The Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  The whiphound broke off its surveillance and commenced its return to Thalia. She snapped off the glasses, folded them and slid them back into her tunic pocket. With a rustle the whiphound emerged through the hedge. She spread the fingers of her right hand and allowed the handle to leap into her grasp, the filament retracting in the same instant.

  She looked back the way she had come, plotting her route, and saw the moving form of a large six-wheeled servitor. Only the top half of the machine was visible, the rest of it obscured by the line of a hedge. It was an orange robot with a high-gloss shell, the claws and scoop of heavy-duty waste-collection apparatus just visible at the front. The machine was trundling along a gravel-lined path, crunching stones beneath its tyres. Thalia replayed the route she had followed and reckoned that the robot would be on her in fifteen or twenty seconds; sooner if she returned the way she had come.

  It might do nothing. It might just rumble past her, on some pre-programmed errand.

  She wasn’t going to take that chance.

  She crouch-walked as fast as she dared, holding the whiphound tight. She reached a dead end where three sets of hedges converged, blocking her in. The servitor rumbled closer. She risked a glance back and saw blue-hazed sunlight flare off its shell. With the outspread axles of its six wheels, its claw-like waste-collection system and the dim-looking cluster of cameras tucked under the shell’s forward lip, there was something fierce and crablike about the advancing machine. An hour ago she would have walked past it without giving it a glance. Now it made her feel mortally frightened.

  Thalia thumbed one of the heavy-duty controls set into the whiphound’s handle. Sword mode. The filament whisked out to a length of one metre, but stiffened to the rigidity of a laser beam. Gripping the thing in both hands, Thalia pushed the blade into the hedge. She sliced sideways, the whiphound automatically twisting the blade to bring the microscopic ablative mechanisms of the cutting edge into play. There was no detectable resistance. A downward swoop, a sweep across, a sweep up. She retracted the blade, then pushed against the cube of hedge she had cut free. It eased inwards, then flopped back onto the turf on the other side. With hindsight, she should have cut a wider hole.

  She didn’t have time for hindsight.

  She wriggled through. Her heels must have been clearing the gap when the robot rounded the final corner. Thalia crouched low and still. She had emerged onto an area of lawn bounding one of the ponds, out of sight of the other servitors. The pond was circular, with an ornamental fountain at its centre.

  The machine approached, its progress silent save for the steady crunch of gravel under its wheels. Thalia tensed, convinced that the machine was going to slow or stop. It would see the hole, she thought; it would find her, then it would summon others. But the machine did not stop, even when it reached the cut in the hedge. Thalia remained as still as possible until the crunching noise had receded into the background sounds - the burble of the fountain, the distant voices of the herded crowd and the endlessly cycling message of reassurance from Constable Lucas Thesiger.

  When at last she was certain that the machine was not about to return, she poked her head above the level of the hedge. No other servitors were nearby, or at least none large enough to see. The orange machine was turning, changing its course to proceed at ninety degrees to the hedge Thalia had cut, but not in a direction that would take it further away. She looked along the line of the hedge that the machine was traversing and spotted an opening at its far end, one she had missed on her first inspection. If the machine reached that spot and then turned in towards her, she would be exposed and obvious. Thalia stowed the whiphound. She returned through the hole she had cut, the gravel chips digging into the skin of her palms as she pushed herself up to a crouching position. Holding still again, she watched the orange servitor make its way to the end of the hedge and then turn into the enclosure around the pond. She had been right to dodge back through the hedge. Even if the machine carried only a rudimentary vision system, she would have been obvious.

  Instinct told her to move while the machine was engaged in its business, but she forced herself to remain still. She had seen something slumped in the servitor’s waste scoop, something that had no business being there.

  The machine trundled to the edge of the pond. It raised the scoop, shining pistons elongating. The angle of the scoop tilted down. The slumped thing Thalia had glimpsed slid free into the water. It was a body, a dead man clothed in the brown overalls of a park attendant. As the body entered the pond, limp enough to suggest that death had been recent, Thalia made out a vivid red gash across the man’s chest, where he had been cut through his clothes. Then he was gone. For a moment an elbow jutted out of the water, before disappearing under. The fountain laid a white froth over the surface of the pond, obscuring the body completely.

  Thalia was shaking. She unclipped the whiphound again. She had not believed the recorded message from Lucas Thesiger, if there was such a person. But until that moment she had at least been prepared to believe that the servitors were acting under some dire-emergency protocol. Perhaps the truth was simply too unsettling to reveal to the citizenry, for fear of inciting panic.

  But even in a state of emergency, you didn’t bury bodies in civic ponds.

  ’There were a hundred of us once,’ Clepsydra said. ‘This room is where we slept, or at least rested our bodies, during interstellar flight. Most of us are still alive, connected via neural connections to the Exordium device.’

  ‘Where is it?’ Dreyfus asked.

  ‘Somewhere else in the ship.’

  ‘Can you show it to me?’

  ‘I could, but then I’d have to kill you.’

  He couldn’t tell if that was an attempt at humour, or whether she was deadly serious.

  In total, she’d told him as little about the technology as she could get away with. All Dreyfus was clear about was that Exordium was a kind of quantum periscope, peering into a murky, fog-shrouded sea of overlapping future states. What Clepsydra called the ‘retrocausal probability function’ was generated by future versions of the same dreamers, plugged into the Exordium machine further down the timeline. It took the minds of those selfsame dreamers to shape the nebulous Exordium data into coherent predictions about things yet to happen.

  He looked at the wounded sleepers. ‘Please don’t tell me they’re conscious.’

  ‘It is a state of consciousness akin to lucid dreaming. Their minds have been enslaved for Aurora’s purposes, nothing more. With their minds given over to processing Exordium imagery, the sleepers have scarcely any spare capacity for what you might call normal thought. Aurora has made that impossible.’

  ‘And yet you escaped,’ Dreyfus said.

  ‘It was planned, with the full cooperation of the remaining sleepers. In the gaps between monitored thoughts we hatched a scheme. It took us years. We knew only one of us could escape. I was chosen at random, but any one of us would have sufficed.’

  ‘Why just one of you? Once you’d escaped, couldn’t you ... free the others, or something?’

  ‘We had hopes that I might make it back to civilisation. That proved impossible.’

  ‘How long have you been free?’

  ‘A hundred days. A thousand. I’m not sure. Now at least you understand how I kept myself alive. I have a hiding place elsewhere in the rock, away from Aurora’s scrutiny. But I can’t stay there all the time. Periodically I must return here, to the ship, and harvest rations. I do it surgically, a little at a time. Just enough to keep me alive for a couple of days, but not enough to cause any additional complications in the donor. I take the harvested food back with me to my hideaway. I cook it as best I can, using a cauterizing tool.’ She looked at Dreyfus, her expression challenging him to judge her. ‘Then I eat it, slowly and gratefully. Then I return.’

  ‘It’s monstrous.’

  ‘It’s what we agreed.’

  ’We?’

  ‘The other sleepers and I. Listen carefully, Dreyfus. This
was always the plan. One of us would wake. One and only one. Aurora demanded a single thing of us: a steady stream of Exordium data. If we fell short, if we were perceived not to be performing to expectations, we would be punished. Our neural blockades are effective at neutralising physical pain, but they can do nothing against pain that is administered directly to the brain via cortical stimulation. That was how Aurora made us do what we were told.’

  ‘The helmets?’

  ‘A modification of our own equipment. They connect us to Exordium, but they also administer punishment.’

  ‘Did she hurt you?’

  ‘Aurora hurt all of us. But not by administering pain to the entire group of sleepers. Had Aurora done that, it might have engendered a sense of unity through suffering: a rebellious solidarity that might have given us the strength to refuse to dream. Aurora was cleverer than that.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘Aurora’s way was to select one of us and make that sleeper suffer for our collective failure. Aurora picked on certain sleepers again and again. Because we are Conjoiners, we always felt something of the other sleeper’s pain: not its totality, but a reflection of it, enough to judge the degree of suffering.’

  ‘And that worked?’

  ‘We learned not to fail her. But by the same token we also strove to find a way to cheat. Aurora monitors our thoughts, but not infallibly. We sensed gaps in the flow of our group consciousness when her attention was elsewhere. In these gaps we devised our scheme.’

  ‘Surely Aurora would have noticed at some point?’

  ‘Aurora cares only about dreams and punishment. The mechanics of how the Exordium prognostications arrive are of little concern. Had I gone on to cause trouble ... then perhaps things would have been different.’

  ‘How were you selected?’

  ‘The honour was bestowed randomly. There were some who thought the escapee should be one of the sleepers Aurora was prone to punish, but that would have risked drawing too much attention to our plan, when the time for the next punishment came around.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘The matter of escape was not simple. It required enormous preparation, artful distraction. I learned how to fool the helmet into thinking I was still in the dreaming consciousness state, while in fact being fully lucid, fully awake. I learned how to interfere with its mechanism, to release it, yet not trigger any alarms. All this required more than a year of preparation.’

  Dreyfus reeled at the enormity of what he was hearing. ‘But once you escaped ... wouldn’t there still have been an empty position?’

  ‘That was easily dealt with. I mentioned the accident that had already befallen our ship. There were corpses elsewhere on the vessel, due to be returned to the Mother Nest for component recycling. Before my absence was noted, I retrieved one of these corpses and plugged it into the dreaming apparatus. The life-support system kept the corpse animate. It was incapable of thought, but the other dreamers were able to conceal that from Aurora.’

  Dreyfus shook his head, dumfounded, appalled and awed at what he had heard. Speech itself felt like a form of blasphemy, set against so much suffering. ‘But if you haven’t been able to escape ... hasn’t all of this been for nothing?’

  ‘I was beginning to think so. So were the other sleepers. The idea was that I would use my talents to send a message to the Mother Nest, if it still existed. But the machinery in this place would not allow it. I can sense doors opening and closing, the arrival of ships and individuals. But the data architecture depends on optical circuitry, which my implants cannot manipulate.’

  Dreyfus nodded grimly. ‘Aurora knew exactly which bars would hold you prisoner.’

  ‘Yes, she did. Perhaps your deputy will have more success, if he has the right equipment. But I was mute.’

  ‘But you didn’t give up.’

  ‘I shifted my efforts to constructing a transmitter of my own. The ship could grow me such a thing in hours if I sent the right commands to it. But if I did that, Aurora would sense the changes in the ship. She almost certainly knows that you are here, Prefect. I could not risk her killing the sleepers. I was forced to scavenge what I could from the surrounding structure. I have been piecing together parts and tools in my hiding place.’

  ‘How close are you to success?’

  ‘A hundred days, a thousand days.’ Then quietly she added, ‘Perhaps longer. Nothing is certain.’

  ‘How long could you last?’

  ‘In a few years, I would reach the limit of what could be harvested without causing death. Then difficult decisions would need to be made. I would have made them, without flinching. That is our way. But then something changed.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘You arrived, Prefect. And now things can start happening.’

  Meriel Redon was waiting for Thalia as soon as she returned to the other four members of the escape party. ‘What did you see?’ she asked.

  Thalia raised a hand until she caught her breath. Her back was aching from all the crouching she’d had to do.

  ‘It’s pretty much what I expected, based on what we saw from the bird.’ She kept her voice low, breaking off to take deep breaths. ‘But it’s not as bad as it looked at first. The servitors have been activated under an emergency protocol. I heard the voice of a constable explaining why everyone needs to stay calm.’

  ‘I thought there were no constables,’ said Caillebot. ‘Except for the one we saw in the crowd, being treated like all the other people.’

  ‘I don’t think he had the right to wear a constable’s armband,’ Thalia said, her mind racing ahead as she tried to anticipate the questions her party might ask. ’The voice was coming from a servitor, anyway. It was broadcasting a looped statement from someone called Lucas Thesiger. Does the name mean anything to any of you?’

  ‘Thesiger was assigned to the constabulary during the Blow-Out Crisis,’ said Redon. ‘I remember seeing his face on the reports. He was commended for bravery after he saved some people who were stranded outside near the breach. A lot of us said he should be made a permanent constable, to be activated again the next time there was a crisis.’

  ‘Well, it looks like you got your wish. Thesiger’s calling the shots now, from somewhere else.’

  Cuthbertson looked sceptical. ‘Why are the machines doing the work of the constables if the constables are still in charge?’

  ‘Constables can’t get everywhere at once,’ Thalia told the bird man. ‘And there are problems with communication. That’s why the machines have been tasked in some areas, like this one. The people are being told to sit tight and wait for the crisis to blow over.’

  ‘What crisis?’ Parnasse asked, so quietly that Thalia almost didn’t hear him.

  ‘It’s not clear. Thesiger says there are indications the habitat was attacked. The attack may even be ongoing. Something nasty might have been released into the air.’

  The curator studied her with a look on his face that said Thalia might fool the others, but she wasn’t fooling him. ‘Then it was just coincidence that abstraction went down the moment you completed that upgrade?’

  ‘Difficult as it may be to believe, that’s what it looks like.’

  ‘That’s quite some coincidence.’

  Thalia nodded earnestly. ‘I agree, but right now we don’t have time to dwell on that. What we have to focus on is surviving. Thesiger - whoever he is - is right to enforce martial rule to keep the citizenry from panicking too much. In his shoes, it’s exactly what I’d do - even if that meant tasking servitors to fill in for constables.’

  ‘But those machines weren’t just directing the people to safety,’ Cuthbertson said, a strained edge in his voice. ‘They were herding them. There was something wrong there.’

  ‘It’s okay. The servitors must have been tasked before Thesiger was able to get his recorded message out. Given what had already happened - abstraction going down, the loss of utilities - I can imagine that the people were pretty spooked when the
robots started pushing them around. But the machines were just doing what they were instructed to do. Constables would have done it with a smile and a wave of encouragement, but it’s no different in the end. The crowd was a lot calmer once Thesiger explained what was happening.’

  ‘I think she’s right,’ Redon said. ‘I can’t hear the voices as much now.’

  ‘So what are you proposing?’ Caillebot asked. ‘That we go and join those people?’

  Thalia took her biggest gamble. ‘You can if you want. I won’t stop you. But unlike those people, you happen to be under Panoply care already. That overrides any local security arrangements, including a habitat-wide curfew.’

  ‘But you mentioned something in the air,’ Redon said.

  Thalia nodded. ‘Thesiger talked about a toxic agent. I’m guessing he has intelligence that says something like that was at least planned. But I think he may be overstating the danger, just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ the furniture-maker said, her eyes widening with concern.

  ‘No,’ Thalia admitted. ‘I can’t. But I can tell you this. Thesiger wants to round people up to prevent panic, and for now that means holding them in the open air.’

  ‘The larger buildings are all airtight,’ Caillebot said, as if just realising it himself. ‘They’re designed to tolerate another blow-out. Why doesn’t he move them to the larger buildings?’