On the Steel Breeze

by Alastair Reynolds

  She wondered how Mposi could know this, but he was ahead of her: ‘Too many rumours to ignore – and Sou-Chun has friends in the right places, people she can rely on to tell her the truth. With Noah’s testimony, however they got it out of him, the other holoships are making rapid strides towards their own slowdown technology. They’ll have it soon, one way or another, and I don’t know what’ll happen then. You managed it wisely, Mother – but I’m not sure everyone else will.’

  She laughed hollowly. Wisely. Yes, and here she was, shot down on an alien planet, prisoner of an artificial intelligence, having achieved almost nothing she had set out to accomplish.

  ‘If that’s wisdom, Mposi—’ she began, but he was already speaking again.

  ‘I’ve been in contact with Eunice – Father passed on your ching coordinates to me and Ndege before things got too bad. We’ve spoken to her. No physical access, of course, but . . . it’s been sufficient for purposes. Why did you hide these things from us, Mother? Why didn’t you trust us?’

  ‘You were children,’ she said.

  ‘Eunice is aware of the developing situation and extremely concerned about the potential for violence. She seems to think the troubles may force her hand. I don’t think the world’s ready for her yet – but that won’t necessarily stop her.’

  ‘You’re right – the world isn’t ready. Not remotely.’

  ‘I hope we’ll speak again,’ Mposi said. ‘Until then, I trust you have some way of hearing my words, and that you’re well, and that Nedge and I will see you again. Be safe, Mother.’

  She was about to skip ahead – if indeed there was a later transmission in the desk’s memory – when another discontinuity interrupted her perception of elapsed time. It was morning again, judging by the angle of sunlight on the surrounding trees. She felt unexpectedly rested and refreshed, as if she had slept very soundly indeed. And clean, although she had no recollection of washing or being washed. She had eaten and drunk, too, she remembered that much, but felt no need to empty her bowels.

  And now the girl was back, but the desk was gone, and they were drinking chai again.

  ‘You’re doing something to me,’ Chiku decided. ‘Manipulating my perception of time on a deep level. I have no idea how long I’ve been here – it feels like a day, but I don’t trust my perceptions at the moment. How do I know I haven’t been here for weeks or months, while you keep resetting some clock in my brain and asking me these questions over and over? Actually . . .’ She rapped her knuckles on the table, making the crockery clatter. ‘Actually, how do I even know this is a real environment? How do I know you’re not inside my head, rummaging around like they did in Noah’s brain and sucking out information? How do I even know I’m awake? The last thing I’m certain happened to me is being gassed aboard my ship. For all I know I’ve been in a coma ever since.’

  ‘You must appreciate,’ the girl said, ‘that no answer I could give you would convince you one way or the other. Such an answer would render three thousand years’ worth of philosophical debate superfluous in a single stroke!’

  ‘I’ll ask you anyway – is this reality?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said firmly, as if they were playing some kind of question-and-answer parlour game.

  ‘Am I on Crucible?’

  ‘Oh yes, definitely. I could tell you our exact surface coordinates—’

  ‘Where’s Mandala?’

  ‘Quite a long way to the west, on one of the main continental plates. We’re on one of the larger islands. We’re keeping our distance from Mandala, for now. But that’s enough about me. What did you make of the transmissions from Zanzibar?’

  ‘No, that’s not nearly enough about you. Give me something for a change. Why would you keep your distance from Mandala?’

  ‘We were ordered not to investigate until the human settlers arrived.’

  ‘You were also ordered to build cities. You had no trouble disobeying that order, so why would you comply with another?’ Chiku nodded to herself. ‘Either you’re lying and you have been poking around Mandala, or something else compelled you to keep away. We haven’t discussed the orbiting things yet. They called you here, didn’t they? Ocular picked up their optical communication stream, the blue light. It did something to Arachne, penetrated her deep programming, made her doctor the data before it reached human eyes. On the basis of that false data, we launched the caravans and the Provider seed packages. You rode our expansion wave, surfed ahead of it – machines summoned by machines. But what happened when you arrived? Did you communicate with anyone – or should I say any thing?’

  ‘Communications are proceeding,’ the girl said, after what Chiku thought was a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Efforts are ongoing. There has been . . . fruitful exchange.’ The girl smiled quickly. ‘What conclusions have you drawn regarding the twenty-two machines?’

  ‘None at all, but then we only just arrived. You’ve had more than a century to study them. What have you done? What have you actually learned? Assuming you learned anything at all.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve learned a great deal. A tremendous amount.’ But there was something almost too forceful about this response, a touch too much protestation.

  ‘Do you know who sent them? What they’re called? Why they’re here in the first place?’

  ‘They were drawn by Mandala, as were we. They have an interest in the mutual welfare of . . . ones such as us.’

  ‘Artificial intelligences. Artilects.’

  ‘Machine-substrate consciousnesses,’ the girl said, as if this made some vital distinction. ‘Our name for them . . . or rather my best understanding of their name, mapped across daunting cognitive horizons . . . It’s nothing more than an approximation, I hope you understand—’

  ‘I do,’ Chiku said. ‘Please get to the point.’

  ‘We call them the Watchkeepers. They’ve been here for about three million years, but they’re much older than that. Clearly, they are unimaginably patient. Our recent activities, our busy goings-on – the emergence of human civilisation twenty-eight light-years away, the arrival of the seed packages, your presence . . . all these things happened in an instant, from their perspective. They’re not slow-witted, you understand, just anchored to a different idea of time’s flow. Their clock is galactic, not stellar. But it would be wrong to say that they are uninterested in developments in and around this planet.’

  ‘What have they been doing since you arrived? Just hovering above Crucible?’

  ‘There have been measurable interactions, as I stated. Preliminaries to deeper communication.’

  ‘Have you explored them? When we passed one of the machines, we could see some way into it. If I’d been here for decades, I’d have tried to send a probe to find out what was inside.’

  ‘And what sort of reaction might you have anticipated?’

  ‘You tell me. I’m not the artificial intelligence – sorry, machine-substrate consciousness – in this conversation.’

  The girl raised an arch eyebrow. ‘Self-evidently.’

  ‘Let’s go back to Mandala for a moment. I can’t believe your curiosity didn’t get the better of you. Did those things – the Watchkeepers – frighten you away?’

  ‘Why would you come to that conclusion?’

  ‘Who cares? Those machines aren’t my problem, anyway. If they’ve been orbiting Crucible all this time without doing anything, presumably they aren’t particularly interested in what happens on the planet. All I want is settlement space for my colonists – we can worry about the Watchkeepers when we’ve built some cities and farms.’

  ‘That’s an admirably pragmatic sentiment. Do you think you could go about your daily lives with mysterious alien machines hovering in your skies?’

  ‘Our objective was to study Mandala,’ Chiku pointed out. ‘That would have been enough to be starting with, before we turned our attention to the Watchkeepers. Let’s move on, shall we? We had an arrangement – I reca
ll you promising to let me speak to my friends.’

  ‘But of course.’ The girl looked abashed. ‘I’d hate you to think that my word is anything less than dependable. Who would you like to talk to?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘But if you had to choose just one . . . who would it be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Travertine or Guochang, I suppose.’

  The girl nodded sagely, and time slipped another gear.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  It was a different time of day, and the girl who looked like Lin Wei had been replaced by Travertine. Chiku had the queasy sense that this moment had happened before. How had Travertine arrived? When? Was it even Travertine, or just a simulated figment? Ve looked real enough, it was true, right down to the cuff around vis wrist, which was still emitting a metronomic red pulse every few seconds.

  ‘I could ask you the same question,’ Travertine said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Are you real, or a figment? That’s what you just asked. Or speculated. Or thought aloud. I’ve been through this with the others. There’s probably no way we’ll ever know for sure – I mean, ontologically speaking, this is pretty deep water. But the most efficient information-gathering strategy may be to assume that we’re all real, or are having a real conversation, at least.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I mean that we might not be in our bodies exactly. For all we know, the machines could be keeping us asleep while they open us up, like frogs on a dissection table. Even if they aren’t invading our bodies and minds, they’re clearly manipulating our perceptions on some level – probably addressing brain function through the existing pathways of our neural implants but using forbidden protocols, functions and backdoors that not even the Mech or ching services would normally be allowed to access. Skipping time, rewinding time, that sort of thing. It’s been happening to all of us, and I doubt you’re an exception.’

  ‘You said “all of us”. Have you seen the others?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Namboze directly, and Namboze has spoken to Doctor Aziba. Doctor Aziba claimed to have had contact with Guochang, although we’re not sure who Guochang’s spoken to. No one appears to have spoken to you until now, unless it was Guochang.’

  ‘You’re the first, I think.’

  ‘In which case, let me be the first to say I’m glad you’re still alive, Chiku, but I think we’re in the shit, so to speak.’

  ‘Do you know what’s happening? Do you know where we are?’

  ‘I haven’t been in this room before,’ Travertine said. ‘I know the view from my room, and I’ve seen the view from Namboze’s place. The placement of the towers is different, and you can make out some variation in the tree cover if you pay attention. You can also take note of sun angle, that sort of thing. My assumption is that these rooms are real, that they’re actual structures on Crucible’s surface, and that they’re moving us around from tower to tower as and when it suits them. I think there’s more than one version of the little girl, although it’s not easy to tell with all this interrupted time-perception stuff.’

  ‘The little girl is Arachne. She looks like a real person who used to be called Lin Wei, but that’s only because Lin Wei played a part in shaping Arachne’s persona. And yes, it makes sense that she can be in more than once place at a time – she’s an artilect, after all. Dealing with five of us must be like . . . I don’t know, some incredibly trivial activity. Has she asked you lots of questions?’

  ‘Until my ears are bleeding. And after I spoke to Namboze, she had a thousand more questions about our conversation. Forget any illusion of privacy – she’s listening in now.’

  ‘I don’t care. It’s not as if we’ve anything to lose by saying what’s on our minds. All I’ve got is speculation.’

  ‘All right,’ Travertine said, pausing to prepare a cup of chai for verself, and then another for Chiku. ‘Then here’s a bit more. See what you make of it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Arachne – this thing that speaks to us – hasn’t got a clue.’

  Chiku almost laughed. It was as if they were being rude about a host while she was out of the room, and there was a delicious sense of naughtiness about it.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Anything. But especially anything happening outside the immediate realm of her senses. She keeps asking me about Earth and the solar system and life on the holoships.’

  ‘Same with me,’ Chiku said.

  ‘But why wouldn’t she know what’s going on in all those places? We’ve seen the relay satellites, and the Providers are capable of transmitting a high-powered signal into interstellar space. The seed packages were also meant to deploy a listening capability just as effective – a wide baseline network, spread across the system – so Arachne should be receiving a rich stream of data, telling her everything she could ever want to know about life back home. So why would she keep asking us stuff she ought to know already?’

  Travertine’s words confirmed what Chiku had already been thinking. ‘She needs validation. She can receive the data, but she can’t authenticate it. She’s in exactly the same position we were in when we started doubting the Provider data stream from Crucible!’

  ‘Yes – we came here to validate – or invalidate – the false data received about Crucible. But our memories and the files on Icebreaker are the only means Arachne has of validating the data coming from Earth.’

  ‘Wait, though,’ said Chiku. ‘We had reason to doubt the Provider uplink. Why would Arachne doubt the signal coming from Earth? She’s a splinter of another artificial intelligence that’s still active around the solar system – the artilect that manipulated events to send Providers here in the first place. Distrusting the Earth data would be like distrusting herself.’

  ‘She’s a splinter, separated from her source by twenty-eight light-years,’ Travertine said. ‘Maybe she’s begun to feel isolated, cut off from her other self. Maybe there was some discontinuity, some interruption of the data stream – just enough to force this Arachne to start examining and questioning her assumptions. She’s an intelligence, after all, and that’s what intelligences do.’

  Chiku thought on this some more, trying to slot this vast new assumption into her existing mental framework.

  ‘I still don’t get it.’

  ‘Look at it from her perspective. Logically, she can’t prove the truthfulness of the Earth transmissions, but she can keep trying to falsify them, by testing her picture of Earth against our accounts and the data on Icebreaker. That’s why she keeps circling around the same details – it’s her way of testing us, trying to trap us in a contradiction. That’s why we’re being kept isolated, for now, and why she’ll only allow us very limited interaction. She doesn’t want to risk cross-contamination.’

  Chiku shifted in her kneeling position. ‘Why allow us to interact at all, in that case?’

  ‘I suppose she knows there are things she can only learn about us via conversations between us. She’s probably reading our brains as we speak, watching our mirror neurons light up, trying to work out whether we’re actually having a conversation or are engaged in some elaborate choreographed bluff. I think she’s worried that we’re some kind of weapon – infectious information agents, perhaps, a physical embodiment of the lies she suspects she’s been receiving from Earth.’

  ‘If that’s the case, what happens when she makes her mind up? Do we get to live or die?’

  ‘I don’t know, although I suspect she’ll keep us fed and watered for as long as she considers us useful.’

  ‘Have you asked her about the pine cones?’

  Travertine nodded. ‘Yes, and so did Namboze and Doctor Aziba – and Guochang, for all I know. What conclusions did you draw from her answers?’

  ‘Nothing much – she seemed cagey.’

  ‘I had the same impression,’ Travertine replied.

  ‘There could be a hundred reasons for that, though. She either knows far more than she’s te
lling, or she’s unwilling to admit exactly how little she knows after all this time. She looks human, but she’s not, and it’s difficult to get a read on a machine.’

  ‘I’m not sure she’s imaginative enough to try to deceive us. Cunning as a weasel, yes, and brilliantly quick and clever, but not very good at outright fabulation. It’s only a hunch, mind, but if I’m right, she’d find it very difficult to create a self-consistent fiction concerning the progress she’s made with the pine cones.’

  ‘You might be on to something there,’ Chiku said. ‘From what we observed coming in, the Providers only made the minimum changes necessary to the uplink information. I haven’t been out into that forest, but I bet the botanical data they sent us wasn’t far off the mark.’

  ‘It makes sense that they’d change as little as possible – less chance of being caught out that way.’

  ‘Absolutely – but as you say, it might also tell us that she’s not very good at wholesale invention.’ Chiku thought back to her earlier conversation with the artilect, trusting that her recollection of it was accurate despite the time slippages she had experienced since. ‘When I asked her how much progress she’d made, she hedged around a lot before saying there’d been preliminaries to deeper communication, as if all they’ve done is sniff around each other. Could she really have achieved so little after all this time?’

  ‘It’s possible. But from her viewpoint it must be absolutely galling – called across space by this vast, ancient alien intelligence, only to be met with indifference or even hostility when the Providers actually arrived. Perhaps Arachne and her friends don’t measure up – Arachne’s smart by human standards, but the pine cones might have different ideas. Perhaps she doesn’t impress them. Maybe they regard her as a subspecies, some kind of annoying machine vermin.’