Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "Release it," she said.

  The whiphound uncoiled itself and pulled back from the robot, while still keeping its eye locked on the machine. Laboriously, the robot extended telescopic limbs to right itself. A slender pillar rose from the wheeled base, with limbs and sensors sprouting at odd, asymmetric angles from the pillar.

  "I am Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng, of Panoply," she said. "Identify your origin."

  The robot's voice was disconcertingly deep and emphatic. "Welcome to Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. I trust your journey was pleasant. I apologise for my lateness. I have been tasked to escort you to the participatory core."

  "I was hoping to talk to Citizen Orson Newkirk."

  "Orson Newkirk is in the participatory core. Shall I assist you with your luggage?"

  "I can manage," Thalia said, shaking her head.

  "Very well, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. Please follow me."

  "Where is everyone? I was expecting a population of one point three million people."

  "The current population is one million, two hundred and seventy-four thousand, six hundred and eighteen people. All are accounted for in the participatory core."

  "You keep saying that — what's a 'participatory core'?"

  "Please follow me."

  The robot spun around, tyres hissing against the wet flooring, and began to amble down the corridor, trailing an electrical burning smell in its wake.

  * * *

  From seven and a half metres away Jane Aumonier smiled tightly. "You're like a dog with a bone, Tom. Not everything in life is a conspiracy. People do sometimes get mad and do stupid and irrational things."

  "Dravidian sounded neither mad nor irrational to me."

  "One of his crew, then."

  "Acting according to plan. Following a script to make the whole attack look like a heat-of-the-moment thing, when in fact it was set up long before Dravidian ever met Delphine."

  "You really think so?"

  Dreyfus had just run the Solid Orrery in his room. He'd backtracked the configuration of the Glitter Band to the time when Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious said the call had come in. The data was now sitting in Thalia's cutter, waiting for her to get to it when she completed her current upgrade.

  "You've always trusted my instincts in the past," Dreyfus said. "Now they're telling me that there's something going on here that we're supposed to overlook."

  "You've spoken to the betas?"

  "They can't think of anyone who'd do this to the family."

  "So you've no hint as to what the motive might have been?"

  "No, not yet. But I'll tell you this. If you just wanted to hurt a family, there are any number of assassination weapons capable of doing the job without leaving a forensic trail."

  "Agreed ... " Aumonier said, her tone non-committal, letting him know that she was going along with him for the sake of argument alone.

  "But whoever did this wanted to take out more than just the family. They killed all the people in that habitat and then they killed the habitat itself."

  "Maybe they didn't have access to assassination weapons."

  Dreyfus pulled a sceptical expression. "Yet they did have the means to infiltrate an Ultra ship and manipulate its Conjoiner drive?"

  "I'm not sure where you're going with this, Tom."

  "I'm saying that it would have been harder for them to use Dravidian than to get their hands on any number of assassination tools. Which means they really needed that ship. They used it for a reason. Killing the family wasn't enough. They had to incinerate them, wipe every trace of them out of existence. Short of a foam-phase bomb or a nuke, how else do you do that, except with a Conjoiner drive?"

  "It still doesn't add up to much," Aumonier said.

  "At least the ship gave them a chance to pin it on the Ultras, rather than making it look like the work of another habitat. But I think Dravidian and his crew were innocent."

  Aumonier looked wearily at the wall of displays jostling for her attention. Even at a glance, Dreyfus could see that almost all of them referred to her efforts to contain the escalating crisis between the Glitter Band and the Ultras. The screens wrapped the room from pole to pole, the combined pressure of them pushing in from all directions like the impaling spikes of an iron maiden.

  "If I did have proof," she said, "if I could demonstrate that the Ultras were innocent, that would certainly ease matters."

  "I've got Thalia Ng helping me to trace the caller who set up Dravidian."

  She looked at Dreyfus questioningly. "I thought Ng was outside on field duty. The update to the polling cores, wasn't it? Vantrollier asked me to sign off on the pad release."

  "Thalia's outside," Dreyfus confirmed. "And she's helping me as well, between upgrades."

  Aumonier nodded approvingly. "A good deputy."

  "I don't employ any other kind."

  "And I don't employ any other kind of field prefect. I want you to understand that you are appreciated, no matter how ... frustrating you must occasionally find your position."

  "I'm perfectly happy with my role in the organisation."

  "I'm glad you feel that way."

  There was a lull.

  "Tell me something, Jane. Now that we're having this conversation."

  "Go ahead, Tom."

  "I want you to answer truthfully. I'm going to be poking around under some stones. There may be things under them that bite back. I need to be certain that I have your complete confidence when I go out there to do my job."

  "You have it. Unconditionally."

  "Then there's no reason for me to think that I might have disappointed you, or underperformed, in my line of work?"

  "Why would you feel that way?"

  "I sense that I have your confidence. You've given me Pangolin clearance, which I appreciate. I'm entitled to sit in with the senior prefects. But I'm still a field, after all these years."

  "There's no shame in that."

  "I know."

  "If it wasn't for this ... thing on my neck, maybe I'd still be out there as well."

  "Not very likely, Jane. You'd have been promoted out of fieldwork whether you liked it or not. They'd have kept you inside Panoply anyway, where you can be of most benefit to the organisation."

  "And if I'd said no?"

  "They'd have thanked you for your opinion and ignored you anyway. People get promoted out of field while they're still at the top of their game. That's the way it works."

  "And if I told you I thought the best way for you to serve Panoply was to remain a field prefect?"

  "I'm getting old and tired, Jane. I've started making mistakes."

  "None that have reached my attention." She addressed him with sudden urgency, as if she'd been indulging him until then but now it was time to lay down the law. "Tom, listen to me. I don't want to hear any more of this. You're the best we have. I wouldn't say that if I didn't mean it."

  "Then I have your confidence?"

  "I've said it once already. Go and look under as many stones as you want. I'll be right behind you."

  * * *

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  Ahead, the whiphound was a nervous black squiggle against a brightening red glow. The escort servitor had broken down, but it had given Thalia clear instructions about where she should go. Now she quickened her pace, the cylinder weighing heavily on her wrist, until she emerged into a huge arena-like space. She appeared to be standing on a railed balcony, the opposite wall an easy hundred metres away. The wall was divided into endless boxlike partitions, stacked on many levels, but the blood-red light was too dim for Thalia to see more than that. Above was only inky darkness, with no suggestion of how high the ceiling was.

  Next to her, the whiphound snapped around agitatedly, sizing up the new space in which it found itself.

  "Easy," she whispered. "Maintain defence posture one."

  That was when a new voice boomed out of nowhere. "Welcome, Thalia. This is Orson Newkirk speaking. I'
m sorry about your tribulations with the servitor."

  She raised her own voice in return. "I can't see you, Citizen Newkirk."

  "My apologies. It's spectacularly bad form not to be there to greet your guests, but I haven't been unplugged in a while and there was a problem with one of my disconnect valves. All fixed now, though. I'm on my way down as I speak. Be with you in a jiffy."

  "On your way down?" she asked, looking up.

  "How much do you know about us, Thalia?" he asked, his voice cheerfully playful.

  "I know that you stay out of trouble with Panoply," she said, giving a non-answer that she hoped would mask her ignorance.

  "Well, that's good. At least you haven't heard anything bad."

  Thalia was getting a crick in her neck. "Should I have?"

  "We have our critics. People who think the level of abstraction we practise here is somehow wrong, or immoral."

  "I'm not here to judge. I'm here to install a software patch."

  She could see something now: a mote of light in the darkness above, descending towards her. As Orson Newkirk came fully into view, Thalia saw that he was contained inside a rectangular glass box, which was being lowered down on a barely visible line. The box wasn't much larger than a suitcase.

  He was a bust, Thalia thought: a human head, half of the upper torso, and nothing else. Nothing below the ribs. No arms, no shoulders. Just a head and a chest, the base of his torso vanishing into a ring-shaped life-support device. A padded framework rose up behind him, supporting the torso, neck and head.

  "They say we're just heads," Newkirk said chattily. "They couldn't be more wrong! Anyone can keep a head alive, but without the hormonal environment of the rest of the body, you don't get anything remotely resembling the rich texture of human consciousness. We're creatures of chemistry, not wiring. That's why we keep as much as possible, while throwing out everything we don't need. I still have glands, you know. Glands make all the difference. Glands maketh the man."

  "All your glands?" Thalia asked, glancing at the truncated torso.

  "Things can be moved around and rerouted, Thalia. Open me up and you'd find a very efficient utilisation of space."

  The box came to a halt with Newkirk's head level with Thalia's.

  "I don't understand," she said, thinking about the echoing, musty spaces she had already walked through. "Why have you done this to yourself? It can't be that you need the room."

  "It's not about room. It's about resources." Newkirk smiled at her. He had a young man's face, not unattractive when one ignored everything else about him. His eyes were white orbs, blank save for a tiny dot of a pupil. They trembled constantly, with the coordinated motion of someone in deep REM sleep.

  "Resources?" she asked.

  "Funds have to be used in the most efficient manner possible. There are more than a million people living in Sea-Tac. If every single one of them had the mass-energy demands of an adult human, we'd be spending so much money keeping them all fed and watered that we wouldn't have a penny left over for bandwidth."

  "Bandwidth?" Thalia asked, blearily conscious of where this was heading.

  "For abstraction, of course," Newkirk said, sounding surprised that this wasn't obvious.

  "But there isn't any. My glasses were dead."

  "That's because you were outside the participatory core. It's heavily shielded. We don't waste a watt broadcasting abstraction where it isn't needed."

  She cut him off. "Where is everyone, Citizen?"

  "We're all right here."

  Lights blazed on, descending in a wave from a vanishing point that appeared to be almost infinitely far above. Thalia saw tier upon tier of compartments, each of which held an identical glass box to the one in which Newkirk resided. There wasn't room for this inside the habitat, she started to think, before realising that she must be looking along one of the connecting spokes, all the way to the weightless hub.

  "Why have you done this to yourselves?"

  "That's not the right question. What you should be asking is, who do I have to kill to join?"

  She grinned nervously. "No thanks."

  "You don't know what you're missing."

  "Maybe not. I do know that I quite like having a body, being able to walk around and breathe."

  "But you know nothing of abstraction. If you had any experience of it before you became a prefect, it must be just a fading memory by now. Like a glimpse of the gates of heaven between a crack in the clouds. Before the clouds closed again."

  "I've sampled abstraction — I had implants before I joined Panoply."

  "You've sampled it, yes. But only in Sea-Tac would you know the euphoric bliss of total immersion."

  Thalia looked across the open space, at the boxes ranked on the far wall, the endless parade of human busts. "They're all somewhere else, aren't they? Mentally, I mean. Their minds aren't in Sea-Tac at all."

  "What would be the point? My people are the only real citizens of the Glitter Band, the only ones who truly inhabit it. Their minds are out there now, Thalia: spread across the entire volume of near-Yellowstone space, a choir invisible, singing the body electric, angels in the architecture."

  "They've paid a price for it."

  "One they'd all gladly pay ten times over."

  "I really should be getting on with the upgrade," Thalia said.

  "The polling core's at the bottom of the shaft. Follow the walkway and it'll bring you to the base in two rotations."

  Thalia did as Citizen Newkirk instructed. When she reached the bottom of the shaft — Newkirk lowering down to match her descent until he was hovering only a metre above the floor — she reached out her right hand and summoned the whiphound back. It sprang into her grip, retracting its filament with a supersonic crack. She locked the whiphound back onto her belt.

  "I'll run through what I need to do. I'm going to open a ten-minute access window into the polling core's internal operating architecture." Thalia patted the cylinder she had brought with her. "Then I'm going to implement a minor software upgrade. I won't need to take abstraction down for more than a few milliseconds." She cast a glance at the wall of busts. "They won't notice it, will they?"

  "A few milliseconds? Not very likely. Buffering software in their implants will smooth over any glitches, in any case."

  "Then there's no reason for me not to begin."

  Thalia's cylinder opened like a puzzle box, revealing racks of specialised tools and colour-coded data diskettes. She pulled out the first of the four one-time pads and held the rectangle up to eye level. She applied finger pressure and watched text spill across the rectangle's surface.

  "This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Acknowledge security access override Probity Three Saxifrage."

  "Override confirmed," the apparatus replied. "You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng."

  "Present entry port sixteen."

  The polling core sank into the floor like a descending periscope, rotating on its axis as it did so. An illuminated slot came into view. Thalia reached into her cylinder and extracted the diskette containing the relevant software upgrade. She slid the diskette into the slot, feeling the reassuring tug as the pillar accepted it. The diskette vanished into the polling core, accompanied by a series of faint rumbles and thuds.

  "The diskette contains a data fragment. What do you wish me to do with this data fragment, Deputy Field Prefect Ng?"

  "Use the fragment to overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six." She turned to Newkirk and whispered, "This will only take an instant. It's a run-time fragment, so there won't be any need to recompile the main operating stack."

  "I cannot overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six," the core said.

  Thalia felt a tingle of sweat on her brow. "Clarify."

  "The requested operation would introduce a tertiary-stage conflict in the virtual memory array addressing the executable image in segment kappa epsilon nine nine
four."

  "A problem, Prefect?" Newkirk asked mildly.

  Thalia wiped her brow dry. "Nothing we can't work around. The architecture's just a bit knottier than I expected. I might have to take abstraction down for slightly longer than a few milliseconds."

  "What counts as 'slightly longer'?"

  "Maybe a tenth of a second."

  "That won't go unnoticed."

  "You now have four hundred and eighty seconds of access, Deputy Field Prefect Ng."

  "Thank you," she said, struggling not to sound flustered. "Please evaluate the following. Suspend run-time execution of all images between segments alpha alpha to kappa epsilon inclusive, then perform the data segment overwrite I already requested. Confirm that this would not involve a suspension of abstraction access exceeding one hundred milliseconds — "

  "The aforementioned tertiary-stage conflict would now be resolved, but a quaternary-stage conflict would then arise."

  Thalia swore under her breath. Why had she not probed the architecture before initiating the one-time access window? She could have learned everything she needed to without invoking Panoply privileges.

  "Turn it around," she said, suddenly seeing a way. "Tell me what would be required to perform a clean installation of the new data segment."

  "The new data segment can be installed, but it will entail a complete rebuild of all run-time images in all segments between alpha alpha and kappa epsilon inclusive."

  "Status of abstraction during downtime?"

  "Abstraction will be fully suspended during the rebuild."

  "Estimated build-time?" Thalia asked, her throat dry.

  "Three hundred and forty seconds, plus or minus ten seconds, for a confidence interval of ninety-five per cent."

  "State remaining time on access window."

  "You now have four hundred and six seconds of access, Deputy Field Prefect Ng."

  She looked at Newkirk, who was studying her with a distinctly unamused expression, in so far as his wax-like mask was capable of expression.

  "You heard what the machine said," Thalia told him. "You're going to lose abstraction for more than five minutes. I have to begin the build in the next minute to stand a chance of it finishing before my window closes."