Godlike Machines

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Dimitri?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I thought you were gone for a while there.”

  I turned to face my comrade. Against the vastness I had been shown, the cosmic scale of the history I had almost glimpsed, Galenka appeared no more substantial than a paper cut-out. She was just a human being, translucent with her own insubstantiality, pinned in this one moving instant like dirt on a conveyor belt. It took moments for my sense of scale to normalize; to realize that, for all that the machine had shown me, I was just like her.

  “They sent it back for us,” I said. The words came out in a rush, and yet at the same time each syllable consumed an eternity of time and effort. “To show us how we’ve gone wrong. There’s history here-lots of it. In these walls. Mountains, chasms, of data.”

  “You need to slow your breathing. That silver stuff that got into us—it’s primed us in some way, hasn’t it? Rewired our minds so that the Matryoshka can get into them?”

  “I think—maybe. Yes.”

  “Get a grip, Dimitri. We still need to get home.”

  I made to touch the wall again. The urge was still there, the hunger-the vacuum in my head-returning. The Matryoshka still had more to tell me. It was not done with Dimitri Ivanov.

  “Don’t,” Galenka said, with a firmness that stopped my hand. “Not now. Not until we’ve seen the rest of this place.”

  At her urging I resisted. I found that if kept to the middle of the corridor, it wasn’t as bad. But the walls were still whispering to me, inviting me to stroke my hand against them.

  “The Second Soviet,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “It falls. Fifty years from now, maybe sixty. Somewhere near the end of the century. I saw it in the history.” I paused and swallowed hard. “This road we’re on—this path. It’s not the right one. We took a wrong turn, somewhere between the first and second apparitions. But by the time we realize it, by the time the Soviet falls, it’s too late. Not just for Russia, but for Earth. For humankind.”

  “It came from our future. Even I felt that, and I only touched it briefly.”

  “There’s a darkness between then and now. Like a black river we have to cross. A bad, dark time. A bottleneck. Humanity survives, but only just. It’s something to do with the Second Soviet, and turning away from space. That’s the mistake. When the darkness comes, it’s because we’ve turned away from space travel. Something comes and we aren’t ready for it.”

  We were still walking, following the arcing downslope of the corridor, towards the silver-blue radiance at its end. “The Second Soviet is the only political organization still doing space travel. If anything we’re the ones holding the candle.”

  “It’s not enough. Now that the other nations have abandoned their efforts, we have to do more than just subsist. And if we are holding the candle, it won’t be for much longer.”

  “The Second Soviet won’t like being told it’s a mistake of history.”

  There was a fierce dryness in my throat. “It can’t ignore the message in the Matryoshka. Not now.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. But you know something, Dimitri?”

  “What?”

  “If this thing is from the future—from our future-then maybe it’s Russian as well. Or sent back to meet Russians. Which might mean that Nesha Petrova was right after all.”

  “They should tell her,” I said.

  “I’m sure it’ll be the first thing on their minds, after they’ve spent all these years crushing and humiliating her.” Galenka fell silent for a few paces. “It’s like they always knew, isn’t it.”

  “They couldn’t have.”

  “But they knew enough to want her to be wrong. A message from the future, intended for us? What could we possibly need to hear from our descendants, except their undying gratitude?”

  “Everything we say is being logged on our suit recorders,” I said. “Logged and compressed and stored, so that it can be sent back to the Soyuz and then back to the Tereshkova, and then back to Baikonur.”

  “Right now, comrade, there are several things I give more than a damn about than arsehole of a party official listening to what I have to say.”

  I smiled, because that was exactly how I felt as well.

  In 60 years the Second Soviet was dust. The history I had absorbed told me that nothing could prevent that. Accelerate it, yes—and maybe the arrival of the Matryoshka would do just that—but not prevent it. They could crucify us and it wouldn’t change anything.

  It was a crumb of consolation.

  The corridor widened, the intricate walls flanking away on either side, until we reached a domed room of cathedral proportions. The chamber was round, easily a hundred meters across, with a domed ceiling. I saw no way in or out other than the way we had come. There was a jagged design in the floor, worked in white and black marble-rapier-thin shards radiating from the middle.

  The music intensified—rising in pitch, rising in speed. If there was a tune there it was almost on the point of being comprehensible. I had a mental image of a rushing winter landscape, under white skies.

  “This is it, then,” Galenka said. “An empty fucking room. After all this.” She took a hesitant step towards the middle, then halted.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Something was happening.

  The black and white shards were pulling back from the middle, sliding invisibly into the floor’s circular border, a star-shaped blackness opening up in the center. It all happened silently, with deathly slowness. Galenka stepped back, the two of us standing side by side. When the star had widened to ten or twelve meters across, the floor stopped moving. Smoothly, silently, something rose from the darkness. It was a plinth, and there was a figure on the plinth, lying down with his face to the domed ceiling. Beneath the plinth, icy with frost, was a thick tangle of pipes and coiling, intestinal machinery. We stood and watched it in silence, neither of us ready to make the first move. There was a tingle in my head that was not quite a headache just now, but which promised to become one.

  The floor began to slide back into place, the jagged blades locking beneath the plinth. There was now an uninterrupted surface between the resting figure and us. Galenka and I glanced at each other through our visors then began a slow, measured walk. The slope-sided plinth rose two meters from the floor, putting the reclining figure just above our heads. It hadn’t moved, or shown the least sign of life, since emerging through the floor.

  We reached the plinth. There was a kind of ledge or step in the side, allowing us to bring our heads level with the figure. We stood looking at it, saying nothing, the silence only punctuated by the labored, bellows-like sound of our air circulators.

  That it was human had been obvious from the moment the plinth rose. The shape of the head, the ribbed chest, the placement and articulation of the limbs-it was all too familiar to be alien. Anyway, I knew that something descended from us-something essentially human-had sent back the Matryoshka. My bright new memories told me now that I was seeing the pilot, the navigator that had steered the artifact through the vicious barbs of the booby-trapped time machine, and then up through time, skipping through a cascade of wormholes, to our present era. The pilot was ghostly pale, wraithe-thin and naked, lying on a white metallic couch or rack that at first glance appeared to be an apparatus of torture or savage restraint. But then I decided that the apparatus was merely the control and life-support interface for the pilot. It was what had kept him alive, and what had given him the reins of the vast, layered machine it was his duty to steer and safeguard.

  I sensed that the journey had not been a short one. In the Matryoshka’s reference frame, it had consumed centuries of subjective time. The pilot, bio-modified for longevity and uninterrupted consciousness, had experienced every howling second of his voyage. That had always been the intention.

  But something had gone wrong. A miscalculation, a problem with the injection into the time machine. Or the emergence, or the
wormhole skip. Something I couldn’t grasp, except in the nature of its outcome. The journey wasn’t supposed to have taken this long.

  “The pilot went mad.”

  “You know this for a fact,” Galenka said.

  “You’d think this was a punishment—to be put inside the Matryoshka, alone, hurled back in time. But in fact it was the highest honor imaginable. They glorified him. He was entrusted with a mission of unimaginable importance.”

  “To change their past?”

  “No. They were stuck with what they already had. You can change someone else’s past, but not your own. That’s how time travel works. We have a different future now-one that won’t necessarily include the people who built the Matryoshka. But they did it for us, not themselves. To redeem one possible history, even if they couldn’t mend their own. And he paid for that with his sanity.”

  Galenka was silent for long moments. I surveyed the figure, taking in more of the details. Had he been standing, he would have towered over both of us. His arms were by his sides—his hands were small and boyish, out of proportion to the rest of him. His fists were clenched. The emaciated form was partly machine. The couch extended parts of itself into his body. Glowing blue lines slipped into orifices and punctured his flesh at a dozen points. Hard, non-biological forms bulged under drum-tight flesh. His eye sockets were stuffed with faceted blue crystals, radiating a spray of glowing fibers. There was something not quite right about the shape of his skull, as if some childhood deformity had never healed in the right way. It was hairless, papered over with translucent, finely veined skin. His lips were a bloodless gash.

  “The music,” Galenka said, breaking the reverence. “You think it’s coming from his head, don’t you?”

  “I think music must have comforted him during his journey. Somewhere along the way, though, it swallowed up his mind. It’s locked in a loop, endlessly repeating. He’s like a rat in a wheel, going round and round. By the time he came out of the wormhole, there couldn’t have been enough left of him to finish the mission.”

  “He made the Matryoshka sing.”

  “It might have been the last thing he did, before the madness took over completely. The last message he could get through to us. He knew how alien the artifact would have appeared to us, with its shells of camouflage and disguise. He made it sing, thinking we’d understand. A human signal, a sign that we shouldn’t fear it. That no matter how alien it appeared on the outside, there was something human at the heart. A message for the species, a last chance not to screw things up.”

  “Would it have killed him to use radio?”

  “He had to get it through Shell 3, remember-not to mention how many shells we’ve come through since Shell 4. Maybe it just wasn’t possible. Maybe the simplest thing really was to have the Matryoshka sing itself to us. After all, it’s not as if someone didn’t notice in the end.”

  “Or maybe he was just insane, and the music’s just a side-effect.”

  “That’s also a possibility,” I said.

  The impulse that had drawn my hand towards the patterned wall seemed to compel me to reach out and touch the pilot. I was moving my arm when the figure twitched, convulsing within the constraints of the couch. The blue lines strained like ropes in a squall. I jerked in my suit, nerves battling with curiosity. The figure was still again, but something about it had changed.

  “Either it just died,” Galenka said, “or it just came back to life. You want to take a guess, Dimitri?”

  I said nothing. It was all I could do to stare at the pilot. His chest wasn’t moving, and I doubted that there was a heart beating inside that ribcage. But something was different.

  The pilot’s head turned. The movement was glacially slow, more like a flower following the sun than the movement of an animal. It must have cost him an indescribable effort just to look at us. I could read no expression in the tight mask of his face or the blue facets of his eyes. But I knew we had his full attention.

  The gash of his lips opened. He let out a long, slow sigh.

  “You made it,” I said. “You completed your mission.”

  Perhaps it was my imagination—I would never know for certain—but it seemed to me then that the head nodded a fraction, as if acknowledging what I had said. As if thanking me for bringing this news.

  Then there was another gasp of air—longer, this time. It had something of death about it. The eyes were still looking at me, but all of a sudden I didn’t sense any intellect behind them. I wondered if the pilot had conserved some last flicker of sanity for the time when he had visitors—just enough selfhood to die knowing whether he had succeeded or failed.

  Tension exited the body. The head lolled back into the frame, looking sideways. His arm slumped to the side, dangling over the side of the plinth. The fist relaxed, letting something small and metallic drop to the floor.

  I reached down and picked up the item, taking it as gingerly I could in my suit gloves. It was a tiny metal box with a handle in the side and I stared down at it as if it was the most alien thing in the universe. Which, in that moment, I think it probably was.

  “A keepsake,” I said, wondering aloud. “Something he was allowed to bring with him from the future. Something as ancient as the world he was aiming for. Something that must have been centuries old when he began his journey.”

  “Maybe,” Galenka said.

  I closed my own fist around the musical box. It was a simple human trinket, the most innocent of machines. I wanted to take my gloves off, to find out what it played. But I wondered if I already knew.

  A little later the chrome tide came to wash us away again.

  The men are waiting next to Nesha’s apartment when we return with her bread. I never saw their Zil, if that was how they arrived. There are three of them. They all have heavy black coats on, with black leather gloves. The two burlier men—whose faces mean nothing to me—have hats on, the brims dusted with snow. The third man isn’t wearing a hat, although he has a pale blue scarf around his throat. He’s thinner than the others, with a shaven, bullet-shaped head and small round glasses that bestow a look somewhere between professorial and ascetic. Something about his face is familiar; I feel that we’ve known each other somewhere before. He’s taking a cigarette out of a packet when our eyes lock. It’s the same contraband variety I used to buy on my ride into town.

  “This is my fault,” I say to Nesha. “I didn’t mean to bring these men here.”

  “We’ve come to take you back to the facility,” the bald man says, pausing to ignite the cigarette from a miniature lighter. “Quite frankly, I didn’t expect to find you alive. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to find you.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Of course you know me. I’m Doctor Grechko. We’ve spent a lot of time together at the facility.”

  “I’m not going back. You know that by now.”

  “I beg to differ.” He takes a long drag on the cigarette. “You’re coming with us. You’ll thank me for it eventually, I assure you.” He nods at one of the hatted men, who reaches into his coat pocket and extracts a syringe with a plastic cap on the needle. The man pinches the cap between his gloved fingers and removes it. He holds the syringe to eye level, taps away bubbles and presses the plunger to squirt out a few drops of whatever’s inside.

  The railing along the balcony is very low. We’re nine floors up, and although there’s snow on the ground, it won’t do much to cushion my fall. I’ve done what I came to do, so what’s to prevent me from taking my own life, in preference to being taken back to the facility?

  “I’m sorry I brought this on you,” I tell Nesha, and make to lift myself over the railing. My resolve at that moment was total. I’m surrendered to the fall, ready for white annihilation. I want the music in my head to end. Death and silence, for eternity.

  But I’m not fast enough, or my resolve isn’t as total as I imagine. The other hatted man rushes to me and locks his massive hand around my arm. The other one moves closer
with the syringe.

  “Not just yet,” Doctor Grechko—if that was his name-says. “He’s safe now, but keep a good grip on him.”

  “What happens to Nesha?” I ask.

  Grechko looks at her, then shakes his head. “There’s no harm in talking to a madwoman, Georgi. Whatever you may have told her, she’ll confuse it with all that rubbish she already believes. No worse than telling secrets to a dog. And even if she didn’t, no one would listen to her. Really, she isn’t worth our inconvenience. You, on the other hand, are extraordinarily valuable to us.”

  Something’s wrong. I feel an icebreaker cutting through my brain.

  “My name isn’t Georgi.”

  Doctor Grechko nods solemnly. “No matter what you may currently believe, you are Doctor Georgi Kizim. You’re even wearing his coat. Look in the pocket if you doubt me—there’s a good chance you still have his security pass.”

  “No,” I insist. “I am not Georgi Kizim. I know that man, but I’m not him. I just took his coat, so that I could escape. I am the cosmonaut, Dimitri Ivanov. I was on the Tereshkova. I went into the Matryoshka.”

  “No,” Doctor Grechko corrects patiently. “You are not Ivanov. You are not the cosmonaut. He was—is, to a degree-your patient. You were assigned to treat him, to learn what you could. Unfortunately, the protocol was flawed. We thought we could prevent a repeat of what happened with Yakov, but we were wrong. You began to identify too strongly with your patient, just as Doctor Malyshev began to identify with Yakov. We still don’t understand the mechanism, but after the business with Malyshev we thought we’d put in enough safeguards to stop it happening twice. Clearly, we were wrong about that. Even with Ivanov in his vegetative state ...”

  “I am Ivanov,” I say, but with a chink of doubt opening inside me.

  “Maybe you should look in the coat,” Nesha says.

  My fingers numb with cold, I dig into the pocket until I touch the hard edge of his security pass. The hatted man’s still keeping a good hold on my arm. I pass the white plastic rectangle to Nesha. She squints, holding it at arm’s length, studying the little hologram.