But something had.
Horst stood in front of the bench which served as an altar, hair on his arms pricked up as though he was standing in some kind of massive static stream. There was a presence in the church, ethereal yet with an almost brutal strength. He could feel it watching him. He could feel age almost beyond comprehension. The first time Horst had seen a gigantea he had spent over an hour just looking up at it in stupefaction, a living thing that had been old when Christ walked the Earth. But the gigantea was nothing compared to this, the tree was a mere infant. Age, real age, was a fearful thing.
Horst didn’t believe in ghosts. Besides, the presence was too real for that. It enervated the church, absorbing what scant ration of divinity had once existed.
“What are you?” he whispered to the gentle breeze. Night was falling outside, waving treetops cast a jagged sable-black silhouette against the gold-pink sky. The men were returning from the fields, sweaty and tired, but smiling. Voices carried through the clearing. Aberdale was so peaceful, it looked like everything he had wanted when he left Earth.
“What are you?” Horst demanded. “This is a church, a house of God. I will have no sacrilege committed here. Only those who truly repent are welcome.”
For a giddy moment his thoughts were rushing headlong through empty space. The velocity was terrifying. He yelled in shock, there was nothing around him, no body, no stars. This was what he imagined the null- dimension that existed outside a starship would look like while it jumped.
Abruptly, he was back in the church. A small ruby star burnt in the air a couple of metres in front of him.
He stared at it in shock, then giggled. “Twinkle twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are.”
The star vanished.
His laughter turned to a strangled pule. He fled out into the dusky clearing, stumbling through the soft loam of his vegetable garden, heedless of the shabby plants he trampled.
It was his singing which drew the villagers a few hours later. He was sitting on the jetty with a bottle of home-brew vodka. The group that had gathered looked down at him with contempt.
“Demons!” Horst shouted when Powel Manani and a couple of the others pulled him to his feet. “They’ve only gone and summoned bloody demons here.”
Ruth gave him one disgusted glance, and stalked off back to her cabin.
Horst was dragged back to his cot, where they administered one of his own tranquillizers. He fell asleep still mumbling warnings.
The Ly-cilph was interested in humans. Out of the hundred and seventy million sentient species it had encountered, only three hundred thousand had been able to perceive it, either by technology or their own mentalities.
The priest had clearly been aware of its identity focus, although not understanding the nature. Humans obviously had a rudimentary attunement to their energistic environment. It searched through the records it had compiled by accessing the few processor blocks and memory fleks available in Aberdale, which mostly comprised the educational texts owned by Ruth Hilton. The so-called psychic ability was largely dismissed as hallucinatory or fraud committed for financial gain. However the race had a vast history of incidents and myths in its past. And its strong continuing religious beliefs were an indication of how widespread the faculty was, granting the “supernatural” events a respectable orthodoxy. There was obviously a great deal of potential for energistic perception development, which was inhibited by the rational mentality. The conflict was a familiar one to the Ly- cilph, although it had no record of a race in which the two opposing natures were quite so antagonistic.
What do you think?laton asked his colleagues when the door closed behind Quinn Dexter.
He’s a psychopathic little shit, with a nasty steak of sadism thrown in,said waldsey, the group’s chief viral technologist.
Dexter is certainly unstable,camilla said. I don’t think you can trust him to keep any agreement. His revenge obsession with this Banneth person is the dominant motivator. Our immortality scheme is unlikely to replace it; too cerebral.
I say we should eliminate him,salkid said.
I’m inclined to agree,laton said. Pity. It’s rather like watching a miniature version of one’s self.
You were never that gratuitous, Father,camilla said.
Given the circumstances, I might have been. However, that is an irrelevant speculation. Our immediate problem is our own security. One can reasonably assume Quinn Dexter has informed most, if not all, of his fellow Ivets that something wicked lurks in the woods. That is going to make life difficult.
So? We just take out all of them,salkid said. Out of all the exiles, the ex-blackhawk captain found the decades of inactivity hardest to handle. I’ll lead the incorporated. It’ll be a pleasure.
Salkid, stop acting the oaf,laton said. We can’t possibly eliminate all the Ivets ourselves. The attention such an overt action would generate would be quite intolerable coming so soon after the homesteads.
What, then?
Firstly we shall wait until Quinn Dexter incapacitates Supervisor Manani’s communicator, then we shall have to get the villagers to eliminate the Ivets for us.
How?waldsey asked.
The priest already knows the Ivets are Devil worshippers. We shall simply make the knowledge available to everyone else in a fashion they cannot possibly ignore.
Chapter 12
Idria traced a slightly elliptical orbit through the Lyll asteroid belt in the New Californian system, with a median distance of a hundred and seventy million kilometres from the G5 primary star. It was a stony-iron rock, which looked like a bruised, flaking swede, measuring seventeen kilometres across at its broadest and eleven down the short spin axis. A ring formation of thirty-two industrial stations hung over the crinkled black rock, insatiable recipients of a never-ending flow of raw material ferried out from Idria’s non-rotating spaceport.
It was the variety of those compounds which justified the considerable investment made in the rock. Idria’s combination of resources was rare, and rarity always attracts money.
In 2402 a survey craft found long veins of minerals smeared like a diseased rainbow through the ordinary metal ores, their chemistry a curious mixture of sulphurs, alumina, and silicas. A planetside board meeting deemed that the particular concentration of crystalline strata was valuable enough to warrant an extraction operation; and the miners and their heavy digging machinery began chewing shafts into the interior in 2408. Industrial stations followed, refining and processing the ores on site. Population began to creep upwards, caverns were expanded, biospheres started. By 2450 the central cavern was five kilometres long and four wide, Idria’s rotation was increased to give it a half-standard gravity on the floor. There were ninety thousand people living in it by then, forming a community which was self-sufficient in most areas. It was declared independent, and earned a seat in the system assembly. But it was a company town, the company being Lassen Interstellar.
Lassen was into mining, and shipping, and finance, and starship components, and military systems, amongst other endeavours. It was a typical New Californian outfit, a product of innumerable mergers and takeovers; a linear extension of its old Earth predecessors which had thrived on America’s western seaboard. Its management worshipped the super-capitalist ethic, expanding aggressively, milking governments for development contracts, pressuring the assembly for ever more convenient tax breaks, spreading subsidiaries across the Confederation, shafting the opposition at every opportunity.
There were thousands of companies like it based on New California. Corporate tigers whose spoils elevated
