Stone Clock

by Andrew Bannister

  What was outside wasn’t the inside of the ship.

  He was close to one of the walls of the room. He reached out a claw and caught at the surface, moving as gently as he dared so as not to shove himself away. Then he pulled himself towards the opening.

  The view expanded, became – vast.

  They were inside a space. Shape and distance were difficult to judge. The far wall was a hazy violet blur that gave no clue to the eye. Stars shone faintly through it.

  Skarbo felt something bump into him. There was a soft curse, and then claws walked up his back.

  ‘Can’t see through you. Oh …’

  There was nothing to add.

  The space was full of ships, stretching off towards the violet wall until they became too small to see properly, and between the ships were smaller things: pods and pieces of debris. Hardly any of them looked intact, and most were hideously damaged.

  Skarbo found his voice. ‘Bird? Where are we?’

  For once the voice sounded subdued. ‘Containment, maybe. That colour? Could be a field. Don’t know. Don’t know why it’s full of air, either. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe an oxygen bubble round us? But why? Don’t know. Don’t know anything.’ It made a flapping noise. ‘Don’t like not knowing. It’s about your turn to know something.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’ Skarbo stared out across the huge space. It wasn’t completely still, he realized. In among the big things, there were signs of movement. Tiny stabs of light flickered, and here and there he caught a slight shift in a vast hulk, giving him a sudden mental image of the bloated corpse of some great sea creature, turning over uneasily in the surf. He shook his head and refocused on his immediate surroundings.

  Then he startled, and almost lost his grip. Something was silhouetted in the doorway – an irregular mass about a metre across, with bumps and stalks and antennae. It was holding on to the edges of the opening with four flexible-looking legs.

  It spoke. ‘Life-form?’ The voice was flat and metallic.

  He peered at the thing. ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

  ‘Are you tradeable?’

  Skarbo was nonplussed. ‘What do you mean?’

  The thing bounced a couple of times. ‘Tradeable, unit of exchange, perceived or actual value. Are you?’

  ‘I don’t know—’ but then Skarbo felt claws digging sharply into his back.

  ‘Yes!’ It was The Bird. ‘Definitely tradeable. The insect has high potential value. Strategic! Expert! What are you offering?’

  The thing bounced again. ‘Evidence. Require proof of worth. May take form of …’

  There was a flash that seared Skarbo’s optic nerves. When his vision cleared, he saw the remains of a couple of legs still gripping the edge of the opening. The rest of the thing was gone, and there was the sharp smell of complicated molecules burning.

  The Bird floated round in front of Skarbo, its wings moving slowly. Despite what it had said, it actually looked very much at home in zero gee; Skarbo filed that thought away.

  ‘Ooops,’ it said, quietly. ‘Wonder what did that?’

  Skarbo gestured with his free claw. ‘There’s a choice,’ he said, equally quietly.

  There was. Things were approaching – a wild range of things, from centimetres to metres across. A few looked a bit like their first visitor, but as well as that there were featureless spheres and complicatedly aerodynamic-looking things and organic-looking things and – things. Most of them looked damaged.

  A small dented cuboid shoved its way through the crowd. ‘Apologies! The last machine was presumptuous. Also apologies for the abrupt removal from your last ship. To confirm – you are Skarbo?’

  ‘Um, yes. Who are you?’

  ‘Skarbo the Horologist?’

  ‘Yes. Well, possibly ex-horologist. I don’t really know. Again, who are you?’

  ‘All.’ The machine swivelled through a full turn. ‘We are a collective. The other machine was a maverick. We don’t tolerate privateers.’

  The Bird clicked its beak. ‘Who do you represent, then?’

  ‘Ourselves, this place, and someone who would like to meet you.’

  Skarbo looked at The Bird. It raised its wings at the shoulder. Shrug. He turned back to the little machine. ‘What if I don’t want to meet them?’

  ‘Oh, you do. You just don’t know it yet. Let’s turn you round so you can see the rest of the view, shall we?’

  The cloud of things dispersed, zipping back out of sight to leave just the little machine framed in the middle of the opening. There were busy clanks and scratching sounds through the walls and then the view began to move. Ranks of ships and wreckage circled past.

  Then the movement stopped.

  It became evident that they had been looking outwards from their position in the vast space. Now they were looking inwards, towards the centre, and the light was much, much brighter.

  Skarbo caught his breath.

  The space was a sphere, and the centre of the sphere was on fire – a pulsing, flickering ball of yellow that fell just short of being unwatchably bright. It was surrounded by a cloud of wrecked ships and debris, dots to its fist, and as he watched a group of dots fell into it, leaving a brief, dirty red smear on its surface.

  The machine started talking again. ‘That’s the other option. About twenty gigatonnes of molten metal, growing at one per cent a day. That’s what this place mainly is – a furnace with a field round it. It’s a crude way to recycle things, but it works.’

  The Bird was keeping quiet. Skarbo found his voice. ‘Everything in here goes in there?’

  ‘In the end. Unless it’s worth more sold than melted. That brings us back to you. Are you?’

  ‘Worth more? I don’t know.’ The sight of the fireball was simplifying him; he couldn’t think of anything more elaborate to say.

  ‘Never mind. Why don’t I turn off your anchor field and get the guys to give you one good push? Off you’d go. You’d be there in a few days. You’re in an atmosphere bubble at the moment. We could leave that in place so you’d arrive with just enough oxygen to burn properly.’

  Skarbo shook his head. Then something occurred to him. ‘You said everything ends up in the furnace?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But you don’t. Why not?’

  The machine didn’t answer. Skarbo went on, ‘I don’t think you own this, and I don’t think you started out here. Did you?’

  He felt The Bird’s claws tightening on his carapace. The machine floated a little closer and said, ‘One good push, remember …’

  ‘You aren’t going to do that.’ Skarbo felt his confidence growing. He looked round the group of ragged devices that had collected behind the little machine. ‘I think you’re scavengers.’

  The Bird let go and swung itself round in front of him. ‘Ha! Parasites. Skarbo’s right. That’s what you are! Ticks and fleas.’

  ‘We prefer the word symbionts. Now, are you coming?’

  Skarbo nodded. ‘I suppose so.’

  The journey took a while. The sphere was a hundred kilometres across, tiny by space-going standards, but the longest straight-line path anywhere inside it was the distance between two hulks, and the hulks were pretty close together, and the gaps between them were full of junk. Getting up any serious speed would have been suicidal.

  Serious speed would have been disconcerting almost anywhere. They were in a kind of hemispherical basket made of metal strips, streaked black and brown with alternating bands of rust and burn. The strips were crudely fixed together with actual welds that had left lumpy beads along the joins. Skarbo scratched at one of the beads. His claw left a lighter brown streak in the rust. Real welds. Real rust.

  The Bird watched him scrape. ‘Just as well we’re in a field bubble,’ it muttered. ‘Wouldn’t trust them to make anything else airtight.’

  Skarbo said nothing.

  They had left their quarters behind, having watched the Factors give it the promised one good shove. Now they were ed
ging between and around the motionless hulks and the unrecognizably twisted debris. Meanwhile their companion filled in the missing bits.

  A Converter Sphere was basically an analogue of a very big single-celled organism. The outer field was the cell wall, the blob of molten ship in the middle was the nucleus. Charged particles in the outer field could store and change electrical patterns just fast enough to imitate a primitive electronic processor, well short of AI standards but good enough to count ships. They changed their emissions spectra as it happened. From the outside, a Sphere thinking hard looked a bit like coloured patterns on a soap bubble.

  Spheres didn’t think, or move, fast enough to be a real threat to anyone, and what they did naturally was basically useful, so people had left them to it for a hundred thousand years. No one knew how many there were.

  They existed to melt down dead spaceships, for money. Mostly, Converters spent their time wandering round the edges of mature civilizations browsing on the trash. Occasionally they were commissioned to do a specific clean-up job: if the low orbit of your planet got too full of dead satellites for comfort, and they were getting in the way of the yachts, you called in a Converter. It gained the rights to the scrap metal and maybe a small fee; you gained clear skies.

  Most Converters worked more or less for themselves, most of the time: every now and then, when the ball of molten metal in the middle got too big, they would calve a huge blob, neatly stratified by molecular weight, and sell it to someone.

  But this wasn’t most of the time.

  This was war, and the war was about resources. Not just raw materials, or water, or food, like the good old wars – this war was about absolutely any resources at all.

  Suddenly, Spheres and their contents were very valuable. So much so that this one had been approached by no fewer than eleven governments, armies and consortiums.

  The Bird laughed at that. ‘Do they all know about each other?’

  ‘Not my worry.’ The little machine bobbed up and down. ‘I only live here.’

  ‘Ransoming people, I suppose?’ Skarbo frowned at it. ‘Or is that not your worry either?’

  It bobbed again. ‘To be honest, I don’t worry about anything, but if you like worrying think of this: would it be better if I let every life-form that entered here end up as impurities in a ball of metal?’

  Skarbo thought about that for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It depends what happens to them instead. But I assume that’s not your department?’

  The machine was quiet for a while. Then it said, ‘This is a war. I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that the war was started by biological beings, like most wars. But for every tonne of biological stuff that ends up smeared across the ball, we send a gigatonne of metal into it. Some of that metal used to think. Do you worry about that? Or is it not your department?’

  The Bird muttered, ‘Ouch.’

  Skarbo stared at the machine for a while. Then he turned and watched the hulks drifting past.

  He wondered what they had thought about, and if they had been afraid.

  Wall Energy Collective

  ‘ZEB!’

  Something was digging into his ribs.

  ‘Wake up!’

  Digging in hard. He tried to turn over.

  ‘Shit! Zeb, wake up, dammit!’

  Something hit his shoulder. It hurt. He opened his eyes and managed to focus on a figure he recognized.

  ‘Hey, Shol.’

  ‘Oh, thank fuck …’ She pushed her hair out of her eyes and he saw dark rings round them.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Trouble. Two sorts. Zeb, I’m sorry I hit you but you took so long to wake, I thought you’d got stuck somewhere.’

  He shook his head. ‘Just sleepy.’ It was true, he was very sleepy. It felt wrong. He screwed his fists into his eyes and then levered himself up to a sitting position. ‘Sorry, Shol. What time is it?’

  ‘Daybreak plus two.’

  He blinked. ‘Then why’s it dark?’ The room was in half-light.

  ‘Lens trouble. Three failures.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I wish. We’ve lost twenty per cent of the total light in the last five hours.’

  He stared at her. ‘But that’s crazy. Lenses don’t fail. They just float there. Unless someone messes with them.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So someone did mess with them?’

  ‘Aish thinks so. We’ll find out when we look. Zeb, that means you. I need someone atmos-trained and you are. Were, at least. I’ll be banksman.’

  He swung his legs off the couch and stood up. ‘Well, sure. But it’s been a while since I went up. I’m kind of stale. Is there really no one else? What about Gesh and Xi? Or,’ he paused, and sought names, ‘ah, some of the others?’

  ‘Geshwith and Xiparanafy were here last night. They’re not here this morning. Nor are ten others – including Dekefstiel and all the recent atmos guys.’ Her lips pursed. ‘They all have names too but I guess you’ve been busy. It’s been a while since you did much interacting.’

  He ignored the comment. ‘So where are they?’

  ‘We don’t know, yet. Still working on it.’

  ‘Oh, shit …’ He looked at her for a while. ‘This is big, right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘How’s Aish taking it?’

  ‘Keeping calm. Making me proud. We owe her some of that back. Zeb? You gotta go.’

  ‘Yes. Okay.’ He straightened his back. ‘Let’s.’ And followed her to the door, trying not to notice the weariness in her step.

  They found Aish sitting in an alcove at the back of the room that multitasked as function space, meeting room and mess. It was the closest thing she had to a private office, and the improvised desk in front of her was usually littered with the paper notebooks which were her one real affectation. Once, while they were still an item, Zeb had suggested to her that the archaic devotion to paper was part of a rejection of the virtual.

  It had been around that time that the relationship had taken a downhill turn, he remembered.

  Now there were no notebooks. The place had a swept-clean look, as if Aish had subtracted her personality from it.

  Tiny alarm bells sounded in the back of Zeb’s mind. He sat down on the edge of the desk. ‘Hey, Aish. I hear we’ve got to go atmos?’

  She looked up, nodded, and looked down again. The alarm bells got louder, and Zeb glanced at Shol. She was biting her lip. He looked back to Aish, and forced himself to sound cheerful. ‘That’s fine. Is there any back-up or are we solo?’

  She gave him a slow half-smile as if to say, I know what you’re doing. ‘Solo,’ she said, and the smile faded. ‘The others left. I found a message.’

  ‘Left?’ Zeb glanced at Shol. ‘Left why?’

  ‘Resigned. Gave up. They think there’s no point. We should just switch everything off.’

  Zeb and Shol exchanged looks. Then Shol let out a breath. ‘Oh, Aish. They were so wrong.’

  ‘Were they? Are you sure?’ Aish gazed up at her with bleak eyes. Then she shook her head and did the half-smile again. ‘Okay. Yes, I guess. Guys? There are three lenses out of place. Zeb, you get your arse up the Lines and fix them. Shol, you stand banksman.’

  Zeb stood up and gave a stagey salute. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ He saw Shol open her mouth and kicked her softly. She closed it, and they left.

  Outside the hall they stopped. Zeb looked at Shol. ‘You ever seen her like that?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Me neither. We’d better do what she says, Shol, but the difficult bit’s going to be deciding what to do next.’

  ‘Yeah. Zeb? Even more, you’ve got to stay engaged. You hear me?’

  ‘I hear you.’

  The tiny spartan capsule bump-bumped, and rose, and bump-bumped. Zeb gripped the frame of his seat and tried not to bang into things. He managed to open the comms.

  ‘Shol? I think there’s something wrong with this one.’

&n
bsp; Bump-bump.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s really uneven.’

  ‘Could be, yeah.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Should I be concerned?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Okay, thanks for that.’

  Bump-bump.

  Shol was not feeling sympathetic, which was understandable. Maybe if he admired the view instead?

  It was pretty good. Nearest the window, the segmented prehensile claws reached upwards, closed around what looked like nothing at all – bump-bump – and hauled the little capsule another two metres upwards.

  The nothing at all, if he moved so the angle was just right, became visible as a fine, bright filament. It was actually not one but two parallel ancient-tech fullerene tubes bonded to each other to make a flat cable just under a millimetre across – and therefore colossally over-engineered – one of a narrow tripod of guy-wires ten kilometres high.

  At the top of the tripod eight lenses formed a slowly rotating circular array, held taut by their rotation against their own much thinner tubes. From close up the array looked a bit like a flower. From down here it was still a dot, getting very slowly brighter.

  It took a Tower Bug about two hours to climb to the array. Zeb was one hour into his journey, and the uneven motion was making him feel sick.

  A Bug was a pressurized pod, just big enough to sit in, with three articulated claw-tipped hydraulic arms. It could use two together to haul itself up a cable, sticking the third out for stability and using it to swap to another cable if one was near enough to reach. It was a slow but safe way of accessing guy-wire structures, avoiding the potential damage from using heavier-than-air craft with their hot engine exhaust and their cable-knitting propellers.

  Safe, that is, as far as the wires were concerned. Zeb had never felt sure about the safety of the passengers.

  Two team members at a time, but only one in the air: wire-climbing was done by two trained people at once, but one of them always stayed on the ground, and only left it if the other needed rescuing. This time he was in the air and Shol was on the ground, and she hadn’t needed to explain to him why that was the right way around. So, concentrate on the view.

  Beyond the guy-wires, the world was divided into three horizontal bands. Below, the Plains, blurred by freezing fog that shone a little in the twilight. In the middle, blue-black sky, growing darker by the minute as he climbed and as the day drained away. Above, and a kilometre off ahead of them, the line of the Skylid.