Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I cared,” Yukimi said to herself. “Even if you didn’t.”

  She still had the companion in her hands from when she had shown it the lake.

  “You want a moment to yourself?” Corax asked.

  Yukimi nodded.

  SHE STAYED IN the submerged buggy while he took the helmet and the companion into the airtight building. He went out in the underwater armor, a monster born anew. But when he had taken a few paces away from the buggy and turned back to wave, Yukimi waved back. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was Corax inside now, and while the armor was still monstrous, it was no longer frightening. Corax had been kind to her, and on some level he had seemed to understand what she was going through.

  She watched him enter the building via the porch airlock. Some bubbles erupted out of the dark mouth of the door, and then there was nothing. She didn’t think it would take him long to place the helmet and the companion, especially if he already knew his way around the building.

  The buggy started moving.

  It was sudden, purposeful activity, not the result of the brakes being loose or some underwater current stirring it into motion. It began to turn, steering back the way they had come. This wasn’t right. Yukimi looked despairingly at the console, with its many controls. She didn’t know which one to hit. There was a red panel, lit up as if it was some kind of emergency stop. She whacked it with her palm and then when there was no response she whacked it again and again. She grabbed hold of the steering joystick Corax had been using and tried yanking it left and right. But nothing she did had any effect on the buggy’s progress. It was already climbing out of the lake, the water beginning to drain off the top of the canopy as it pushed into air. “Stop!” she shouted. “Corax isn’t back yet!”

  But either the buggy was too stupid to realize what was happening or Corax had programmed it to ignore her.

  Soon it was out of the lake. Once the ripples had settled, Yukimi could see the outline of Crowe’s Landing exactly as it had been before. Nothing had changed. Except now Corax was down there, inside the armor, inside the watertight building.

  She remembered him punching commands into the buggy before he had stood up. Had he been telling it to return to the Scaper after a set interval with Yukimi was still aboard?

  Numb, but knowing there was nothing she could do, she sat in silence for the rest of the journey.

  THE FLIER CAME not long after the buggy climbed back into the Scaper’s belly. She was sitting alone in the galley, barely able to speak, when she heard footsteps echoing down the long metal corridors from the landing bay. Eventually two adults came into the galley. One was a young-looking man carrying a heavy bag. The other was her father, looking worried and gray. She braced herself for a stinging reproof, but instead her father rushed to Yukimi and hugged her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We didn’t realize.”

  When she could find the words she asked, “Am I in trouble?”

  “No,” her father said soothingly. “I am. But you’re not. Not now. Not ever.” He hugged her again, as if he couldn’t quite believe he had her in his arms, that it wasn’t a dream.

  “Where’s the old guy?” asked the other man.

  “I presume you mean Corax?” Yukimi asked.

  “Yeah, Corax.” The young-looking man set his bag down on the table and began unloading it. “I’m his replacement. That’s why the flier was scheduled, so I could take over from him. The sponsors were worried he was getting a little too old for this kind of thing.”

  “Corax isn’t coming back,” Yukimi said.

  The man looked impatient with her, as if she wasn’t showing sufficient deference. “What do you mean, not coming back? What happened to him? Where is he?”

  She looked him straight in the face, daring him to dismiss what she was about to say. “That’s between me and Corax.”

  “Are you all right, Yukimi?” her father asked gently.

  “I’m fine,” she said. Which, for the moment at least, was the truth. She was sad for Corax, sad that she wouldn’t see him again. But whatever he had done, he must have planned on doing it long before she took her airship ride. That he had shared it with her, that he had allowed her to place the companion in the time capsule, and to record her thoughts before doing so—her angry, bitter, wounded thoughts—was a privilege and a secret she would always carry with her. And whatever happened next, however hard it got with her family, she would have the knowledge that she had participated in something wonderful and unique, something no one else would know about until the seas retreated, on some impossibly distant day in the future of Mars, her Mars.

  The flier took off, leaving the other man alone on the Scaper. Her father let Yukimi sit by the window as the flier accelerated back toward Shalbatana City. Nose pressed to glass, she studied the wheeling, rushing landscape for the lake where Crowe’s Landing used to be. She saw a few patches of water, some vehicle tracks, and some of them looked vaguely familiar. But from up above, with an entirely different perspective, she couldn’t be certain.

  “Shirin’s coming back from Venus,” her father said, breaking the long silence.

  “Oh,” Yukimi answered.

  “She says she’s sorry she hasn’t been in touch as often as she’d have liked.”

  “I’m sorry as well.”

  “She means it, Yukimi. I saw how upset she was.”

  Yukimi didn’t answer immediately. She watched the ground hurtle by, thinking of Corax in his armor, the old man and the Martian sea. Then she reached out and took her father’s hand in hers. “It’ll be good to see Shirin,” she said.

  IN BABELSBERG

  THE AFTERNOON before my speaking engagement at New York’s Hayden Planetarium I find myself at The Museum of Modern Art, standing before Vincent Van Gogh’s De Sterrennacht, or the Starry Night. Doubtless you know the painting. It’s the one he created from the window of his room in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, after his voluntary committal. He was dead scarcely a year later.

  I have seen paintings before, and paintings of starry nights. I think of myself as something of a student of the human arts. But this is the first time I grasp something of crucial significance. The mad yellow stars in Van Gogh’s picture look nothing like the stars I saw during my deep space expeditions. My stars were mathematically remote reference points, to be used only when I had cause to doubt my inertial positioning systems. These stars are exuberant, flowerlike swabs of thick-daubed paint. More starfish than star. Though the painting is fixed—no part of it has changed in two hundred years—its lurid firmament seems to shimmer and swirl before my eyes. It’s not how the stars really are, of course. But under a warm June evening this is how they must have appeared to this anxious, ailing man—as near and inviting as lanterns, lowered down from the zenith. Almost close enough to touch. Without that delusion—let us be charitable and call it a different kind of truth—generations of people would have had no cause to strive for the heavens. They would not have built their towers, built their flying machines, their rockets and space probes; they would not have struggled into orbit and onto the Moon. These sweetly lying stars have inspired greatness.

  Inspired, in their small way, me.

  Time presses, and I must soon be on my way to the Hayden Planetarium. It’s not very far, but in the weeks since my return to Earth I have gained a certain level of celebrity and no movement is without its complications. They have already cleared a wing of the museum for me, and now I must brave the crowds in the street and fight my way to the limousine. I am not alone—I have my publicity team, my security entourage, my technicians—but I still feel myself at the uncomfortable focus of an immense, unsatiable public scrutiny. So different to the long years in which I was the one doing the scrutineering. For a moment I wish I were back out there, alone on the solar system’s edge, light hours from any other thinking thing.

  “Vincent!” someone calls, and then someone else, and then the calls become an assault of sound. As we push through the cro
wd fingers brush against my skin and I register the flinches that accompany each moment of contact. My alloy is always colder than they expect. It’s as if I have brought a cloak of interplanetary cold back with me from space.

  I provide some signatures, mouth a word or two to the onlookers, then bend myself into the limousine. And then we are moving, flanked by police floatercycles, and the computer-controlled traffic parts to hasten our advance. Soon I make out the blue glass cube of the Hayden, lit from within by an eerie glow, and I mentally review my opening remarks, wondering if it is really necessary to introduce myself to a world that already knows everything there is to know about me.

  But it would be immodest to presume too much.

  “I am Vincent,” I begin, when I have the podium, standing with my hands resting lightly against the tilted platform. “But I suspect most of you are already aware of that.”

  They always laugh at that point. I smile and wait a beat before continuing.

  “Allow me to bore you with some of my holiday snaps.”

  More laughter. I smile again. I like this.

  LATER THAT EVENING, after a successful presentation, my schedule has me booked onto a late night chat show on the other side of town. I take no interest in these things myself, but I fully understand the importance of promotion to my transnational sponsors. My host for tonight is called The Baby. He is (or was) a fully adult individual who underwent neotenic regression therapy, until he attained the size and physiology of a six-month human. The Baby resembles a human infant, and directs his questions at me from a sort of pram.

  I sit next to the pram, one arm slung over the back of the chair, one leg hooked over the other. There’s a drink on the coffee table in front of me (along with a copy of the book) but of course I don’t touch it. Behind us is a wide picture window, with city lights twinkling across the great curve of Manhattan Atoll.

  “That’s a good question,” I say, lying through my alloy teeth. “Actually, my earliest memories are probably much like yours—a vague sense of being, an impression of events and feelings, some wants and needs, but nothing stronger than that. I came to sentience in the research compounds of the European Central Cybernetics Facility, not far from Zurich. That was all I knew to begin with. It took me a long time before I had any idea what I was, and what I was meant to do.”

  “Then I guess you could say that you had a kind of childhood,” The Baby says.

  “That wouldn’t be too far from the mark,” I answer urbanely.

  “Tell me how you felt when you first realised you were a robot. Was that a shock?”

  “Not at all.” I notice that a watery substance is coming out of The Baby’s nose. “I couldn’t be shocked by what I already was. Frankly, it was something of a relief, to have a name for myself.”

  “A relief?”

  “I have a very powerful compulsion to give names to things. That’s a deep part of my core programming—my personality, you might almost say. I’m a machine made to map the unknown. The naming of things, the labelling of cartographic features—that’s something that gives me great pleasure.”

  “I don’t think I could ever understand that.”

  I try to help The Baby. “It’s like a deep existential itch. If I see a landscape—a crater or a rift on some distant icy moon—I must call it something. Almost an obsessive compulsive disorder. I can’t be satisfied with myself until I’ve done my duty, and mapping and naming things is a very big part of it.”

  “You take pleasure in your work, then.”

  “Tremendous pleasure.”

  “You were made to do a job, Vincent. Doesn’t it bother you that you only get to do that one thing?”

  “Not at all. It’s what I live for. I’m a space probe, going where it’s too remote or expensive or dangerous to send humans.”

  “Then let’s talk about the danger. After what you saw on Titan, don’t you worry about your own—let’s say mortality?”

  “I’m a machine—a highly sophisticated fault-tolerant, error-correcting, self-repairing machine. Barring the unlikely—a chance meteorite impact, something like that—there’s really nothing out there that can hurt me. And even if I did have cause to fear for myself—which I don’t—I wouldn’t dwell on it. I have far too much to be getting on with. This is my work—my vocation.” I flash back to the mad swirling stars of De Sterrennacht. “My art, if you will. I am named for Vincent Van Gogh—one of the greatest artistic geniuses of human history. But he was also a fellow who looked into the heavens and saw wonder. That’s not a bad legacy to live up to. You could almost say it’s something worth being born for.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘made for’?”

  “I honestly don’t make that distinction.” I’m talking to The Baby, but in truth I’ve answered these questions hundreds of times already. I could—quite literally—do them on autopilot. Assign a low-level task handling subroutine to the job. I’m actually more fascinated by the liquid coming out of The Baby. It reminds me of a vastly accelerated planetary ice flow. For a few microseconds I model its viscosity and progress with one of my terrain mapping algorithms, tweaking a few parameters here and there to get a better match to the local physics.

  This is the kind of thing I do for fun.

  “What I mean,” I continue, “is that being born or being made are increasingly irrelevant ontological distinctions. You were born, but—and I hope you don’t mind me saying this—you’re also the result of profound genetic intervention. You’ve been shaped by a series of complex industrial processes. I was manufactured, yes: assembled from components, switched on in a laboratory. But I was also educated by my human trainers at the facility near Zurich, and allowed to evolve the higher level organisation of my neural networks through a series of stochastic learning pathways. My learning continued through my early space missions. In that sense, I’m an individual. They could make another one of me tomorrow, and the two of us would be like chalk and cheese.”

  “How would you feel, if there was another one of you?”

  I give an easy shrug. “It’s a big solar system. I’ve been out there for twenty years, visiting world after world, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  “Then you don’t feel any…” The Baby makes a show of searching for the right word, rolling his eyes as if none of this is scripted. “Rivalry? Jealousy?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “You can’t be unaware of Maria. What does it stand for? Mobile Autonomous Robot for Interplanetary Astronomy?”

  “Something like that. Some of us manage without being acronyms.”

  “All the same, Vincent, Maria is another robot. Another machine with full artificial intelligence? Also sponsored by a transnational amalgamation of major spacefaring superpowers? Also something of a celebrity?”

  “We’re quite different, I think you’ll find.”

  “They say Maria’s on her way back to Earth. She’s been out there, having her own adventures—visiting some of the same places as yourself. Isn’t there a danger that she’s going to steal your thunder? Get her own speaking tour, her own book and documentary?”

  “Look,” I say. “Maria and I are quite different. You and I are sitting here having a conversation. Do you doubt for a minute that there’s something going on behind my eyes? That you’re dealing with a fully sentient individual?”

  “Well…” The Baby starts.

  “I’ve seen some of Maria’s transmissions. Very pretty pictures. And yes, she does give a very good impression of Turing compliance. You do occasionally sense that there’s something going on in her circuits. But let’s not pretend that we’re speaking of the same order of intelligence. While we’re on the subject, too, I actually have some doubts about…let’s say the strict veracity of some of the images Maria has sent us.”

  “You’re saying they’re not real?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. But entirely free of tampering, manipulation?” I don’t actually make the accusation: I just le
ave it there in unactualised form, where it will do just as much harm.

  “OK,” The Baby says. “I’ve just soiled myself. Let’s break for a nappy change, and then we’ll come back to talk about your adventures.”

  THE DAY AFTER we take the slev down to Washington, where I’m appearing in a meet and greet at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. They’ve bussed in hundreds of schoolchildren for the event, and frankly I’m flattered by their attention. On balance, I find the children much more to my taste than The Baby. They’ve no interest in stirring up professional rivalries, or trying to make me feel as if I ought to think less of myself for being a machine. Yes, left to myself I’d be perfectly happy just to talk to children. But (as my sponsors surely know) children don’t have deep pockets. They won’t be buying the premium editions of my book, or paying for the best seats at my evening speaking engagements. They don’t run chat shows. So they only get an hour or two before I’m on to my more lucrative appointments.

  “Do you walk around inside it?” asks one boy, speaking from near the front of my cross-legged audience.

  “Inside the vehicle?” I reply, sensing his meaning. “No, I don’t. You see, there’s nothing inside the vehicle but machinery and fuel tanks. I am the vehicle. It’s all I am and when I’m out in space, it’s all I need to be. I don’t need these arms and legs because I use nuclear-electric thrust to move around. I don’t need these eyes because I have much better multispectrum sensors, as well as radar and laser ranging systems. If I need to dig into the surface of a moon or asteroid, I can send out a small analysis rover, or gather a sample of material for more detailed inspection.” I tap my chest. “Don’t get me wrong: I like this body, but it’s just another sort of vehicle, and the one that makes the most sense during my time on Earth.”

  It confuses them, that I look the way I do. They’ve seen images of my spacefaring form and they can’t quite square it with the handsome, well-proportioned androform physiology I present to them today. My sponsors have even given me a handsome, square-jawed face that can do a range of convincing expressions. I speak with the synthetic voice of the dead actor Cary Grant.