CONURBATION 2473

AD 5407

Rala knew there was something wrong.

For days, all around Conurbation 2473 there had been muttered rumours. A cell of counter-Extirpationists had been found hoarding illegal data. Or a group of cultists were planning an uprising, like the failed Rebellion decades ago. Rala just wanted to get on with her work. But everybody got a little agitated.

It all came to a head one morning.

The room lights came on as usual to wake them up, But when their supervising jasoft didn’t come to collect them for work, Rala quickly got uneasy.

Rala shared her tiny room with Ingre, a cadre sibling. The room was just a bubble blown in nano-engineered rock by Qax technology. There was nothing inside but a couple of bunk beds, a space to store clothes, waste systems, water spigots, a food hole.

Ingre was a little younger than Rala, thin, anxious. She went to the door - which had snapped open at the allotted time, as it always did - and peered up and down the corridor. `Luru Parz is never late.’

`We’ll just wait,’ Rala said firmly. `We’re safe here.’

But now there was a tread, steadily approaching along the corridor. It was too heavy for Luru Parz, their controlling jasoft, who was a slight woman. Some instinct prompted Rala to take Ingre’s hand and hold it tight.

A man stood in the doorway. His skin seemed oddly reddened, as if burned. He wore a skinsuit of what looked like gold foil. And there was a thick thatch of black hair on his head. Nobody in the Conurbation, workers or jasofts alike, wore hair.

He wasn’t Luru Parz. He wasn’t from the Conurbation at all.

The man stepped into the room and glanced around. `All these cells are the same. I can’t believe you drones live like this.’ His accent was strange. Rala thought his gaze lingered on her body, and she looked away. She had never heard the word `drone’ before. He pointed at the panel in the wall. `Your food hole.’

`Yes-‘

He smashed the transparent panel with a gloved fist. Ingre and Rala cowered back. Bits of plastic flew everywhere, and a silvery dust trickled to the floor. To Rala this was literally an unthinkable crime.

Ingre said, `The jasofts will punish you for that.’

`You know what this was? Qax shit. Replicator technology.’

`But now it’s broken.’

`Yes, now it’s broken.’ He pointed to his chest. `And you must come to us for your food.’

`Food is power,’ Rala said.

He looked at her more closely. `You are a fast learner. Report to the roof in one hour. You will be processed there.’ He turned and walked out. Where he had passed Rala thought she could smell burning, like hot metal.

Rala and Ingre sat on their bunk for almost the whole hour, barely speaking. Nobody came to fix the smashed hole. Before they left, Rala scooped up a little of the silver dust and put it in a pocket of her robe.

From the roof the Conurbation domes were a complex of vast, glistening blisters. Rala had been up here only a handful of times in her life. She tried not to flinch from the open sky.

Today this dome roof was full of people. The Conurbation inhabitants, with their shaven heads and long robes, had been gathered into queues that snaked everywhere. Each queue led to a table, behind which sat an exotic-looking individual in a gold skinsuit.

Ingre whispered, `Which line shall we join?’

Rala glanced around. `That one. Look who’s behind the table.’ It was the man who had come to their cell.

`He frightened me.’

`But at least we know him. Come on.’

They queued in silence. Rala felt calmer. Living in a Conurbation, you did a lot of queuing; this felt normal.

Around the Conurbation the land was a plain that shone silver-grey, like a geometric abstraction. Canals snaked away to the horizon, full of glistening blue water. Human bodies drifted down the canals, away from the Conurbation to the sea. That wasn’t unusual, just routine waste management. But there did seem to be many bodies today.

At last Rala reached the front of the queue.

The stranger probably wasn’t much older than she was, she realised, no more than thirty. `It’s you,’ he said. `The drone who understands the nature of power.’

She bristled. `I am not a drone.’

`You are what I say you are.’ He had a data slate before him, obviously purloined from a Conurbation workstation. He worked it slowly, as if unfamiliar with the technology. `Tell me your name.’

`Rala.’

`Rala, my name is Pash. From now on you report to me.’

She didn’t understand. `Are you a jasoft?’ The jasofts were human servants of the Qax who, it was said, were granted freedom from death in return for their service.

He said, `The jasofts are gone.’

`The Qax-‘

`Are gone too.’ He glanced upwards. `At night you can see their mighty Spline ships, peeling out of orbit. Where they are going, I don’t know. But we will go after them one day.’

Could it be true - could the centuries-old Occupation be over, could Luru Parz and the other jasofts really have melted away, could the framework of her whole world have vanished? Rala felt like a lost child, separated from her cadre. She tried not to let this show in her face.

`What was your sin?’ It turned out he was asking what job she did.

She had spent her working life in vocabulary deletion. The goal had been to replace the old human tongues with a fully artificial language. It would have taken a few more generations, but at last a great cornerstone of the Extirpation, the Qax’s methodical elimination of the human past, would have been completed. It was intellectually fascinating.

He nodded. `Your complicity with the great crime committed against humanity-‘

`I committed no crime,’ she snapped.

`You could have refused your assignments.’

`I would have been punished.’

`Punished? Many will die before we are free.’

The word shocked her. It was hard to believe this was happening. `Are you going to punish me now?’

`No,’ he said, tiredly. `Listen to me, Rala. It’s obvious you are smart, you have a high degree of literacy. We were the crew of a starship. A trading vessel, called Port Sol. While you toiled in this bubble-town, I hid up there.’ He glanced at the sky.

`You are bandits.’

He laughed. `No. But we are not bureaucrats either. We need people like you to help run this place.’

`Why should I work for you?’

`You know why.’

`Because food is power.’

`Very good.’

The traders tried to rule their new empire by lists. They kept lists of `drones’, and of their `sins’, and tables of things that needed to be done to keep the Conurbation functioning, like food distribution and waste removal.

For Rala it wasn’t so bad. It was just work. But compared to the sophisticated linguistic analysis she had been asked to perform under the Occupation, this simple clerical stuff was dull, routine.

Once she suggested a better way to devise a task allocation. She was punished, by the docking of her food ration. That was how it went. If you cooperated you were fed. If not, not.

Her food was the same pale yellow tablets she had grown up with, the tablets produced by the food holes, though less of them. They came from a sector at the heart of the Conurbation where the food holes had been left intact - the only such place, in fact. It was guarded around the clock.

After the first month or so, the battles started in the sky. You would see glowing lights on the horizon, or sometimes flashing shapes in the night, threads and bursts of light. All utterly silent. All these ships and weapons were human. The oppression of the Qax had been lifted, only for humans to fall on each other.

Actually there was a lot of information to be had from the traders’ lists, if you knew how to read them. Rala saw how few the traders really were. She sensed their insecurity, despite the gaudy weapons they wielded: so few of us, so many of them. And now there were challenges from the sky. The traders’ rule was fragile.

But though people muttered about the good old days under the Qax, nobody did anything about it. It wouldn’t even occur to most drones to raise a fist. Besides there was no place else to go, nothing else to eat. Beyond the city there was only the endless nano-chewed dirt on which nothing grew.

There was never enough to eat, though.

In a corner of her cell, away from prying eyes, Rala examined the silvery Qax replicator dust. This stuff had made food before; why wouldn’t it now? But the dust just lay in its bowl, offering nothing.

Of course the food hadn’t come from nothing. A slurry of seawater and waste had been fed to the dust through pipes in the wall. Somehow the silver dust had turned that muck into food. But in the pipes now there was only a sticky, greenish sludge that stank like urine. She scraped a little of this paste over the dust, but still, treacherously, it sat inert. She hid it all away again.

She had been aware of Pash’s interest in her from the first moment they had met.

She built on that tentative relationship. She talked to him about her work, and drew him out with questions about his background. He told her unlikely tales of worlds beyond the Moon, where humans had once built cities that orbited through rings of ice. Perhaps she was developing an instinct for survival; Pash’s interest was something she could exploit.

Eventually he began to invite her to his room. The room, once owned by a jasoft, was set beneath the Conurbation’s outer wall. It had a view of the sky, where silent battles flared.

`I don’t know what you want here,’ she said to him one evening. `You traders. Why do you want a Conurbation? You aren’t very good at running it.’

`There are worse than us out there.’

`It isn’t wealth you want, is it?’ She had struggled to understand that trader word, long expunged from her language; for better or worse the Qax had for centuries imposed a crude communism on mankind. `There’s no wealth to be had here.’

`No. There are only people.’

`Yes. And where there are people, there is power to be wielded. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

He fell silent, and she wondered if she had pushed him too far. She sighed. `Tell me about Sat-urn again-‘

The door slammed open. Somebody was standing there, silhouetted by bright light.

Instinctively Rala stepped forward, spreading her arms to hide Pash. A light shone in her face.

The intruder said, `I represent the Interim Coalition of Governance. The illegal seizure of this Conurbation by the bandits of the GUTship Port Sol is over.’

`We are both drones.’ She rattled off details of her identity and work assignment.

`You must stay in your cell. In the morning you will be summoned for new details. If you encounter the Port Sol crew-‘

`I will report them.’

There was shouting in the corridor; the Coalition trooper, distracted, hurried away.

Pash murmured, `Lethe. Look.’

Beyond the window, in the reddening sky, a Spline ship was hovering, a great meaty ball pocked with weapons emplacements. But this was no Qax vessel; a green tetrahedral sigil, a human symbol, had been crudely carved in its flank.

`Things have changed,’ Rala said dryly.

Pash asked, `Why did you shelter me?’

`Because I have had enough of rulers,’ she snapped. `We must be ready. You will have to shave your head. Perhaps one of my robes will fit you.’

The Coalition had its own, different theory about how to run a Conurbation.

They were all evicted from the city. The people stood in sullen ranks - mostly Conurbation drones, but with at least one trader, Pash, camouflaged among the rest. They had been given tools, simple hoes and spades. The walls of the Conurbation loomed above them all, scorched by fire.

The sun was hot, the air dry, and insects buzzed. These were city folk; they didn’t like being out here. There were even children; the new rulers of the Conurbation had closed down the schools, which even the traders had kept running.

A woman stood on a platform before them. She wore a green uniform, clean but shabby, and she had the green sigil tattooed on her forehead - the symbol, as Rala had now learned, of free humanity. At her side were soldiers, not in uniform, though they all wore green armbands, and had the sigil marked on their faces.

`My name is Cilo Mora,’ said the woman. `The Green Army has restored order to the Earth, overthrowing the bandit traders. But the Qax may return - or if not them, another foe. We must always be prepared. You are the advance troops of a moral revolution. The work you will begin today will fortify your will and clarify your vision. But remember - now you are all free!’

One man near the front raised his hoe dubiously. `Free to scrape at the dirt?’

One of the green-armbands clubbed him to the ground.

Nobody else moved. Cilo Mora smiled, as if the unpleasantness had never happened. The man in the dirt lay where he had fallen, unattended.

Fields were marked out using rubble from fallen Conurbation domes. Seeds were supplied, from precious stores preserved off-world. All around the city people toiled in the dirt, but there were machines too, hastily adapted and improvised.

For many, it went hard. There hadn’t been farmers on Earth for centuries, and the people of the Conurbation had all been office workers. Some fell ill, some died. But as the survivors’ hands hardened, so did their spirit, it seemed to Rala.

The crops began to grow. But the vegetables were sparse and thin. Rala thought she understood why - the poisoning of the soil was a legacy of the Qax - but nobody seemed to have any idea what to do about it.

The staple food continued to be the pale yellow ration tablets from the food holes. But just as under the old regime there was never enough to eat.

In the rest times they would gather, swapping bits of information.

Pash said, `The Coalition’s Green Army really does seem to be putting down the warlords.’ He seemed fascinated by developments, apparently forgetting he was one of those `warlords’ himself. `Of course having a Spline ship is a big help. But those clowns who follow Cilo around aren’t Army but another agency called the Green Guard. Amateurs, with a mission to cement the revolution.’

Rala whispered, `What this “revolution” comes down to is scratching at the dirt for food.’

`We can’t use Qax technology any more,’ Ingre said. `It would be counter-progressive.’ Ingre was always mouthing phrases like this. She seemed to welcome the latest ideology. Rala wondered if she had been through too many shocks to be able to resist.

`It’s not going to work,’ Rala said softly. `The Extirpation was pretty thorough. The Qax planted replicators in the soil, to make it lifeless.’ Their ultimate goal had been to wipe off the native ecology, to make the Earth uninhabited save for humans and the blue-green algae of the oceans, which would become great tanks of nutrient to feed their living Spline ships. `No amount of scraping with hoes is going to make the dirt green in a hurry.’

`We have to support the Coalition,’ said Ingre. `It’s the way forward for mankind.’

Pash wasn’t listening to either of them. He said, `You’d never get in the Army, but those Green Guards are the gang to join. Most of them are pretty dumb; you can see that. A smart operator could rise pretty fast.’

They spoke like this only in brief snatches. There was always a collaborator about, always a spy ready to sell a story to the Guards for a bit of food.

The cuts began.

It was as if the Coalition believed that starvation would motivate the new shock troops of its uninterrupted revolution. Or perhaps they simply weren’t managing the food stocks competently. Soon the first signs of malnutrition appeared, swollen bellies among the children.

Rala had always kept her handful of replicator dust, from her old cell in the Conurbation. Now she found a hidden corner by the Conurbation walls, where she dug out the earth and sprinkled in a little of her dust. Still nothing happened.

One day Pash caught her doing experiments like this. By now he had fulfilled his ambition to become a Green Guard. The former trader had donned the green armband of his enemies with shameless ease.

She said, `Will you turn me in?’

`Why should I?’

`Because I’m trying to use Qax technology. This action is doctrinally invalid.’

He shrugged. `You saved my life.’

`Anyhow,’ she said, `it’s not working.’

He frowned and poked at the dirt. `Do you know anything about this kind of technology? We used a human version in the Port Sol’s life support - cruder than this, of course. Nanotech manipulates matter at the molecular or atomic levels.’

`It turns waste into food.’

`Yes. But people seem to think it’s a magic dust, that you just throw at a heap of garbage to turn it into diamonds and steak.’

`Diamonds? Steak?’

`Never mind. There is nothing magic about this stuff. Nanotech is like biology. To “grow”, a nanotech product needs nutrients, and energy. On Sol we used a nutrient bath. This Qax stuff is more robust, and can draw what it needs from the environment, if it gets a chance.’

She thought about that. `You mean I have to feed it, like a plant.’

`There is a lot of chemical energy stored in the environment. You can tap it slowly but efficiently, like plants or bacteria, or burn it rapidly but inefficiently, like a fire. This Qax technology is smart stuff; it releases energy more swiftly than biological cells but more efficiently than a fire. In principle a nano-sown field ought to do better than a biologically planted crop …’

She failed to understand many of the words he was using. Though she pressed him to explain further, to help her, he was too busy.

Meanwhile Ingre, Rala’s cadre sibling, became a problem.

Despite her ideological earnestness she was weak and ineffectual, and hated the work in the fields. A drone supervisor, a collaborator, one of her own people, punished Ingre more efficiently than any Guard would have done. And when that didn’t work in motivating Ingre to work better, she cut off Ingre’s food ration.

After that Ingre just lay on her bunk. At first she complained, or railed, or cried. But she grew weaker, and lay silent. Rala tried to share her own food. But there wasn’t enough; she was going hungry herself.

Rala grew desperate. She realised that the Guards, in their brutal incompetence, were actually going to allow Ingre to die, as they had many others. She could think of only one way of getting more food.

She wasn’t sexually inexperienced; even the Qax hadn’t been able to extirpate that. Pash was easy to seduce.

The sex wasn’t unpleasant, and Pash did nothing to hurt her. The oddest thing was the spacegoer’s exoskeleton he wore, even during sex; it was a web of silvery thread that lay over his skin. But she felt no affection for him, or - she suspected - he for her. Unspoken, they both knew that it was his power over her that excited him, not her body.

Still, she waited for several nights before she asked him for the extra food she needed to keep Ingre alive.

Meanwhile, in the Conurbation, things got worse. Despite the maintenance rotas the stairwells and corridors became filthy. The air circulation broke down. The inner cells became uninhabitable, and crowding increased. Then there was the violence. Rumours spread of food thefts, even a rape. Rala learned to hide her food when she walked the darker corridors, scuttling past walls marked with bright green tetrahedral sigils, the most common graffito.

The Conurbation was dying, Rala realised with slow amazement. It was as if the sky itself was falling. People spoke even more longingly of the Qax Occupation, and the security it had brought.

One day Pash came to her, excited. `Listen. There’s trouble. Factional infighting among the Green Guards.’

She closed her eyes. `You’re leaving, aren’t you?’

`There’s a battle at a Conurbation a couple of days from here. There are great opportunities out there, kid.’

Rala felt sick; the world briefly swam. They had never discussed the child growing inside her, but Pash knew it existed, of course. It was a mistake; it hadn’t even occurred to her that the contraceptive chemistry which had circulated with the Conurbation’s water supply might have failed.

She hated herself for begging. `Don’t leave.’

He kissed her forehead. `I’ll come back.’

Of course he never did.

The brief factional war was won by a group of Green Guards called the Million Heroes. They wore a different kind of armband, had a different ranking system, and so forth. But day to day, under their third set of bosses since the Qax, little changed for the drones of Conurbation 2473; one set of rulers, it was turning out, was much the same as another.

By now most of the Conurbation’s systems had ceased functioning, and its inner core was dark and uninhabitable. Everybody worked in the fields, and some were even putting up crude shelters closer to where they worked, scavenging rock from the Conurbation’s walls.

Still Rala went hungry, and she increasingly worried about the child, and how she would cope with the work later in her pregnancy.

She remembered how Pash had said, or hinted, that the nano dust was like a plant. So she dug it up again and planted it away from the shade of the wall, in the sunlight.

Still, for days, nothing happened. But then she started to noticed pale yellow specks, embedded in the dirt. If you washed a handful of soil you could pick out particles of food. They tasted just as if they had come from a food hole. She improvised a sieve from a bit of cloth, to make the extraction more efficient.

That was when Ingre, for whose life Rala had prostituted herself, turned her in to the new authority.

Ingre, standing with one of the Million Heroes over the nano patch, seemed on the point of tears. `I had to do it,’ she said.

`It’s all right,’ said Rala tiredly.

`At least I can put an end to this irregularity.’ The Hero raised his weapon at the nano patch. He was perhaps seventeen years old.

Rala forced herself to stand before the weapon’s ugly snout. `Don’t destroy it.’

`It’s anti-doctrinal.’

`We can’t eat doctrine.’

`That’s not the point,’ snapped the Hero.

Rala spread her hands. `Look around you. The Qax did a good job of making our world uninhabitable. They even levelled mountains. But this bit of Qax technology is reversing the process. Look at it this way. Perhaps we can use their own weapons against the Qax. Or is that against your doctrine?’

`I don’t know. I’d have to ask my political officer.’ The Hero let the weapon drop. `I’m not changing my decision. I’m just postponing its implementation.’

Rala nodded sagely.

After that, as the weeks passed, she saw that the patch she had cultivated was spreading, a stain of a richer dark seeping through the ground. Her replicators were now turning soil and sunlight not just into food but into copies of themselves, and so spreading further, slowly, doggedly. The food she got from the ground became handfuls a day, almost enough to stave off the hunger that nagged at her constantly.

Ingre said to her, `You have a child. I knew they wouldn’t hurt you because of that.’

`It’s OK, Ingre.’

`Although betraying you was doctrinally the correct thing to do.’

`I said it’s OK.’

`The children are the future.’

Yes, thought Rala. But what future? We are insane, she thought, an insane species. As soon as the Qax get out of the way we start to rip each other apart. We rule each other with armbands, bits of rag. And now the Million Heroes are prepared to starve us all - they might still do it - for the sake of an abstract doctrine. Maybe we really were better off under the Qax.

But Ingre seemed eager for forgiveness. She worked in the dirt beside her cadre sibling, gazing earnestly at her.

So Rala forced a smile. `Yes,’ she said, and patted her belly. `Yes, the children are the future. Now here, help me with this sieve.’

Under their fingers, the alien nano seeds spread through the dirt of Earth.

During the churning of the post-Qax era, we undying, our actions during the Occupation misunderstood, were forced to flee.

The Interim Coalition of Governance consolidated its power, as such agencies do, and proved itself to be rather less than interim.

But from the ranks of the Coalition’s stultifying bureaucracy emerged one man whose strange genius would shape human history for twenty thousand years.

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