to see those statements.’ Hendricks, who sat in the navigator’s chair, rested his hand on the thick book on his lap.
‘Bastards,’ said Ansel, his voice flat.
‘I’d imagine that for your service, in thirty-seven years the Company would have paid you in drug patches. After Kelly’s deposition you became inconvenient, what with you possessing a new symbiont the precise twin of those here — proof that no mutation had taken place, that producing a killer symbiont had been precisely the Company’s intention.’
Erlin leant forwards. She had been silent for a long while after he had killed Kelly, but that silence had ended when they reached Kelly’s shuttle.
‘He called you a good friend,’ she had said.
‘I know what he meant,’ Ansel had replied.
‘Not entirely I think.’
‘Then explain it to me.’
‘They live with certainties here, Ansel. They know their lives will be short and will end in horrifying agony unless they kill themselves. They have a celebration here called The Leaving.
When a colonist feels his or her symbiont changing — usually signalled by stomach cramps — they throw a wild party. When the individual concerned is so drunk on cornul liquor he loses consciousness a good friend will cut his throat.’
Ansel swallowed drily as he engaged the thrusters. What of his prospects now? The Company would be unlikely to provide him with the drug the miners had used. All they would supply was a quick death.
‘You are evidence. You’ll come with us to Earth Central, and after this book is presented you’ll stand in court and give your statement. THC will pay and they’ll pay heavily,’ said Hendricks.
‘I’ll come,’ said Ansel.
Garp and Geronamid
The grey-bearded park labourer reminded Salind of Earth and autumn, though the man was not raking up leaves. It was treelfall on Banjer — a season with no real Terran equivalent — and the snakish creatures squirming from the pox of holes in the banoaks were dying. Having raked the fallen into slightly shifting drifts, the man began forking the spaghetti tangle into his wheelbarrow.
‘I’ll be damned,’ said Salind, initiating the ‘save’ facility in Argus.
He watched the man for a while longer, then hoisted his rucksack more securely onto his shoulders before moving on. Shortly he came to where a black and twisted banoak had spilled from its hollow branches a thick crop of treels across the path. The banoak itself reminded him of a baobab, though he vaguely recollected it was not in fact a tree, being more akin to a tube worm. The parasitic treels were black and grey, and on average half a metre long. With their narrow heads and discshaped feeding mouths, they appeared more like lampreys than the eels after which they were named. Salind subvocalized a question and Argus, his internal augmentation, replied in its lecturing tone:
Because its life cycle is utterly confined to the soft tissues and hollow branches of the banoak, it will attempt to feed on any soft tissue with which it comes into contact. Avoidance is recommended.
Salind looked askance at the writhing mass as he stepped off the path and onto the spherule grass to bypass it.
‘Why do they die?’ he asked.
There came a pause from Argus as it accessed the relevant files.
A poison from the aforementioned soft tissues accumulates in the creatures and kills them off in their fifth year. Shall I continue?
‘Might as well,’ said Salind. ‘I don’t suppose Garp’s there yet.’
As I mentioned, the treel’s entire life cycle is confined to the interior of the banoak. There it feeds on the soft tissues of the polychaete body, mates and lays its eggs. By their fifth year the treels die from a cumulative poison in the polychaete’s flesh. It was first thought the poison served no other purpose than to rid the banoak creature of this parasite. It is now known that the treel’s relationship with its host is mutualistic rather than parasitic. The treels, as well as feeding on the banoak, protect it from predation. Creatures that feed on the banoak inevitably ingest treels and can sicken and die from the poison concentrated inside them.
‘They harvest them, don’t they?’ said Salind, his attention drawn to the large tanker parked under some distant banoaks. He could hear the cavitating roar of a vacuum pump and see another park labourer sucking up the creatures with a wide-ribbed hose.
The poison accumulates in their skin. For humans that substance works as a narcotic and mild hallucinogen. The treels are mulched, pressed and dried and what remains is mostly skin.
They make a tea from it here.
‘I guess I’ll have to give that a try then,’ said Salind, though he did not particularly relish the prospect.
The tea is as addictive as nicotine. Most people here drink it.
‘Then I’ll take a detoxicant course afterwards. My audience will want to know what it’s like.’
At the centre of the park stood a monolithic quartz crystal into whose lattices had been recorded the names and personal histories of the thousands who had died during the civil war here a century earlier. The deeply translucent crystal ran in its depths holograms taken randomly from those personal histories. Positioned all around it were seats for spectators, though they were unoccupied today and, studying the figure standing with his back to the crystal, Salind could understand why.
This man’s clothing resembled an antique acceleration suit with its webwork of veins sandwiched in metallic fabric. Pipes were also visible at his joints and curved up from the neck ring, and fluid vessels were affixed here and there on the suit’s surface. This clothing was not of great note though. Others dressed more exotically and few would so much as blink an eye at them. However, this man seemed ilclass="underline" his face greyish and his eyes containing a sickly yellow tint.
When he turned to gaze up at the crystal, it became evident that the tubes from the neck ring entered the base of his skull. As Salind drew closer he noted fingertips frayed down to the bone, eye irrigators at the man’s temples, skull exposed through holes in shaven scalp. Closer still and he caught the first whiff of putrefaction. For what Garp suffered there was no cure — him being dead.
As soon as the Tarjen Network picked up on the story, Salind knew that it had to be his. It was a perfect footnote to the big story on Banjer at the moment: the imminent arrival of the Arbiter of Transition, the awesome AI Geronamid, and subsumption of this world into the Polity.
Since the civil war, during which a theocracy had been bloodily usurped then replaced by more conventional government, there had been plenty of murders solved, or not, by the usual methods. However, there had not been a reification of a murder victim in a hundred years.
When the strange cult of Anubis Arisen governed Banjer, every viable murder victim had been reified and sent after his murderer. The victim’s dead brain was decoded and the essential mind and memory downloaded into an augmentation. Cybermotors at the joints moved the body, which was partially preserved by chemicals. Obviously more complex than this, the system utilized, in some reifs, surviving brain tissue, and historians argued that such were still alive.