I don’t think I was ever meant to like it, Seventeen.
She detected the tiniest hint of a sulk in the weapon’s reply. [Perhaps.]
Seventeen ... there’s a matter we need to talk about, if you don’t mind ...
[I’m not going anywhere. You’re not either.]
No. I don’t suppose I am. Are you aware of the difficulty, Seventeen? The code that won’t allow you to fire?
Now the sulk - if that was what it had been - shifted to something closer to indignation. [How could I not know about it?]
I was just checking, that’s all. About this code, Seventeen . . .
[Yes?]
I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you ignoring it, is there?
[Ignore the code?]
Something along those lines, yes. You having a certain degree of free will and all that, I thought it might just be worth raising, as - shall we say - a matter for debate, if nothing else . . . Of course, I know it’s unreasonable to expect you to be capable of such a thing . . .
[Unreasonable, Ilia?]
Well, you’re bound to have your limitations. And if, as Clavain says, this code is causing a system interrupt at root level . . . well, there’s not a lot I can expect you to do about it, is there?
[What would Clavain know?]
Rather a lot more than you or I, I suspect...
[Don’t be silly, Ilia.]
Then might it be possible . . . ?
There was a pause before the weapon deigned to reply. She thought for that moment that she might have succeeded. Even the degree of fear lessened, becoming nothing much more than acute screaming hysteria.
But then the weapon etched its response into her head. [I know what you’re trying to do, Ilia.]
Yes?
[And it won’t work. You don’t seriously imagine I’m that easily manipulated, do you? That pliant? That ridiculously childlike?]
I don’t know. I thought for a moment I detected a trace of myself in you, Seventeen. That was all.
[You’re dying, aren’t you?]
That shocked her. How would you know?
[I can tell a lot more about you than you can about me, Ilia.]
I am dying, yes. What difference does that make? You’re just a machine, Seventeen. You don’t understand what it’s like at all.
[I won’t help you.]
No?
[I can’t. You’re right. The code is at root level. There’s nothing I can do about it.]
Then all that talk of free will ... ?
The paralysis ended in an instant, without warning. The fear remained, but it was not as extreme as it had been before. And around her the weapon was shifting itself again, the door into space opening above her, revealing the belly of the shuttle.
[It was nothing. Just talk.]
Then I’ll be on my way. Goodbye, Seventeen. I’ve a feeling we won’t be talking again.
She reached the shuttle. She had just pushed herself through the airlock into the airless cabin when she saw movement outside. Ponderously, like a great compass needle seeking north, the cache weapon was re-aiming itself, sparks of flame erupting from the thruster nodes on the weapon’s harness. Volyova sighted down the long axis of the weapon, looking for a reference point, anything in the sphere of battle that would tell her where weapon seventeen was pointing. But the view was too confusing, and there was no time to call up a tactical display on the shuttle’s console.
The weapon came to a halt, stopping abruptly. Now she thought of the iron hand of some titanic clock striking the hour.
And then a line of searing brightness ripped from the maw of the weapon, into space.
Seventeen was firing.
It happens in three billion years, she told him.
Two galaxies collide: ours and its nearest spiral neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. At the moment the galaxies are more than two million light-years apart, but are cruising towards each other with unstoppable momentum, dead set on cosmic destruction.
Clavain asked her what would happen when the galaxies met each other and she explained that there were two scenarios, two possible futures. In one, the wolves - the Inhibitors or, more accurately, their remote machine descendants - steered life through that crisis, ensuring that intelligence came out on the other side, where it could be allowed to flourish and expand unchecked. It was not possible to prevent the collision, Felka said. Even a galaxy-spanning, super-organised machine culture did not have the necessary resources to stop it from happening completely. But it could be managed; the worst effects could be avoided.
It would happen on many levels. The wolves knew of several techniques for moving entire solar systems, so that they could be steered out of harm’s way. The methods had not been employed in recent galactic history, but most had been tried and tested in the past, during local emergencies or vast cultural segregation programmes. Simple machinery, necessitating the demolition of only one or two worlds per system, could be shackled around the belly of a star. The star’s atmosphere could be squeezed and flexed by rippling magnetic fields, coaxing matter to fly off the surface. The starstuff could be manipulated and forced to flow in one direction only, acting like a huge rocket exhaust. It had to be done delicately, so that the star continued to burn in a stable manner, and also so that the remaining planets did not tumble out of their orbits when the star started moving. It took a long time, but that was usually not a problem; normally they had tens of millions years’ warning before a system had to be moved.
There were other techniques, too: a star could be partially enshrouded in a shell of mirrors, so that the pressure of its own radiation imparted momentum. Less tested or trusted methods employed large-scale manipulation of inertia. Those techniques were the easiest when they worked well, but there had been dire accidents when they went wrong, catastrophes in which whole systems had been suddenly ejected from the galaxy at near light-speed, hurled into intergalactic space with no hope of return.
The slower, older approaches were often better than newfangled gimmicks, the wolves had learned.
The great work encompassed more than just the movement of stars, of course. Even if the two galaxies only grazed past each other rather than ramming head-on, there would still be incandescent fireworks as walls of gas and dust hit each other. As shockwaves rebounded through the galaxies, furious new cycles of stellar birth would be kickstarted. A generation of supermassive hot stars would live and die in a cosmic eyeblink, dying in equally convulsive cycles of supernovae. Although individual stars and their solar systems might pass through the event unscathed, vast tracts of the galaxy would still be sterilised by these catastrophic explosions. It would be a million times worse if the collision was head-on, of course, but it was still something that had to be contained and minimised. For another billion years, the machines would toil to suppress not the emergence of life but the creation of hot stars. Those that slipped through the net would be ushered to the edge of space by the star-moving machinery so that their dying explosions did not threaten the newly flourishing cultures.
The great work would not soon be over.
But that was only one future. There was another, Felka said. It was the future in which intelligence slipped through the net here and now, the future in which the Inhibitors lost their grip on the galaxy.
In that future, she said, the time of great flourishing was imminent in cosmic terms; it would happen within the next few million years. In a heartbeat, the galaxy would run amok with life, becoming a teeming, packed oasis of sentience. It would be a time of wonder and miracles.
And yet it was doomed.
Organic intelligence, Felka said, could not achieve the necessary organisation to steer itself through the collision. Species co-operation was just not possible on that scale. Short of xenocide, one species wiping out all the others, the galactic cultures would never become sufficiently united to engage in such a massive and protracted programme as the collision-avoidance operation. It was not that they would fail to see that something had to be d
one, but that every species would have its own strategy, its own preferred solution to the problem. There would be disputes over policy as violent as the Dawn War.
Too many hands on the cosmic wheel, Felka said.
The collision would happen, and the results - from the collison and the wars that would accompany it - would be utterly catastrophic. Life in the Milky Way would not end immediately; a few flickering flames of sentience would struggle on for another couple of billion years, but because of the measures they had taken to survive in the first place, they would be little more than machines themselves. Nothing resembling the pre-collision societies would ever arise again.
Almost as soon as she had registered the fact that the weapon was firing, the beam shut down, leaving weapon seventeen exactly as she found it. By Volyova’s estimation, the weapon had broken free of Clavain’s control for perhaps half a second. It might even have been less than that.
She fumbled her suit-radio on. Khouri’s voice was there immediately. ‘Ilia . . . ? Ilia . . . ? Can you—’
‘I can hear you, Khouri. Is something the matter?’
‘Nothing’s the matter, Ilia. It’s just that you seem to have done whatever it was you set out to do. The cache weapon landed a direct hit on Zodiacal Light.’
She closed her eyes, tasting the moment, wondering why it felt far less like victory than she had imagined it would. ‘A direct hit?’
‘Yes.’
‘It can’t have been. I didn’t see the flash as the Conjoiner drives went up.’
‘I said it was a direct hit. I didn’t say it was a fatal hit.’
By then Volyova had managed to call up a long-range grab of Zodiacal Light on the shuttle’s console. She piped it through to her helmet faceplate, studying the damage with awed fascination. The beam had sliced through the hull of Clavain’s ship like a knife through bread, snipping off perhaps a third of its length. The needle-nosed prow, glittering with carved facets of diamond-threaded ice, was buckling away from the rest of the hull in ghastly slow motion, like some toppling spire. The wound that the beam had excavated was still shining a livid shade of red, and there were explosions on either side of the severed hull. It was the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful thing she had seen in some time. It was just a shame she was not seeing it with her own eyes.
That was when the shuttle jarred to one side. Volyova thumped against one wall, for she had not had time to buckle herself back into the control seat. What had happened? Had the weapon adjusted its direction of aim, shoving her shuttle in the process? She steadied herself and directed her goggles to the window, but the weapon was in the same orientation as it had been when it had stopped firing. Again the shuttle jarred to one side, and this time she felt, through the tactile-transmitting fabric of her gloves, the shrill scrape of metal against metal. It was exactly as if another ship were brushing against her own.
She arrived at this conclusion only a moment before the first figure came through the still open airlock door. She cursed herself for not closing the lock behind her, but she had been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that she was wearing a suit. She should have been thinking about intruders rather than her own life-support needs. It was exactly the kind of mistake she would never have made had she been well, but she supposed she could allow herself one or two errors this late in the game. She had, after all, delivered something of a winning move against Clavain’s ship. The broken hull was drifting away now, trailing intricate strands of mechanical gore.
‘Triumvir?’ The figure was speaking, his voice buzzing in her helmet. She studied the intruder’s armour, noting baroque ornamentation and dazzling juxtapositions of luminous paint and mirrored surface.
‘You have that pleasure,’ she said.
The figure had a wide-muzzled weapon pointed at her. Behind, two more similarly armoured specimens had squeezed into the cabin. The first tugged up a black flash visor; through the thick dark glass of his helmet she caught the not-quite-human facial anatomy of a hyperpig.
‘My name is Scorpio,’ the pig informed her. ‘I’m here to accept your surrender, Triumvir.’
She clucked in surprise. ‘My surrender?
‘Yes, Triumvir.’
‘Have you looked out of the window lately, Scorpio? I really think you ought to.’
There was a moment while her intruders conferred amongst themselves. She sensed to the second the moment when they became aware of what had just happened. There was the minutest lowering of the gun muzzle, a flicker of hesitation in Scorpio’s eyes.
‘You’re still our prisoner,’ he said, but with a good deal less conviction than before.
Volyova smiled indulgently. ‘Well, that’s very interesting. Where do you think we should complete the formalities? Your ship or mine?’
So that’s it? That’s the choice I’m given? That even if we win, even if we beat the wolves, it won’t mean a damn in the long term? That the best thing we could do in the interests of the preservation of life itself, taking the long view, is to curl up and die now? That what we should be doing is surrendering to the wolves, not preparing to fight them?
[I don’t know, Clavain.]
It could be a lie. It could be propaganda that the Wolf showed you, self-justifying rhetoric. Maybe there is no higher cause. Maybe all they’re really doing is wiping out intelligence for no other reason than that’s what they do. And even if what they showed you is true, that doesn’t begin to make it right. The cause might be just, Felka, but history’s littered with atrocities committed in the name of righteousness. Trust me on this. You can’t excuse the murder of billions of sentient individuals because of some remote utopian dream, no matter what the alternative.
[But you know precisely what the alternative is, Clavain. Absolute extinction.]
Yes. Or so they say. But what if it isn’t that simple? If what they told you is true, then the entire future history of the galaxy has been biased by the presence of the wolves. We’ll never know what would have happened if the wolves hadn’t emerged to steer life through the crisis. The experiment has changed. And there’s a new factor now: the wolves’ own weakness, the fact that they’re slowly failing. Maybe they were never meant to be this brutal, Felka - have you considered that? That they might once have been more like shepherds and less like poachers? Perhaps that was the first failure, so long ago that no one remembers it. The wolves kept following the rules they had been instructed to enforce, but with less and less wisdom; less and less mercy. What started as gentle containment became xenocide. What started as authority became tyranny, self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. Consider it, Felka. There might be a higher cause to what they’re doing, but it doesn’t have to be right.
[I only know what it showed me. It’s not my job to choose, Clavain. Not my job to show you what you should do. I just thought you ought to be told.]
I know. I’m not blaming you for it.
[What are you going to do, Clavain?]
He thought of the cruel balance of things: equating vistas of cosmic strife - millennia-long battles thrumming across the face of the galaxy - against infinitely grander vistas of cosmic silence. He thought of worlds and moons spinning, their days uncounted, their seasons unremembered. He thought of stars living and dying in the absence of sentient observers, flaring into mindless darknesss until the end of time itself, not a single conscious thought to disturb the icy calm between here and eternity. Machines might still stalk those cosmic steppes, and they might in some sense continue to process and interpret data, but there would be no recognition, no love, no hate, no loss, no pain, only analysis, until the last flicker of power faded from the last circuit, leaving a final stalled algorithm half-executed.
He was being hopelessly anthropomorphic, of course. This entire drama concerned only the local group of galaxies. Out there - not just tens, but hundreds of millions of light years away - there were other such groups, clumps of one or two dozen galaxies bound together in darkness by their mutual self-gravity. Too far
to imagine reaching, but they were there all the same. They were ominously silent - but that didn’t mean they were necessarily devoid of sentience. Perhaps they had learned the value of silence. The grand story of life in the Milky Way - across the entire local group - might just be one thread in something humblingly vast. Perhaps, after all, it didn’t actually matter what happened here. Blindly executing whatever instructions they had been given in the remote galactic past, the wolves might strangle sentience out of existence now, or they might guard a thread of it through its gravest crisis. And perhaps neither outcome really mattered, any more than a local cluster of extinctions on a single island would make any significant difference when set against the rich, swarming ebb and flow of life on an entire world.
Or perhaps it mattered more than anything.
Clavain saw it all with sudden, heart-stopping clarity: all that mattered was the here and now. All that mattered was survival. Sentience that bowed down and accepted its own extinction - no matter what the long-term arguments, no matter how good the greater cause - was not the kind of sentience he was interested in preserving.
Nor was it the kind he was interested in serving. Like all the hard choices he had ever made, the heart of the problem was childishly simple: he could concede the weapons and accept his complicity in humanity’s coming extinction, while knowing that he had done his part for sentient life’s ultimate destiny. Or he could take the weapons now - or as many of them as he could get his hands on - and make some kind of stand against tyranny.
It might be pointless. It might just be postponing the inevitable. But if that was the case, what was the harm in trying?
[Clavain ...]
He felt a vast, searing, calm. All was clear now. He was about to tell her that he had made his mind up to take the weapons and make a stand, future history be damned. He was Nevil Clavain and he had never surrendered in his life.
But suddenly something else merited his immediate attention. Zodiacal Light had been hit. The great ship was breaking in two.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 221