The Inhuman Peace Read online

  ‘Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’

  —Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I: Connection

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  II: Emergence

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  III: Expiration

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  IV: Amalgamation

  ONE

  TWO

  V: Domination

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  V: Motion

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  VI: Fragmentation

  ONE

  TWO

  VII: Convergence

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  VII: Termination

  Acknowledgements

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Imagine that the British Empire never fell.

  The Great War never happened; Britain conquered all that stood in her way, destroying the rebellions of the Americas and the British Raj; the old hegemonies remained, untouched by the fire of revolution.

  Now the Commonwealth flies the flag of the Empire, many of its colonies stripped bare in the name of British interests. The world clashes with guns, germs and steel. On the surface, the dreadnoughts known as the Tin Soldiers march on all who stand in Her Majesty’s path; while in the skies, the Angels Interitus orbit the Earth, ready to wipe out entire cities at a moment’s notice with their tungsten bombs.

  Who dares resist? To the Far East, the Second Song Emperor rules China, and meditates upon an electronic empire built behind the Bamboo Curtain. To the West, the French and the Ottomans bicker after the failing of their great alliance; German knights prowl the borders of their Empire, fearful of the advances of Catherine IV and her Russian nobles. In dark corners, scientists, especially of the Russo-Nipponese alliance, still dream of a worldwide network uniting all nations, but the Vatican disapproves of this heresy; from Rome, the Babel Machine computes the algorithm known as the Echo of God, endlessly reconstructing and flooding the airwaves with background radiation of the Beginning of the Universe.

  In the middle of this grand and great drama, a little island called Ceylon floats in the waters of the Indian Ocean. Seen from above, it is just a grey-green dot; a speck sheltered in the watery shadow of great India. If it lusts for empire, it is only in the dreams of what few monks committed their scrolls to memory when the British destroyed their temples.

  A handful of lights glitter on Ceylon’s otherwise blank skin.

  Look at those lights, now. Most of them are Kandy, the old, overpopulated hill capital in the heart of the country. Very few other cities exist – a state maintained, partly by wit, partly by incompetence, with the net effect of preventing the natives from gathering, from rebuilding their art and thought, from forming too complex an economy to govern. Yarl, that first bastion of resistance, has been obliterated; Colombo, the seaside market city, crushed in the tug-of-war between Britain and China, before the peace treaties were signed.

  In the books of those who rule this realm, Ceylon is part fortress, part factory, part abandoned green, part trade hub. From China come robotics, rice, tea, synthsilks, construction technology. From the British Raj come education, silver, medicines, drugs to increase lifespans, surgeries to change the shape and function of the human body and the famous network of banks and insurance underwriters that form the beating heart of capitalist-colonialism. They slip through Ceylon’s grasping hands and leave laughing. Who cares if the locals are happy? The British Empire is content, and there is peace. A country is a small price to pay for the New Silk Road.

  But Ceylon is far from peaceful. If the invader had actually learned the history of the place they trod on – if they had actually paid attention to those monks with their endless tales and parables, instead of just turning them into fodder for Kipling’s tales – they would have learned of the slow political poison that grew in this country. They would have understood how every single attempt to unite this land under a single coherent government had been met with abject failure; they would have seen the rot that crept in, the dynasties that rose, again and again, first to cripple, then to supplant, sowing graft and servitude in lieu of law and order; they would known that emperors and kings and governors alike were doomed to this great head-first tilt into chaos.

  And so it is now. It is 2024. The British think they have a government in place. The people who live here know that the British control the courts, and perhaps the military; certainly not the police, not anymore. Five families have ruled this misaligned roost for at least a generation now.

  Take, for instance, House Bandaranaike, the largest and richest of the lot. A tidy little coalition of fathers, sons, uncles, mothers, aunts, nephews and nieces that went to the most elite Kandyan schools and promptly became directors of some state-owned operation or the other. Interests: minerals, ores, weapons. Behind every grain of titanium sand and every ton of graphite is a Bandaranaike. Punish one, reprimand a couple, and the island’s electricity workers would immediately go on strike, the thorium miners would announce fasts unto death and armed mobs would suddenly appear.

  Or take Molligoda. The Molligodas command all the armed forces the British are too busy to administer, especially in the unruly South; and only a very good accountant, able to freeze the entire island, and study all the motions thus suspended, could have calculated just how many men and guns that actually meant. Ever so often violence would break out between the Bandaranaikes and the Molligodas – sometimes a duel with swords, sometimes a lover spurned – but by and large these things were settled under the justice of the Maha Sangha, and not the sweating judges the British sent to watch over this far colony.

  And what of the monks themselves? The Sangha, who have always written themselves into history, are no less powerful a government; their words hold where law will not; their messages carry where official channels fail; they represent, though unelected, and ch0ose who falls and fails.

  This is not immediately apparent to the very tall, very thin man who has just appeared 0n the rooftop of what appears to be a construction site. The sun has already brought a rosy glow to his candlewax face, and in a few moments, will begin roasting it. The dirigible that brought him here is a thin, hungry-looking affair, with the words HMS CARADOC painted across its bow. It signals to him, rises, and is lost to the sky. Only the pale man remains, surrounded by concrete dust and scaffolding.

  Presently another man, perspiring slightly, makes his way through a maze of stairwells and to this top floor. This second man is bald and built like a tank; only good tailoring, it seems, prevents him from spilling out of his suit like a mound of flesh. In one hand, he carries a silver-tipped cane.

  ‘A
h, there you are. Edgar Drake the Second,’ says the mound, sticking out a hand. ‘A pleasure to meet you, Penhaligon. We’ve heard great things about you. Sorry about the delay, I had to sort out a meeting with a roboticist. You know how they are – love to hear themselves talk.’

  ‘The pleasure is all mine, I assure you,’ says Nigel Penhaligon. The proffered hand is clammy and uncomfortable to the touch. ‘There are roboticists here?’

  ‘One,’ says Drake. ‘Well, you know how it is. Not officially. Local chap, not with the Royal Society. Bit … unorthodox, shall we say, but between you and me, half the units we shipped out to Kashmir (he pronounced it “Cash-mee-yur”) all came from his lab here. Decent stuff. Decent stuff.’

  ‘You’re not the real Drake, are you? You’d be much older.’

  ‘As I said, the second. I’m afraid my original is, indeed, much older. And possibly in better shape.’ His large hand gestures at the city around them. ‘You could say Colombo and I have that in common.’

  Nigel Penhaligon looks out over the ruins that lie strewn about, as if God Himself has reached over and tossed His toys about, and seems to struggle with himself. He settles for a very mild, ‘Half this city seems to be missing.’

  ‘A bit more than that, I’d say,’ says Drake. ‘Look over there.’

  To the West, in front of the setting sun, looms something that looks like an eggshell making a passable attempt at imitating the Moon. Even at a distance, it is taller than anything else in the city; it sits utterly still, dominating the horizon. The sea churns and froths around it. Workers swarm over its pockmarked hide. Occasionally, something glows from within. In front of it is something that could have once been a beach, but is now a jagged expanse of blackened and fused glass. Behind it, keeping careful distance, is a fleet of black ships.

  ‘That’s one of their port cities, isn’t it?’

  ‘Smashed right into the harbour here,’ says Drake. His fat fingers sketch over concrete dust and steel, spilled across the roads and ruins like snow, and into melted-looking rubble beyond. ‘New breach weapon … they call it the Divine Wind or something. We’ve seen this on the Nepal border, but never mounted on a sea vessel before. Troops landed, went straight in. South – we think they had another landing planned; there’s another port there – and east to the perimeter, and the rest straight into the governor’s residence. Local forces didn’t stand a chance. Mostly normal troops and Tin Soldiers,’ he says to Penhaligon’s raised eyebrow. ‘It took maybe a day to take the entire city.’

  ‘That doesn’t account for all the damage.’

  ‘Well,’ says Drake, and for the first time his gravelly voice loses some of its bluster, ‘that was us, I’m afraid. Angelstrike.’

  They both look up, as if they could see with their own eyes the satellite that brooded on the other side of the blue sky.

  ‘You fired an Angels Interitus,’ Penhaligon’s tone is flat, ‘on a civilian city.’

  ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child, Penhaligon. You know how it is. We can’t allow Her Majesty to look soft, can we? One solid blow wiped out all those Chinese Marines and their tanks and set that bloody thing on fire, and everybody wants to talk civilized again.’

  ‘A full Angelstrike.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Cost of doing business, I’m afraid. Anyway, the Chinese backed off, everyone shook hands, we’ve all agreed to put this misunderstanding behind us and get on with it. As of two days ago, everything’s signed and ready. You, sir, shall be the one to get on with it. You can thank me for dealing with the mess.’ He waves his hand at the horizon. ‘Come on, we’ll do fine. The country has two more harbours.’

  Nigel Penhaligon, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, does not move, but stares at the ashes of Colombo, once the commercial capital of this little colony.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ve already moved the orphans and the trade routes into Kandy,’ says Drake impatiently, as if offering a conciliatory prize. ‘That’s the other city, up there in the hills, you know – bloody annoying to get to, but it seems like we’ll be operating from there from now on. Come on, let me tell you about the tea here. We’re having some problems with the topsoil …’

  Many years later, a girl arrives in a crate. Or at least, she looks like a girl. Only when the moon peers out from behind the clouds can you see the glint of metal bones, and the rags wrapped around them in a crude approximation of skin.

  The light falls on her face – a cracked visage where the synth-skin has peeled away, revealing the ceramic plates underneath. But her mouth looks new, as if someone has lovingly pasted new skin there, stretching it over the gleam of clean white ceramic and fresh steel. One of her arms is broken – a reject welded on casually, perhaps the last of a rush order.

  It is April, the cruellest month, breeding not lilacs out of this dead land, but thorns and weeds. No spring rain for this country – not this close to the Equator – but memory and desire mix well enough even under the scorching Ceylonese sun.

  The guards shepherding her are tense, and their movements practiced. They’re not quite sure why they have to deal with this last-minute addition – it was dangerously close to T-zero, or Activation Time. Silently, they trudge past the decrepit shells of dead buildings and the bodies carefully parked there – little human dolls with ticking counters inside their minds; eyes open but unseeing.

  They take her, purely by coincidence, to where Nigel Penhaligon once stood. The crate is cracked open, the girl carefully prised out. Automated standby systems keep her upright, sleepwalking to a halt on the ghost of Penhaligon’s footsteps. The fingers on her good hand are pried open, a makeshift spear stuffed into her fist. Instruments are checked, a thumbs-up given, and the guards fade into the twilight, not wanting to be anywhere near an activated bot.

  A counter ticks. The sun crawls hesitantly up the sky, turning it blue first, then pink, then swift gold. Tick, tock, tick, tock, and as the light touches her, she begins to wake up. She chatters to herself, low and musical, turning the spear this way and that. Something startles her from across the street; frowning, she balances herself, with her bad arm stretched out and back, and with one smooth motion tosses the spear at a little warehouse on the other side.

  Several somethings – very much like her, but male – catch the spear, chatter back, turn it this way and that and begin studying it. Then, as if by silent consensus, they split off, running on swift metallic feet through the bones of a broken city, hunting for more things to make spears with.

  The girl sits back on her haunches, watching them go. Outside, the sound of pianos begins drifting through the dull air: Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat Minor, Op. 35, the 3rd Movement, a dirge that spoke of dust and ashes and loneliness.

  Things are about to change.

  I: Connection

  ONE

  In the city responsible for all those glittering lights, a messenger took a turn at a little over sixty kilometers an hour. Ordinarily, given the topography of Kandy and its roads, this should have resulted in him falling to his death and bouncing off several curving roads on the way down, but the messenger in question was from the Ministry of Reconciliation, and the Ministry chose only the best riders for this kind of work.

  His motorcycle, a Royal Enfield Bullet-E, skidded just enough to put the fear of several gods into him, but kept going, cutting through the crickety stillness of the Kandy night. He rode past rings of houses that grew progressively shorter and wider – land was a luxury, and the more you could build horizontally, the better off you were – and stopped at a lane where they were just two storeys tall and the owners rich enough to have actual courtyards in between.

  One of these houses belong to Kushlani de Almeida, PhD. It was the only house in the lane with its lights still on. It was six months after the October Massacre; many years before Kushlani would fight the combined political might of Kandy’s old Houses in a court case and lose, and so commit the act of desperation that would see her die in a pool of
her own blood, with a bullet in her belly. Her hair was still black and her face had yet to take on that expression she became famous for in her later years; the one that made people feel as if something immensely old and incredibly furious had picked them up and pinned them like butterflies to a corkboard.

  She was, in short, still Assistant Two on the payroll, Assistant One in theory, and had just moved out here, very much against her parents’ wishes.

  If asked why she was up, she would have responded first with the automatic complaint of all Kandyans – the nights were getting warmer, even in Kandy; this was absolutely unheard of; it was those bloody idiots and their plantations and factories, turning the topsoil to desert and the clouds into smog.

  But it was not just the heat that kept her awake. For months now, the October Massacre had played in her mind.

  In hindsight, it felt like the plot of a bad science-fiction novel. The Colombo Entertainment Zone, the ultimate in post-apocalyptic, high-stakes television, a city-sized set for killing machines. Aritha Bandaranaike, gormless villain #1 and playboy aristocrat, deciding that the Conductor robots that prevented all hell from breaking out were better used as a party prop. The Explorer, the chief antagonist; a bot designed to test the boundaries of the Zone, the situation, to discover and exploit weak spots, largely as a diagnostic tool, arriving at exactly the right time to exploit this loss. The train to Kandy, which had to be on a supply run at just that time.

  Bystanders #12–13, innocent people, on the way back from the Wednesday market, their bags stuffed with whatever pola vegetables didn’t look too diseased, suddenly finding themselves on the receiving end of all the violence they usually only saw on their televisions. And Kushlani de Almeida, #1 protagonist, forced to dissect something that, for all her time in robots, had made her actually think about the lives of the things they made and destroyed in the name of profitable entertainment. All this chaos, lining up perfectly.

  Karma, her father had said. Karma, as if that explained the madness, as if it was a story written out in advance, with everyone playing roles proportionate to their sins. Kushlani had long stopped believing in karma. There was no order to history; only moments of order interspersed with chaos, and people trying to make sense of it afterward.