‘Just descend the stairs. I’ll worry about the whiphound.’
Dreyfus and Sparver edged past Saavedra, taking care not to come closer to her than five metres. They clattered down the stairs and crossed the chamber’s equipment-cluttered floor until the reactor was looming over them.
‘Climb to the observation deck,’ Saavedra said, ‘and tell Veitch why you want the Clockmaker.’
Looking up at Veitch, Dreyfus reiterated the argument he had already presented to Saavedra — that the Clockmaker was now the only effective weapon against Aurora.
‘So what are you proposing? That we just let it loose and hope it crawls back to us when it’s done?’
Dreyfus placed a hand on the railing and began to climb the stairs to the observation deck, Sparver immediately behind him.
‘I’m hoping we won’t have to let it loose at all. It’s a matter of self-preservation. If I can impress upon it how much Aurora wants to destroy it, I can make it see the sense in defeating her. It will help us by helping itself.’
‘From inside the cage?’
‘It’s a form of machine intelligence,’ Dreyfus said. ‘So is Aurora, no matter what she started out as.’
‘How does that help us?’
‘Aurora isn’t a disembodied intelligence. She’s a collection of software routines emulating the structure of an individual human brain. But she’s nothing unless she has a physical architecture to run on.’
Above him, Veitch nodded impatiently. ‘And your point is?’
‘Somewhere out there, a machine has to be simulating her. More than likely she’s controlling her takeover from within a single habitat. It probably isn’t one of those she’s already taken over, since she wouldn’t want to risk being wiped out by one of our nukes. Unfortunately, that leaves almost ten thousand other candidates to consider. If we had all the time in the world, we could comb through network traffic records and pin her down. But we don’t have all the time in the world. We have a few days.’
‘You think she has free roam of the networks?’
‘Almost certainly. She’s stayed under our radar for fifty-five years, which means she can move herself from point to point without difficulty. But she can’t duplicate herself. That’s a limitation embedded in the deep structure of alpha-level simulations by Cal Sylveste himself. They cannot be copied, or even backed-up.’
‘Perhaps she’s got around that one by now.’
‘I don’t think so. If she could copy herself, she wouldn’t be so concerned about safeguarding her own survival. She’s scared precisely because there’s only one of her.’
‘But the notion of “machine” is nebulous, Prefect. Aurora might not be able to copy herself, but there’s surely nothing to prevent her from spreading herself thinly, using thousands of habitats instead of one.’
‘There is,’ Dreyfus said, puffing as he reached the observation deck. ‘It’s called execution speed. The more distributed she is, the more she has to contend with light-speed timelag between processor centres. If part of her was running on one side of the Glitter Band, and another part on the far side of the Band, she could be afflicted by unacceptable latencies, whole fractions of a second. She’d still be just as clever as she is now, but the clock rate of her consciousness would have slowed by an intolerable factor. And that’s her problem. Being clever isn’t good enough on its own, especially when she’s trying to win a war on ten thousand fronts. She has to be fast as well.’
‘There’s a lot of supposition there,’ Veitch said as Dreyfus approached him cautiously, Sparver, Saavedra and her whiphound close behind.
‘I agree, but I think it’s watertight. Aurora can’t afford to be spread out, therefore she has to be running on a single machine, inside a single habitat. And that means she’s vulnerable to a counterstrike if that habitat can be identified.’
‘And you’re hoping the Clockmaker can pin her down?’
‘Something along those lines.’
Veitch looked puzzled, as if he knew he was missing something obvious. ‘It would need access to the networks.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re insane. What if it escapes, loses itself in the networks the same way Aurora did?’
‘There’d be a risk of that, but it’s one I’m prepared to take given the alternative. I’d rather have a monster on the loose if it’s a choice between that or dying under Aurora.’
‘Do you have any idea what the Clockmaker did to its victims?’
Dreyfus thought of everything he had learned since gaining Manticore. Examining those new, fresh memories was like opening a wound that had just begun to scab over. ‘I know it did bad things. But it wasn’t indiscriminate. It spared more than it killed. Aurora won’t spare a soul.’
‘Show him what it is,’ Saavedra said. ‘He may as well know what he’s talking about letting loose.’
‘You’ve searched him for weapons?’
‘He’s clean. Show him the window.’
Veitch stood back from the monitor panel. ‘Take a look for yourself, Prefect.’
‘It’s on the other side of this glass?’
‘Nearly. We usually keep it away from the window. I’ll rotate the magnets to bring it into view for a few moments.’
Dreyfus glanced back at Saavedra, waiting for her permission to move. She nodded. He joined Veitch and stepped onto the small pedestal beneath the viewing window. Two upright handrails provided support on either side of the armoured porthole. Dreyfus touched the pale-green skin of the reactor and felt it tremble under his hands. The tremor was irregular, with powerful surges.
‘How did you get it in here?’
‘There’s a door on the other side, for swapping out the magnets. We kept the Clockmaker in a portable confinement rig while we moved it from Ruskin-Sartorious. We had to move fast, since the rig’s only good for about six hours. The Clockmaker was testing it all the time, flexing its muscles, trying to break out, even though we did our best to stun it before the relocation.’
‘Stun it how?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘With a heavy electromagnetic pulse. It doesn’t put it under completely, but it does subdue it. But by the time we arrived here, it was back up to full strength. We got it inside and locked down with the big magnets just in time. You know how a tokamak works?’
‘More or less.’
‘Normally the magnets trap a ring-shaped plasma, steering it away from the walls. You heat and squeeze the plasma to a few hundred million degrees, until you get fusion. There’s no fusion going on inside there now. Just hard vacuum, and the Clockmaker. We had to adjust the magnets to create a localised bottle, but it wasn’t too difficult.’
‘It’s still trying to get out, isn’t it?’ He touched a hand to the reactor’s throbbing skin again. He was feeling the Clockmaker’s exertions as it tested the resilience of those magnetic shackles.
‘It never stops trying.’
Dreyfus looked through the window. At first he saw nothing save a deep-blue darkness. Then he became aware of a faint pink glow encroaching on the darkness from his right. The glow flickered and intensified. To his left, Veitch made delicate adjustments to the configuration of the trapping magnets. The pink became a halo of flickering silver. The silver brightened to incandescent white.
‘Why does it glow?’
‘The field’s stripping ions off its outer layer, a kind of plasma cocoon. When we collapse the field, the Clockmaker appears to suck the plasma back into itself. It doesn’t suffer any net mass loss as far as we can tell.’
‘I can see it now,’ Dreyfus said, very quietly.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
Dreyfus said nothing. He wasn’t exactly sure how he felt. He had thought of the Clockmaker many times since losing Valery, but the appearance of the thing had never been something he dwelled upon. He had been concerned only with its effects, not its nature. He knew from the victims’ testimonies that the Clockmaker was amorphous, capable of shifting its shape with
fluid ease, or at least of conveying that impression. He knew also that some of the survivors had spoken of a humanoid form underpinning its quick-silver transformations, like a stable attractor at the heart of a chaotic process. But those accounts had barely registered. It was only now that he truly appreciated that this was no ordinary machine, but something more like an angel, rendered in glowing white metal.
It hung in the tokamak, pinned in place by magnetic fields fierce enough to boil the electrons off hydrogen. Any normal machine, anything forged from orthodox matter — be it inert or quick — would have been simultaneously shredded and vaporised by those wrenching stresses. And yet the Clockmaker endured, with only that silver-pink halo conveying the extreme physical conditions in which it floated. It had the vague shape of a man: a torso, arms and legs, the suggestion of a head — but the humanoid form was elongated and spectral. The details shimmered and blurred, layers phasing in and out of clarity. For a moment the Clockmaker was a thing of jointed armour, recognisable mechanisms. Then it became a smooth-surfaced, mercurial form.
‘He’s seen enough,’ Saavedra said. ‘Move it away from the window before it breaks confinement.’
Veitch worked the controls. Dreyfus watched the Clockmaker recede from view. He was glad when it had gone. Though its face was featureless, he’d had the overwhelming impression that it was looking straight at him, marking him as a subject for future attention.
‘That’s my side of the arrangement,’ Saavedra said. ‘Now tell me what you know about it.’
‘If I do, will you let me talk to it?’
‘Just tell us what you know. We’ll worry about the other stuff later.’
‘I only came down here for one reason. The longer we delay, the harder it’s going to be to stop Aurora. People are dying up there while we hesitate.’
‘Tell us where it came from, like you promised. Then we’ll talk.’
‘It didn’t come from SIAM,’ Dreyfus said. ‘It was created somewhere else, more than ten years earlier.’
‘Could you try to be less cryptic?’ Veitch said.
‘Does the name Philip Lascaille mean anything to you?’ Dreyfus asked rhetorically. ‘Of course it does. You’re educated prefects. You know your history.’
‘What does Lascaille have to do with anything?’ Saavedra asked.
‘Everything. He became the Clockmaker.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Veitch said, looking away with a dismissive smile on his lips. ‘Lascaille went mad after he got back from the Shroud. He died years ago.’
Dreyfus nodded patiently. ‘As you’ll doubtless recall, he was found drowned in the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies. It was always assumed that he’d committed suicide, that the madness he came back with had finally caught up with him. But that wasn’t the only explanation for his death. He’d been silent for years, but just before his death he’d opened up to Dan, the scion of the family. He’d imparted clues that allowed Dan to go off on his own expedition to the Shrouders, confident of success where others had failed. People concluded that Lascaille, having relieved himself of this enormous burden of knowledge, had viewed his life’s work as being complete. Either way, it was still suicide.’
‘You don’t think it was,’ Saavedra said, curiosity vying with suspicion in her voice.
‘Like I said, a man was murdered. I think that’s where this all began.’
‘But why?’ she said. ‘He was already mad. If people were worried about what he might say to Dan, the time to kill him would have been before they spoke, not after.’
‘That’s not the reason he died,’ Dreyfus said. ‘He wasn’t killed because certain people were worried about the knowledge inside his head. He was killed because certain people wanted to get at that knowledge more than anything else in the universe. And killing him was the only way they knew to reach it.’
‘You’re not making much sense,’ Veitch said.
‘He’s talking about alpha-level scanning,’ Saavedra said, with dawning comprehension. ‘Lascaille had to die because the process was fatal. Right, Dreyfus?’
‘They wanted the patterns in his head, the structures left behind when he returned from the Shroud. They thought that if they could understand those structures, they’d have another shot at understanding the Shrouders. But to scan at the necessary resolution meant cooking his mind alive.’
‘But things have improved since the Eighty,’ Veitch said.
‘Not by the time Lascaille died. All this took place thirty years after the Eighty, but for most of that time there’d been a moratorium concerning that kind of technology. They took him and did it anyway. They burnt his brains out, but they got their alpha-level scan. Then they took his body and dumped it in the fish pond. He was known to be insane, so no questions were asked when it looked as if he’d drowned himself.’
‘Who would have done this?’
Dreyfus shrugged at Saavedra’s question. He hadn’t got that far yet, and his mind was freewheeling with the possibilities. ‘I don’t know. It would have needed to be someone high up in the Sylveste organisation. I doubt that it was Dan himself — it would have been against his own interests since he already had an insight into how to contact the Shrouders. But who’s to say he didn’t have a rival, a spy in the clan, interested in beating him to the prize?’
‘But you’ll go looking, won’t you?’ she said.
‘I can’t let a murder go uninvestigated. Of course, there are a couple of matters we need to deal with first. Surviving the next fifty-two hours would be a good start.’ Dreyfus turned his attention to Veitch. ‘Which is why we need the Clockmaker. I’ve stated my case as best I can. Now I want you to show me how to communicate with it.’
‘It’s an interesting theory you have, concerning its origin,’ Veitch said. ‘It may even be true. But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense to let it loose now.’
‘I’m not talking about letting it loose,’ Dreyfus replied patiently. ‘I’m talking about—’
‘You think it makes a scrap of difference to the Clockmaker whether you open that cage or give it a hotline to the networks?’
Dreyfus felt a powerful wave of exhaustion crash over him. He had done his best. He had explained things to Saavedra and Veitch as clearly as he could, trusting that they would see his sincerity and understand that the Clockmaker really was the only effective weapon against Aurora, as unpalatable a prospect as that undoubtedly was. And it hadn’t worked. Perhaps Saavedra had begun to come around, or at least believe that he had not come to destroy it. With time she could have been turned. But Veitch was showing no inclination to see things Dreyfus’s way.
‘I came here to negotiate,’ he said, offering his hands in surrender. ‘I could have had you killed, you and the Clockmaker. A single nuke would have done it. Do you think I’d have come here if I felt there was another option?’
‘Prefect, listen to me,’ Veitch said. ‘No matter how bad things are up there, no matter how desperate they look, nothing can possibly be bad enough to justify giving the Clockmaker an angstrom of freedom. This is pure fucking evil incarnate, understand? It’s the devil in chrome.’
‘I know.’
‘You can’t know. No one really knows unless they’ve had direct experience with it, day after day, year after year, the way we have.’
‘I was there,’ Dreyfus said calmly.
‘What do you mean, you were there?’
‘When we went into SIAM. I was one of the prefects who went inside, before it was nuked out of existence.’
Veitch shot a nervous glance at Saavedra. Dreyfus recognised the look. They thought he was losing it. He looked at Sparver and saw the same expression on the face of his former deputy, though only Dreyfus would have recognised it.
‘Prefect, we have clearance that exceeds Pangolin, clearance that exceeds even Manticore,’ Veitch answered, in tones of slow reasonableness. ‘We know everything that happened that day, to the last minute. We know who was involved, where they were, what
they were doing.’
‘Except the facts were changed,’ Dreyfus said. ‘My involvement was expunged from the record, from all documents except those intended for the eyes of Jane Aumonier alone. But I was there. I just didn’t remember much about it until now.’
‘He’s losing it,’ Veitch said.
‘Dusollier committed suicide shortly after the Clockmaker crisis,’ Dreyfus continued, ‘but it wasn’t because of decisions he took for himself. He killed himself rather than deal with the consequences of the actions I initiated, acting with Dusollier’s blessing.’
‘What do you mean, actions you initiated?’
‘There was no prefect of higher rank in the vicinity of the crisis. The Clockmaker had already reached Jane. She was out of the equation. Dusollier authorised me to go in and use whatever measures were necessary to save the people still inside SIAM.’
‘Then you failed,’ Veitch said.
‘No, I succeeded. I saved most of them.’ Dreyfus paused. He found the words difficult to say out loud. It had been one thing to read the account of what he had done that day. But it was only now that he was speaking of his deeds that he felt he was really internalising what had happened. ‘They survived. They’re still alive.’
‘No one survived,’ Saavedra said. ‘We nuked SIAM.’
‘Yes, but not until six hours after Jane was pulled out, with the scarab on her neck. What happened in that gap? Why was it expunged from the public record? I’ve always wondered.’ Dreyfus smiled weakly. ‘Now I know.’
‘Just come back to you, has it?’ Saavedra asked snidely.
‘Jane felt it might be tactically useful for me to recover the memories of my previous encounter with the Clockmaker. She knew it would be painful for me, given everything else that came with that baggage. But she was right to do it.’
‘I agree with Veitch — you’re losing it,’ Saavedra replied.
‘There was a ship orbiting nearby,’ Dreyfus said quietly, ‘a type of starship built by the Demarchists in an effort to lessen their dependence on the Conjoiners. It was a prototype, built around Fand. It used a different drive system, one that owed nothing to Conjoiner science. It had made one flight to our system and then been mothballed because it was too expensive, too slow, too clumsy. It was being stored against the day when even a ship like that became economical.’
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