Godlike Machines

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Because our lives will depend on it. You’ve become very courageous all of a sudden, Dimitri. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s not what I expected of you.”

  “I’m not trying to be anyone’s hero. My blood’s running cold at the idea of flying the Soyuz into that thing. But I happen to know the way their minds work back in Baikonur.

  They’ll have thought of the Soyuz option by now, realized that it’s feasible.”

  “They won’t force us to do it, though.”

  “No, that’s not how they operate. But if we don’t raise the possibility, if we don’t put it on the table, they’ll be very, very disappointed. More disappointed than they’ll already be at us for losing the robot.”

  I watched her reflect on what I’d said. In this instance Galenka would have no option but to admit that my grasp of Baikonur politics was superior to hers. I had been a cosmonaut for much longer and I had seen how our superiors punished failings. The best you could hope for was incarceration. The worst was returning to your office to find a loaded revolver and a bottle of vodka.

  “I hope you’re right about this, Dimitri. For both our sakes.”

  “We have no choice,” I said. “Trust me, Galenka. Nothing that happens in the Matryoshka will be as bad as what they’d do to us for failing our country.”

  An hour later we’d informed Baikonur of our decision. Two hours later we had their reply. I went to Yakov and told him what was going to happen.

  “You can let me out now,” he said, through the bulkhead window.

  “Not until we’re back.”

  “You still don’t trust me?”

  “It’s just not a risk we can afford to take.”

  “Don’t leave me alone on the Tereshkova. I’d rather go with you than stay here on my own.”

  “Not an option, I’m afraid. We need the extra space in the Soyuz. But I’m opening comms to your module. You’ll be able to talk to Baikonur, and you’ll be able to talk to us. You won’t feel out of touch.”

  “I’m all right now,” Yakov said. “Please believe me. I had a bad turn, I got confused—but everything’s all right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  An hour after that, we were checking our suits and prepping the Soyuz for departure.

  “I need bread,” Nesha says. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “In this weather?”

  “I need bread. If I don’t go early, there’ll be none left.”

  I peer through the window, at the gray-white sky. “I could fetch it for you. If you gave me some money, and told me where to go.” Seeing the sceptical look on her face, I add, “I’d come back.”

  “We’ll go together. It’s good exercise for me, to get out of this place. If I didn’t have errands, I’d probably never leave the building.”

  Nesha puts on several more layers of clothes and fetches a coat for herself. None of Gennadi’s coats fit me (they’re all too tight in the sleeves) so I’m forced to make do with Doctor Kizim’s again. At least it’s dried a bit, and I have something warm on underneath it. Nesha locks her apartment, turning keys in three separate locks, then we walk slowly to the elevator, still where I left it, on the ninth floor.

  “I shouldn’t have mocked you, Dimitri Ivanov. That wasn’t called for.”

  The elevator doors close. “Mocked me?”

  “About the musical box. The thing you came to give me. Now that we’ve spoken a little more, I see that you’re not the madman I thought you might be. I should have known better.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “Did it really come from the Matryoshka?”

  “All the way back.”

  “Why did they let you keep it?”

  “Because they didn’t realize its significance. By the time we got back, I knew that we weren’t going to get an easy ride. The truth that we’d discovered-it wasn’t going to be something our political masters wanted to hear. We were all ill—the perfect excuse for incarceration in some nameless medical facility cum prison or madhouse. Yakov and Galenka were sick with radiation exposure. I was sick with the Matryoshka inside my head. None of us were going to see daylight again.”

  “I read the papers and saw the television reports. They never actually lied about what happened to you.”

  “They didn’t have to lie. As long as there was a reason not to have us out in public, they were happy.”

  The elevator completes its trundling, hesitant descent. We leave the building, venturing into the snow-covered street. I glance around, vigilant for prowling Zils and men in dark suits.

  “I kept the musical box with me all the way home. They found it, of course, but it was always presumed to be one of my personal effects-something I’d taken aboard the ship when we left. The idea that it might be an artifact—a. thing from the Matryoshka—that never crossed their minds.”

  “And you never thought to tell them?”

  “They’d have destroyed it, Nesha. So I kept it close with me, all the time I was in the facility. The only person I ever showed it to was Doctor Kizim, and I don’t think even he believed where it had come from.”

  “You must have trusted him.”

  “You had to trust someone in a place like that. Just like I’m trusting you now. The musical box is yours now. It’s a piece of the future, in your hands.”

  She removes it from her coat. Until then I have no idea that she’s brought it with her.

  “The tune it makes ...” She starts turning the little handle, the notes tinkling out. We’re in the street, but there’s no one else around to notice one old woman with a little metal box in her hands, or to question why she’s turning the handle in its side. “I think I know it. It’s something familiar, isn’t it? Something Russian?”

  “Like you always said. But please don’t play it now. It makes my head hurt.”

  She stops turning the handle and returns the musical box to her pocket. We trudge on in silence for several more streets, until we’re in sight of the shopping complex where Nesha hopes to find her bread. It looks dingy and disused, but already people are milling around outside. In their dark winter clothes, they form an amorphous, weary mass. Our premier smiles down on them from the looming side of an apartment tower, his lips moving but no sound coming out. Seagulls have pecked away at him, attracted by the flickering colors, flaking away huge pieces of his face.

  “If the musical box was in the Matryoshka, then I was right about its origin,” Nesha says. “It did come from the future after all.”

  “They never believed you. They never wanted to believe you.”

  She glances up at the birdshit-stained edifice, the premier’s moving face. “We live in a flawless collectivized utopia. But a flawless society can’t, by definition, evolve. If it proceeds from one state to another, there must have been something wrong, or sub-optimal, about it. If it gets worse, then the seeds of that worsening must have already been present. It gets better, than it has room for improvement.”

  “It all ends,” I say, keeping my voice low. “In less than a human lifetime. That’s what I learned inside the Matryoshka. That and the fact that you were right all along.”

  “The musical box won’t make any difference.”

  “Except now you know.”

  “There was never any doubt in my mind. Not even in the darkest days, when they punished me through Gennadi.” Nesha walks on a few paces. “But still. It was always only a hypothesis. To have firm proof that I was right... it does make a difference, to me.”

  “That’s all I ever wanted. I felt that we owed you that much. I’m just sorry it took me so long to reach you.”

  “You did your best, Dimitri. You got to me in the end.” Then she reaches into her pocket again and takes out the change she’s saved for the bread.

  “Clear,” I called from the porthole, as we undocked. “Five meters. Ten meters. Fifteen.” The rest of the ship came into view, silvery under its untidy-looking quilt of reflective foil. It was a bittersweet mo
ment. I’d been looking forward to getting this view for months, but I’d always assumed it would be at mission’s end, as we were about to ride the Soyuz back into Earth’s atmosphere.

  “Lining us up,” Galenka said. She was in the command seat, wearing her EVA suit but with the helmet and gloves not yet in place.

  I felt the Soyuz wheel around me as it orientated itself towards the Matryoshka. We’d be following the Progress all the way in, relying on the same collision-avoidance algorithm that had worked so well before. I kept telling myself that there was no reason for it to stop working now, just because we were aboard, but I couldn’t quell my fears. My nerves had been frayed even when it had just been the robot at stake. I kept thinking of that American probe sliced in two, coming apart in two perfectly severed halves. How would it feel, I wondered, if we ran into one of those infinitely-sharp field lines? Would we even notice it at first? Would there even be pain, or just a sudden cold numbness from half our bodies?

  As it was, we sailed through Shell 1 and Shell 2 without incident. All the while we remained in contact with the Tereshkova, and all the while the Tereshkova remained in contact with the microsat swarm. As windows opened and closed in Shell 3, the Progress reported on its continued existence and functionality. Nothing had happened to it since our departure. It was stuck, but otherwise operational and undamaged.

  I clutched at every crumb of comfort. The Matryoshka hadn’t touched the robot. It hadn’t shown any sign of having noticed it. Didn’t that bode well for us? If it didn’t object to one foreign object, there was no reason for it to object to another, especially if we took pains not to get stuck ourselves.

  Galenka brought us to a hovering standstill above Shell 3. In the microgravity environment of the Matryoshka the Soyuz only needed to exert a whisper of thrust from its attitude motors to hold station.

  “You’d better get buckled in, Dimitri. When a window opens, I’m giving her the throttle. It’ll feel like a booster separation, only harder.”

  I made sure I was tight in my seat. “I’m ready. How long do you think?”

  “No idea. Just be ready for it when it comes.”

  The glass cockpit of the Soyuz was much more advanced than the basic frame of the ship itself, which was older than my grandmother. Before our departure, Galenka had configured the sensors and readouts to emulate the same telemetry she’d been seeing from the Progress. Now all she had to do was watch the scrolling, chattering indications for the auguries of an opening window. She’d have no more than a second or two to assess whether it was a window she could reach in time, given the Soyuz’s capabilities. Deciding that there was nothing I could contribute to the matter, I closed my eyes and waited for the moment.

  No matter what happened now, we had made history. We were inside the Matryoshka—the first humans to have made it this far. It had taken three apparitions to achieve this feat. Once, I would have assumed that things would only go from strength to strength with each new return. By the time of the fourth apparition, surely there’d be a permanent human presence out here, following the Matryoshka throughout its orbit. Study stations, research facilities— an entire campus, floating in vacuum.

  Now I wondered if anyone would come after us. The space effort was winding down-even the Tereshkova was cobbled together from the bits of earlier, failed enterprises. It seemed to me—though I would never have voiced such a conviction publicly—that it was less important to my country what we found out here, than that we were seen to be doing something no one else could. The scientific returns were almost incidental. Next time, would anyone even bother sending out a ship?

  “Brace,” Galenka said.

  The thrust came hard, like a hoof kick to the spine. It was worst than any booster separation, stage ignition or de-orbit burn. I had experienced re-entry gee-loads that were enough to push me to the brink of unconsciousness, but those forces had built up slowly, over several minutes. This came instantly, and for a moment I felt as if no bone in my body could possibly have survived unbroken.

  Then I realized that I was all right. The engine was still burning, but at least the gee-load was a steady pressure now, like a firm hand rather than a fist.

  “We are good for insertion,” Galenka said, as if that had ever been in doubt.

  We sailed through the two closely-packed shells, into the luminous blue-green interstitial space above Shell 4. Once we were clear—with the window sealing above us—Galenka did a somersault roll to use the main engine to slow us down again. The thrust burst was longer and less brutal this time. She dropped our speed from hundreds of meters per second to what was only slightly faster than walking pace. The thicket lay ahead or below, depending on my mental orientation. We were making good time. There was no need to rush things now.

  Maybe, just maybe, we’d get away with this.

  A screen flashed red and began scrolling with error messages. “There goes the Tereshkova,” Galenka said. “We’re out of contact now.” She gave me a fierce grin. “Just you and me, and an impenetrable shell of alien matter between us and the outside world. Starting to feel claustrophobic yet?”

  “I’d be insane not to. Do we have a fix on the Progress?”

  She jabbed a finger at another readout—target cross-hairs against a moving grid. “Dead ahead, where she said she was. Judging by the data she recorded before getting stuck, we’ll be able to get within 200 meters without difficulty. I won’t risk taking the Soyuz any closer, but we should be able to cover the remaining distance in suits.”

  “Whatever it takes.” I checked my watch, strapped around the sleeve of my suit. We’d been out from the mother ship for less than three and a half hours-well ahead of schedule. We had air and fuel to spare, but I still wanted to be out of here as quickly as possible. I kept thinking of that iron ceiling overhead. “How soon until we’re in position?” I asked.

  “Twenty minutes, give or take.”

  “We spend two hours on station. Nothing changes that. If we don’t succeed in unloading everything, we still leave. Are we clear on that?”

  “This was your idea, Dimitri. You decide when we leave.”

  “I’m going to finish suiting up. We’ll check comms and life-support thoroughly before we leave. And we’ll make damned sure the Soyuz isn’t going to drift away from us.”

  Galenka’s estimate was on the nail. Twenty minutes later we were deep into the thicket, with blue-green structures crowding around us. Closest to us was a trunk or branch with thornlike protrusions. Galenka brought the Soyuz in against the trunk until the hull shuddered with the contact. Ordinarily I’d have been worried about a pressure rupture, but now that we were both wearing helmets that was only a distant concern. Galenka had picked her spot well, for the Soyuz was resting on one of the out-jutting thorns. Friction, and the ship’s almost negligible weight, would serve to hold it in place until we were ready to leave. Galenka had even taken to pains to make sure the forward escape hatch was not blocked.

  “Maybe you should stay here, while I check out the Progress,” I said. I didn’t feel heroic, but it seemed the right thing to say.

  “If we have to unload it, it’ll go quicker with two of us,” Galenka responded. “We can form a supply chain, save going all the way back each time. And keep an eye on each other.” She unbuckled. “You ready for this? I’m going to vent our air.”

  She let the air drain out through the release valve before opening the hatch. As the cabin transitioned to vacuum my suit ballooned around me, the seals and joints creaking with the pressure differential. I’d checked everything, but I was all too conscious of the thin membranes of fabric protecting me from a nasty, lung-freezing death. Every gesture, every movement, was now more awkward, more potentially hazardous than before. Tear a glove on sharp metal, and you might as well have cut your hand off.

  Galenka popped the hatch. I pushed these concerns from my mind as best I could and climbed out of the Soyuz. Now that I was seeing the alien environment with my own eyes—through a thin
glass visor, rather than a thick porthole or monitor—it appeared much larger, much more oppressive and strange. The all-enveloping shell was a pitiless, hope-crushing black. I told myself that a window would eventually open for us to leave, just as one had allowed us to enter. But it was hard to shake the feeling that we were little warm animals, little shivering mammals with fast heartbeats, caught in a cold dark trap that we had just sprung.

  “Let’s do this shit, and get back home,” Galenka said, pushing past me.

  We climbed down the pea-green flank of the Soyuz, using the handholds that had been bolted on for weightless operations. We left the ship with the hatch open, the last dribbles of air still venting from the hull. My feet touched the thorn. Although I had almost no weight to speak of, the surface felt solid under me. It was formed from the same translucent material as the rest of Shell 4, but it wasn’t as slippery as glass or ice. I reached out a hand and steadied myself against the trunk. I felt as if I was touching bark or rock through my glove.

  “I think we can do this,” I said.

  “The Progress should be directly under us, where this trunk constricts against the one over here. I’d rather climb than drift, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Agreed. There are thorns all the way down, spaced every three or four meters—we should be able to use them for grabs, even if we can’t get traction on the rest of it. It shouldn’t be much harder coming back up.”

  “I’m right behind you.”

  If the thicket registered our presence, there was no evidence of it. The structure loomed around us, dizzying in its scale and complexity, but giving no sign of being alive or responsive to the intrusion of human technology. I began to ease, trying to imagine myself in a forest or cave system-something huge but mindless—rather than the glowing guts of an alien machine.

  It took fifteen minutes of cautious progress to reach the lodged Progress. It was jammed in nose first, with the engine pointing at us. A ship like that was not normally a man-rated vehicle, but the usual variants had a hatch at the front, so that space station crews could enter the vehicle when it was docked. In the case of ours, the innards had been replaced by scientific gear, computers, additional fuel, and batteries. The docking hatch had become a kind of mouth by which the robot could feed samples into itself, using the feeler-like appendages of its sampling devices. Inside was a robotic system which sorted the samples, fed them into miniature laboratories where appropriate, and delivered whatever was left into a storage volume just ahead of the fuel tanks. We couldn’t have got in through the mouth even if the Progress hadn’t been jammed in nose first, but that didn’t matter. A secondary hatch and docking assembly had been installed in the side, so that the sample compartment could be unloaded through the Tereshkova’s own docking port. Galenka, who had overtaken me in our descent from the Soyuz, was the first to reach the sample hatch. The hatch controls were designed to be opened by someone in a suit. She worked the heavy toggles until the hatch swung open, exposing the non-pressurised storage compartment. The hole in the side of the Progress was just large for a suited person to crawl through. Without hesitation she grabbed yellow handholds and levered herself inside. A few moments later the chamber lit up with the wavering light of her helmet-mounted flashlamp.