The Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Then it means nothing.’

  ‘Or it refers to something so dark that it doesn’t even show up in maximum-security files. I can’t dig any deeper without the risk of stumbling into the same kinds of tripwire that may already have alerted them to our interest in the Clockmaker. But I thought you—’

  She cut him off brusquely. ‘I am not omniscient, Sheridan. There are places you can go that I can’t, and vice versa. If I knew everything, saw everything, why would I need you?’

  ‘That’s a very good point.’

  ‘Maybe there is something called Firebrand.’ It sounded like a conciliatory line, but he could feel the stinger coming. ‘Perhaps that is the name of the group or cell who have been studying the Clockmaker. But if so it tells us nothing we didn’t already know.’

  ‘It’s a handle. It’s leverage.’

  ‘Or random noise, plucked out of a dying man’s head by the grabbing fingers of a trawl. What do you think?’

  ‘I think we’re dealing with Panoply,’ Gaffney said.

  ‘You believe your own organisation chose to keep it alive, after all it did to them?’

  ‘Look, it makes a kind of sense. When the Clockmaker got loose, it was Panoply that put it back in the bottle. But we still didn’t know what it was or where it had come from. Who’d have been better placed to smuggle that bottle away for further study? Who, frankly, would have been negligent not to do something like that?’

  After a while she said, ‘There may be some merit in your reasoning, Sheridan.’

  ‘That’s why I think Firebrand might be the codename for a unit inside Panoply. Now I need to find out who’s inside Firebrand. They’ll know where the thing is now. If I can get to one of them, isolate and trawl ...’ As he spoke, his hand stroked the black haft of his Model C whiphound.

  ‘Apart from Jane Aumonier, you wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘I can run a systematic search: look at who was involved eleven years ago, however peripherally, who’s still in the organisation.’ He risked another smile. ’I’ve got one thing on my side, Aurora. They’re beginning to panic, which means they’re likely to screw up.’

  He’d hoped his words would console her, but they had exactly the opposite effect. ‘We don’t want them to err, Sheridan. If these people make mistakes, they may allow the Clockmaker to slip free. Such an outcome wouldn’t just be catastrophic for our plans. It would be catastrophic for the Glitter Band, as it very nearly was eleven years ago.’

  ‘I’ll exercise due discretion. Believe me, that thing isn’t going to escape a second time. And even if it does, we know what we have to do to catch it again.’

  ‘Yes,’ Aurora said. ‘And while we were doing it we’d hope and pray that the same thing worked twice, wouldn’t we? Answer me this, just out of interest: could you have given that order?’

  ‘Which order would that be?’

  ‘You know exactly which one I mean. The thing they don’t like to talk about. The thing they did before they nuked the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have blinked,’ he said.

  Thalia felt a chill on her neck as the heavy double doors swung open behind her. As they entered, the other prefects were engaged in low, whispered conversations that had obviously been going on for some time. Thalia had been too absorbed in her duties to pay much attention to the crisis that had been unfolding during the last twenty-six hours, but it was clear that this meeting was considered a necessary but disagreeable diversion.

  ‘Let’s keep this brief, Thalia,’ said Senior Prefect Gaffney. ‘We all have work to be getting back to. Can we conclude that you’ve closed the leak in the polling apparatus?’

  ‘Sir,’ Thalia said, almost stammering, ‘I’ve completed work on the update. As I said before, it only amounted to a couple of thousand lines of changes.’

  ‘And you’re confident this will plug the security hole Caitlin Perigal was able to abuse?’

  ‘As confident as we can ever be, sir. I’ve subjected the new code to the formal testing process, and the validation system found no errors after simulating fifty years’ worth of polling transactions. That’s a better error rate than we accepted before the last upgrade, sir. I can see no reason not to go live.’

  Gaffney looked at her distractedly, as if his mind had already strolled out of the room, into another more urgent meeting. ‘Across the entire ten thousand?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Thalia said patiently. She’d already explained her plans the last time she’d been sitting in that room, but obviously she’d have to go through it one more time. ‘The changes to the code are relatively simple, but the upgrade will involve high-level access to all ten thousand polling cores. It’ll go smoothly with most of the newer cores, but there are some issues with older installations that I’d like to resolve in the field. By that I mean physical visits, sir.’

  ‘On-site installation?’ asked Michael Crissel.

  Thalia nodded keenly. ‘But only for the following habitats.’ She raised a hand to the Solid Orrery, a gesture she had primed it to wait for. On command, the invisibly fine ceiling threads retracted five orbiting bodies from the frozen swirl of the Glitter Band. Quickmatter oozed down the threads and swelled the representations a hundredfold. One of the five bodies was Panoply itself, instantly recognisable to all present in the room. Thalia pointed instead to the other four, naming each in turn. ‘Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma. The Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass. Szlumper Oneill. House Aubusson.’ Scattered red laser-light flicked between the four habitats and Panoply, revealing Thalia’s intended route. ’In all cases, I think we can be in and out well inside thirteen hours per habitat. Abstraction downtime will be in the order of milliseconds: not long enough for anyone to actually notice.’

  ‘We can’t spare four ships in the current emergency,’ Gaffney said.

  ‘I’m not expecting you to, sir. I’d like to be on-site for all the installations myself, which means doing them sequentially. But even allowing for sleep and travel time between the four habs, I can have all four upgrades complete inside sixty hours.’

  ‘And then you’ll go live across the whole Band?’

  ‘Provided no issues come to light during the four test installations, I don’t see any reason to delay.’

  ‘I think we should hold off until the Ruskin-Sartorious mess has blown over,’ said Senior Prefect Baudry, holding her usual electrified posture. ‘Any non-essential activity at this time is a stretch on our resources we can do without. I don’t doubt that Thalia’s counting on a full support team. Frankly, we can’t afford to reallocate key personnel at such a sensitive time, with the citizenry straining at the leash to punish the Ultras.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Gaffney said. ‘I know Jane wants closure on the polling anomaly as quickly as possible, but she’ll also understand that we have to contain the aggressors until something else comes along to occupy their time.’

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ Thalia said, ‘but I’m not counting on anything other than myself and a cutter to get me between habitats. I can handle the upgrades single-handedly.’

  Gaffney looked unconvinced. ‘Quite a responsibility, Ng.’

  ‘It makes sense, sir. I’m intimately familiarly with the software changes and the procedure for installing them. It’s been my speciality since I joined the organisation. It’s what I live and breathe. I don’t think there’s anyone else in Panoply who understands the polling mechanism as thoroughly as I do.’

  ‘All the same, it’s still a heavy burden for one person.’

  ‘I can do it, sir. In sixty hours, less if things go smoothly, this whole business could be behind us.’

  Crissel and Gaffney exchanged glances. ‘It would be good to get it off the table,’ Crissel said quietly. ‘And if Ng thinks she can handle this on her own ... it won’t impact on our existing activities.’

  ‘I still say she should wait,’ Baudry put in.

  ‘We have no idea how long the cris
is with the Ultras is going to last,’ Crissel said. ‘We could still be putting out fires a month from now. We can’t leave the security hole unplugged until then - there are critical polls coming up and we need the apparatus in a fit state to handle them.’

  ‘If she runs into trouble,’ Baudry said, ‘we won’t be able to spare a Heavy Technical Squad to help her out.’

  ‘I won’t run into trouble,’ Thalia replied.

  Baudry looked unimpressed. ‘You sound spectacularly sure of yourself. No update to a polling core is routine, Ng. You take the local abstraction down and then can’t get it back up, you’ll have a rioting mob on your hands. One whiphound isn’t going to make much difference in that situation.’

  ‘I promise there’ll be no technical difficulties. Aside from a few habitat seniors, no one else need even know that I’m on the premises.’

  ‘She talks a good talk,’ Gaffney said, with the tone of a man who had no great stomach for argument. ‘Part of me says hold off this until we can give it our full attention. Another part says, hell, if she thinks she can do it unassisted—’

  ‘I can, sir,’ Thalia said.

  ‘Maybe we should bounce this one off Jane,’ Crissel said.

  ‘The supreme prefect expressly requested not to be troubled with matters of minor procedure,’ said Baudry. ‘As she’s made abundantly clear, she can only be expected to concentrate on so many matters at once.’

  Gaffney pulled a face, racked by indecision. ‘Sixty hours, you say?’

  ‘Starting from now, sir. I can leave immediately for New Seattle-Tacoma.’ Thalia nodded towards the red laser-line trajectory. ‘The conjunction’s favourable. Assign me a cutter and I can be on-site inside Sea-Tac within two hours.’

  ‘All right,’ Gaffney said. ‘We’ll spare you a cutter. No weps or heavy armour, though.’

  ‘I won’t let you down,’ Thalia said.

  ‘You’ll need one-time pads for core access, I take it?’

  ‘Just the four, sir. Most of the work shouldn’t require deep-level changes, so I ought to be able to manage with six-hundred-second access windows.’

  ‘I’ll have Vantrollier issue them.’ Gaffney looked at her warningly. ‘You’re good, Ng. None of us needs convincing about that. But that doesn’t mean we’ll cut you an easy ride if things go wrong. This is in your hands now. Don’t fuck it up.’

  ‘I won’t, sir.’

  ‘Good. Then get out there and update those cores.’

  CHAPTER 8

  The gallery of clocks covered two long walls, with each timepiece resting in a glass-sealed alcove next to a small black plaque denoting the date and precise location of the object’s construction, together with any other salient observations. As usual, Dreyfus had no intention of stopping on his way to the inner sanctum of Dr Demikhov’s Sleep Lab. But something always caused him to halt, select one of the clocks and use his Pangolin privilege to open the alcove, remove the evil thing and hold it in his hands. This time he chose a clock he did not believe he had examined before, one that was dark and unornamented enough to have escaped his curiosity on previous occasions.

  He could hear it ticking behind the glass. It would have been wound by one of Demikhov’s technicians.

  He read the plaque:

  Clock #115

  Found: LCS, SIAM, 13:54, 17:03:15 YST.

  Finder: Valery Chapelon.

  Duration of construction: unknown.

  Primary base materials: common ferrous alloys.

  Origin of base materials: unknown.

  Movement: double-roller anchor escapement.

  Remarks: electron microscopy reveals atomic-scale fractal patterning in top-right

  spandrel. Nature of fractal patterning obscure, but may echo visible detail on

  pendulum hinge of clock #341.

  Status: functional.

  Known booby traps: none.

  Associated fatalities: none.

  Estimated hazard level: low.

  Dreyfus opened the glass panel. The clock’s ticking became louder. He reached in and placed his hands on either side of the black metal case and lifted the clock from its base, holding it at eye level. Like all the clocks it was surprisingly heavy, dense with mechanisms, but in this case there was no delicate tracery of gold-leaf ornamentation or razor-sharp edges to watch for. The clock had a crudely fashioned look, at odds with the complexity and accuracy of the mechanism inside it. No glass protected the dial. The hands were withered wisps of beaten metal, the hour marks irregularly soldered stubs.

  Dreyfus hated to hold any of the clocks. But whenever he made the pilgrimage to the Sleep Lab, he found himself unable to resist. The models of the scarab in Demikhov’s lab were accurate, but only Jane Aumonier could touch the scarab on her neck. The clocks - all four hundred and nineteen of them - were the only tangible link back to the entity itself.

  Dreyfus had long wondered whether there was a message in the clocks. During the long period of its incarceration in SIAM, the clocks it made had grown in sophistication and ingenuity. It had been presumed by those studying it that the entity was learning with each clock, inventing and innovating as it progressed.

  This view was now considered incorrect. Analysis of microscopic details engraved onto the main gear of clock thirty-five turned out to anticipate refinements - an elegant grasshopper escapement and gridiron pendulum - incorporated as far along the series as clock three hundred and eighty-eight. Since the entity had been denied access to its artefacts as soon as they were discovered, only one conclusion was possible: the Clockmaker had always known what it was doing.

  Which meant that it could easily have been planning its killing spree while the researchers thought they were dealing with something as innocent and guileless as a child, which desired nothing more than to be allowed to make clocks.

  Which meant in turn that, in any given clock, there might be a message that had yet to be deciphered: one that spoke of the Clockmaker’s intentions for the woman who had spent the most time with it, the one who thought she knew it best of all. Had it hated her more than any of the others?

  Dreyfus didn’t know, but he hoped that one day a clock might reveal something to him.

  Not today, though.

  He replaced clock one hundred and fifteen carefully, then sealed the window. Around him the ticking of the other instruments grew more insistent, the ticks moving in and out of phase with subtle rhythms until the hectoring noise forced him further into the Sleep Lab.

  For eleven years, Demikhov’s department had had no other business than the matter of removing the scarab. Every square centimetre of the Sleep Lab beyond the gallery of clocks (which itself offered an insight into the mentality of the Clockmaker) was testament to that effort: walls and partitions aglow with sectional schematics of both the scarab and its host, scribbled over with eleven years’ worth of handwritten notes and commentary. Jane Aumonier’s skull and neck had been imaged from every conceivable angle, using scanning devices powerful enough to function from more than seven metres away and yet still resolve nerve and circulatory structure. The metallic probes that the scarab had pushed into her spinal cord were visible in multiple cross sections, at different degrees of structural penetration. The scarab’s main body, clamped to her neck, had been subjected to the same variety of analysis modes. Interior details showed in ghostly pastel overlays.

  Dreyfus touched certain panels, causing animations to spring into life. These were simulations of planned rescue attempts, all of which had been deemed unsatisfactory. Dreyfus had heard reliable estimates that the scarab’s mechanism would require just under six-tenths of a second to kill Aumonier, meaning that if they could get a machine in there and disarm the scarab in less than half a second they might have a hope of saving her. But he did not envy the person who would have to make the decision as to when to go in. It wouldn’t be Aumonier: that was one responsibility she had abdicated long ago.

  Dreyfus paused by one of the benches and picked up a model of the sc
arab moulded in smoky translucent plastic. There were dozens like it, littering the benches in various dismantled states. They differed in their internal details, depending on the way the scans had been interpreted. Entire rescue strategies hinged on infinitely subtle nuances of analysis. At any one time, Demikhov’s squad consisted of several different teams pursuing radically opposed plans. More than once, they’d almost come to blows over the right course of action. Dreyfus thought of monks, arguing over different interpretations of scripture. Only Demikhov’s quiet presence kept the whole operation from collapsing into acrimony. He’d been doing that for eleven years, with no visible reward.

  He was at work, leaning over a bench in low, whispered debate with three of his team members. Tools and scarab parts covered the work surface. An anatomical model of a skull - made up of detachable glass parts - sat with the structure of its neck and spine exposed. Luminous markers highlighted vulnerable areas.

  Demikhov must have heard Dreyfus approaching. He pulled goggles from his eyes and used his fingers to comb lank strands of hair away from his brow. The subdued red lighting of the Sleep Lab did nothing to ameliorate Demikhov’s sagging lantern-jawed features. Dreyfus had seldom met anyone who looked quite as old.

  ‘Tom,’ he said, with a weary smile. ‘Nice of you to drop by.’

  Dreyfus smiled back. ‘Anything new for me?’

  ‘No new strategies, although we’ve shaved another two-hundredths of a second off Plan Tango.’

  ‘Good work.’

  ‘But not good enough for us to go in.’

  ‘You’re getting closer.’

  ‘Slowly. Ever so slowly.’

  ‘Jane’s patient. She knows how much effort you put in down here.’

  Demikhov stared deep into Dreyfus’s eyes, as if looking for a clue. ‘You’ve spoken to her recently. How is she? How’s she holding up?’

  ‘As well as can be expected.’

  ‘Did she ...’

  ‘Yes,’ Dreyfus said. ‘She told me the news.’

  Demikhov picked up a scarab model and undipped its waxy grey casing. The internal parts glowed blue and violet, highlighting control circuits, power lines and processors. He poked a white stylus into the innards, tapping it against a complicated nexus of violet lines. ‘This changed. A week ago, there were only three lines running into this node. Now there are five.’ He moved the stylus to the right. ‘And this mechanical assembly has shifted by two centimetres. The movement was quite sudden. We don’t know what to make of either change.’