Hearts of Oak Read online

  “Why did Carter come here?” asked Victor.

  “I don’t know,” said Iona.

  “Are others coming?” said Alyssa.

  “I don’t think so.” She felt it was important to tell them the truth about everything so she told them how she’d set out to find Alyssa, which had led her to the planning department, which had led her to Victor’s office. She took the coin from her pocket and held it up.

  “Oh that’s where it went,” said Alyssa, smiling broadly and taking the coin from her.

  “It’s yours?”

  “It was part of my charm bracelet,” Alyssa said, holding up her wrist with the bracelet on it that Iona had found distracting on their first meeting. “Thank you—I was gutted that a piece had gone missing. It’s not the same without all the pieces.”

  Iona went on to explain how the absence of Victor at his office had led her to visit his house. Victor was furious with Iona over this. Alyssa was furious with Victor for leaving the instruction manual lying around for people to find.

  “I left in a hurry,” Victor said. “I didn’t get a chance to go home and tidy up—and I didn’t think anyone would go snooping in my stuff.” This last part was directed more at Iona.

  “And you carried out the instructions on this citizen, this Carter?” said Alyssa.

  “Yes. I wanted to know where he was going so I followed him—why did he come here?”

  “The instructions are for testing new citizens after they’re assembled,” said Victor. “I added the last part myself—it’s a simple program that tells them to come here and wait.”

  If that was simple, Iona wondered what a complex program would look like. But instead she asked a more pressing question: “Why?”

  “Because we need them,” said Alyssa. “Why were you looking for me?”

  Iona remembered she had reasons of her own to be angry with Alyssa. “Because they questioned me about the building that burned down, the one that you and I had been to a few hours earlier, and the bureau thinks my friend faked his own death to do it, and I’m sure you must be involved in all this and I want to know how.”

  “But you didn’t tell the bureau you were there, right?” said Victor urgently.

  “No, I didn’t want them to know I had any connection to it at all.”

  Victor turned to Alyssa. “What do you think?”

  Alyssa considered for a moment. “I think she’s telling the truth.” She gestured to Iona. “Come inside.”

  Iona looked up, unsure what it was she was being invited inside—but as Alyssa’s torch flashed around, she realized her surroundings were as familiar as her own shoes.

  “The Mull of Kintyre,” she breathed.

  * * *

  The king had returned to bed. One of his attendants had brought the newspaper for him so he could read how his assault had been reported. The article’s description wasn’t quite as he remembered it but then again he’d suffered a significant brain trauma, so maybe the report was right and his memory was wrong. He’d barely gotten a glimpse of his attacker and couldn’t now picture him at all—the man’s face was a blank in his mind. There were also several details the king hadn’t told the reporter and he wondered where those had come from. Probably Clarence had filled those in.

  On the second page was an article about Ward, his attacker. This explained more about who he was and speculated on why he had done it. Ward had been a construction worker, passed over for a teaching post several times. His colleagues noted he’d been struggling with physical tasks and speculated he might have a repetitive strain injury. Perhaps he had feared retirement. Perhaps that was why he wanted that teaching job so much. Perhaps he could see no way out. But, as his neighbors were quoted as saying, nobody had suspected he would do something like this.

  The king thought about his attacker for a while.

  After some consideration he called all his attendants. He would need them.

  * * *

  Iona felt queasy to be walking once more along the corridors of the Mull of Kintyre. Alyssa led the way through the ruined spaceship. Iona noticed parts of the interior had been dismantled—whole rooms were missing—and she wondered aloud why that was. She didn’t expect an answer but she got one.

  “This is where all the city’s metal comes from,” said Victor, walking alongside her. “There’s no naturally occurring metal here and even if there was we haven’t got the means to process it. So when they need more they get it from the ship.”

  Iona was stunned by this. “But this mine’s been disused for . . . I don’t know how long it’s been disused for.”

  “Officially it’s disused. Stops people from coming down here. But they still send crews to get metal from time to time.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Oh, the supply department.”

  “And nobody ever asks where it comes from?”

  Victor stopped and turned to Iona. “You’ll find there’s a lot of things nobody ever asks here. And you won’t be able to understand how you never asked either.”

  “And they did all this . . . just to stop us from finding out there was a spaceship down here?”

  Victor smiled. “No, there’s more to it than that. But well done for remembering it’s a spaceship. Took me a while to remember that.”

  “We both traveled on this, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why was it called the—”

  “Mull of Kintyre? I don’t remember. Also I don’t really remember you. Sorry.”

  “I don’t either. I only remember tiny bits and pieces. Why did we forget?”

  Victor looked somber suddenly. “Because we’ve lived too long. Ran out of space in our memories. Past a certain point it all gets vague.”

  “What do you mean, too long?”

  Alyssa had gotten a long way ahead of them, but now she shouted through: “We can talk in the cargo hold. It’s more comfortable there.”

  * * *

  The cargo hold was mostly emptied out but it seemed to have some limited power—Alyssa turned on the lights and Iona could see three rows of citizens standing in the middle. They all faced the same way, arms by their sides, like troops waiting to be inspected. And Iona knew the reason for this before she saw it: the hatches on their backs had been left open. The only one whose hatch was not open—the nearest to her as she walked toward them—was Carter.

  Iona turned and addressed Alyssa. “What are they?”

  “You mean the citizens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Highly advanced automata,” said Victor.

  “Made of . . . wood.”

  “Yep.”

  “By any sensible criteria they’re intelligent—” started Alyssa, but Victor cut her off.

  “Alyssa and I have had this debate several times.”

  “They have independent thought,” Alyssa continued, “they have personalities. Iona—you teach them every day, you know they can learn.”

  “But they were made,” said Iona.

  “Yeah,” said Victor. “Manufactured.”

  “Who made them?”

  “Well, these days they make each other. At the Points of Origin.”

  Iona realized she’d never been assigned to design a Point of Origin, nor had she ever known what they were for—and as Victor had said, she’d never queried this.

  “But who made the first one?” Iona said, referring to the citizens. She turned to Alyssa. “You?”

  “What?” said Alyssa. “No. They did it.” And she pointed to a two-seater sofa that had been placed against the wall.

  At first Iona thought the sofa had two citizens sitting on it but as she walked closer she realized they were something different. They had a very similar shape to the citizens but were made of different materials—predominantly metal. They were old and corroded and parts of them were missing: both had exposed areas on their torsos, one was missing the lower part of its arm, the other had lost a leg. Wiring and circuitry could be seen throug
h the holes. They had both clearly been inactive for a long time.

  Like the ship itself, they were familiar.

  “These were the service robots on the ship,” said Victor, walking up behind her. “There were dozens of them once. Most of them were destroyed in the crash. The ones that were left started building replacements for themselves out of the materials they had on hand.”

  “To look after us after they were gone . . .” said Iona.

  “It’s incredible what they achieved. There’s a small amount of metal inside each citizen—the brain and parts of the clockwork mechanism—but mostly it’s wood. And as I say, they self-replicate.”

  Iona only half-listened to this. Something significant had been contained in what Victor just said but she hadn’t immediately grasped it. She turned to him. “Crash?”

  “Yeah,” Victor began—and then stopped as he realized this was new information to her. He swallowed anxiously and turned to Alyssa.

  Alyssa sighed and rolled her eyes at Victor. “I did tell you to let me do this. I was going to break it more gently.”

  “No, I remember,” Iona said. “We’re not from here. We came here to make a new home. But . . .”

  There had been over four hundred people on board the ship. People traveling to a new life on a new planet.

  The landing gear had failed. Iona had survived. Hardly anyone else had.

  * * *

  Iona sat on a chair Alyssa had found for her, struggling to process the knowledge that had come back into her mind. Victor had confirmed her recollections: his own memories were also very dim but chimed with what Iona managed to dredge up. Victor had then left her alone to process this, busying himself by looking inside Carter’s hatch, tinkering with his insides. Even though she knew Carter was a machine now, Iona still found this unpleasant to look at.

  “The citizens who ‘die’ don’t actually have to be destroyed,” said Victor. “Most of them are easy enough to repair. Often it’s just that their brains get crudded up with all the data they’ve amassed, and you could correct that with a hard reset. But the city prefers to recycle the parts and make new ones—with each generation they refine the design, so—”

  “They get better, faster,” said Iona.

  “The wooden parts burn in the furnace, the metal is retrieved for reuse.”

  “So you’re saving them from the furnace because they’re intelligent beings who deserve to live?”

  “Nothing as altruistic as that, I’m afraid,” said Alyssa as she brought over another chair and sat next to Iona.

  “Did you come here on the ship too?”

  “No, I only arrived a few weeks ago.” This was why Alyssa had always seemed out of tune with the city. Iona had recognized this about her from the moment they met. But then Iona realized—

  “Does that mean you’ve got a ship?”

  Alyssa paused. “Yes, but—”

  “Then you can get us home?”

  “It’s not functional. I don’t know if it can be fixed. I’ve hidden it, but we have to get out of here first.”

  “Out of where?”

  Alyssa and Victor exchanged glances. Victor broke off from his work and walked over to Iona.

  “After we crashed,” Victor began, “someone found us.”

  “What do you mean? Who?”

  “They built this dome . . . but really it’s a sort of cage, I suppose. They built it around us—and it goes right down into the ground, you can’t dig under it—and they made the inside match our natural environment. Or a natural environment.”

  “The figures,” said Iona. “You’re talking about the figures. They put us in here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know,” said Alyssa, “but the dome preserves its subjects indefinitely. In here you don’t age or die.”

  Iona blinked. “How long have we been here?”

  Alyssa bit her tongue. “It’s hard to tell exactly, because you traveled here through a wormhole and the time dilation effect isn’t predictable—but our records suggest . . . well, it’s at least seven hundred years.”

  Iona nodded, but it was too much to take in. She couldn’t remember her childhood, her life on Earth, her family. She’d gained time by being in this dome—but she felt like she’d lost a great deal more. She felt like she’d lost herself.

  “But . . . you only just got here?” Iona said. “From Earth?”

  “Yes. They found me and realized I was like you, which I suppose is why they put me in here.”

  “But why did you come here? To find us?”

  “No . . . not exactly, we assumed you’d all be dead by now. But—”

  “The crash wasn’t an accident, Iona,” said Victor. He was holding out a sheaf of papers with words printed on them. “We had a stowaway.”

  * * *

  The deaths had started after they came out the other side of the wormhole.

  The wormhole was an integral part of the journey, cutting out hundreds of light years. The technique had been tested and was believed to be entirely safe. Nobody was worried about it at all.

  The initial deaths appeared to be heart failures, occurring in people who’d been thoroughly tested before the mission and found to be in good health. At first the ship’s doctors theorized that traveling through the wormhole had weakened them somehow. They embarked on another series of tests, trying to find what had changed. They found small mutations in the bodies of the dead but didn’t know what had caused them or how to stop them.

  The mission continued and the deaths continued. The doctors kept carrying out tests: there was nothing else they could do.

  One day they carried out some tests on a member of the crew and the results said he was not human. At this point the crew member in question started killing the doctors. The ship was put on high alert: the crew member had to be neutralized one way or another. Several more were killed but eventually the crew member was thrown from the airlock. They believed this was the end of it.

  Or at least, most of them believed this. One of the surviving doctors kept studying the results of the tests they’d run on the bodies, as well as the tests on the crew member who’d turned out to be inhuman, and she developed a theory. She believed an intangible creature had come aboard the Mull of Kintyre while the ship was traveling through the wormhole. It had tried to inhabit the body of a crew member, but this process involved some physical mutation, which had killed the host. It had moved onto another crew member and killed that one too. This process had been repeated over and over until the creature managed to latch onto someone who didn’t die, either because that person was physically different from the others or because the creature had learned from its earlier mistakes.

  This doctor believed that if the creature could move from body to body, they couldn’t be absolutely certain it wasn’t still on board, hiding inside someone else. She insisted on running tests on every crew member but found nothing. The deaths stopped and the crew’s worries subsided. They focused instead on reaching their destination.

  Yet the doctor never stopped worrying about it. Maybe the creature was learning—maybe now it knew how to trick the tests and pass for human. She wrote all this down, not just in her report that was stored in the ship’s systems but also on paper in case the systems failed. If she was right, it was too important to risk erasure. She didn’t tell a lot of people about it because she worried any of them might be the creature—but she did tell her wife.

  As Iona read the document she remembered Dr. Hanna Bradley. This memory wasn’t vague and shapeless like the others that had drifted back to her—she saw Hanna’s face and remembered the room they had shared on the Mull of Kintyre and how it had felt to be with her.

  Iona looked up at Victor and Alyssa, who had stayed with her while she read the last thing her wife had written.

  “She died in the crash, we think,” Alyssa said, anticipating Iona’s question. “If it’s any consolation she was absolutely right. That rep
ort is an excellent piece of work.”

  It was no consolation at all.

  “We reckon the thing wanted to strand us here so it sabotaged the ship,” said Victor. “It wanted to cut us off from Earth.”

  “Possibly,” said Alyssa. “Though it needs some of you alive, so if that was the plan it probably didn’t intend to kill quite so many of you.”

  “How do you know so much about it?” asked Iona.

  “This wasn’t the only colony ship to be affected. Dozens of ships that went through those wormholes came out with unwanted passengers. Most of them lurked undetected on colonies—”

  “What are they? What do they want?”

  “We call them the Poramutantur, and all they do is fight each other. They’ve been at it for thousands of years. And they’ll use anyone and anything as weapons. They inhabit the bodies of people with influence, they manipulate, they abuse trust—they set our colonies at war. Millions of people died. We’ve eliminated most of the Poramutantur now but it’s taken centuries to undo the damage.”

  “It’s our own fault,” said Victor. “We went through the wormholes. We set them free.”

  “You were the victims. It’s not your fault at all.”

  “So that’s why you came,” Iona said to Alyssa. “You think it’s still here.”

  “I’m convinced it is. You can’t kill them, we’ve tried. And if it was disguised as one of the crew it would’ve ended up in here with you.”

  “Alyssa’s got a theory,” said Victor, “that one of the dead citizens might know who the Poramutantur is because if one of them found out, the Poramutantur would destroy it to cover up. So we reactivate the dead, enter the program that makes them come down here, talk to them, ask them how they died, see if there’s any clues there.”

  “I suppose you haven’t found anything yet,” said Iona, “otherwise you’d—wait, you stole Weston’s body, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Victor sheepishly, “that was an experiment in sending a reprogrammed citizen to do the business. We usually do it covertly before the ceremony and replace the body with a dummy, but, er . . .” Victor gestured at a citizen whose body was singed and charred around the edges. “Our guy here didn’t get a chance to do that so he tried to carry out his instructions via other means. He just managed to get out of the furnace with the body.”