Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "Not all of it, though," Thalia said. "Right?"

  "We vote," Thory said.

  "So does everyone," Thalia replied. "Except for Panoply."

  "Not everyone votes the way we do. That's the big difference. There are eight hundred thousand people in this habitat, and each and every one of us takes our voting rights very seriously indeed."

  "Still won't put food on your plates."

  "It will if you vote often enough, and intelligently enough." Thory was looking at Thalia quite intently now, as the train whisked through a campus of low-lying buildings, all of which had the softened outlines and pastel coloration of candied marshmallows. "You're Panoply. I presume you're adequately familiar with the concept of vote weighting?"

  "I recall that the mechanism allows it, under certain circumstances."

  Thory looked surprised. "You 'recall'. Aren't you supposed to be the expert here, Prefect?"

  "Ask me about security, or about polling core software, and I'll keep you enthralled for hours. Vote processing is a different area. That's not my remit." Thalia had her hands laced in her lap, with the cylinder between her knees. "So tell me how it works for Aubusson."

  "It's common knowledge that the apparatus logs every vote ever entered, across the entire Glitter Band," Thory said. "That's at least a million transactions every second, going back two hundred years. What people don't generally realise is that the system occasionally peers back into its own records and looks at voting patterns that shaped a particular outcome. Suppose, for instance, that a critical vote was put to the population of the entire Band, all hundred million of us. A hypothetical threat had been identified, one that could be met with a variety of responses ranging from a pre-emptive attack to the simple decision to do nothing at all. Suppose furthermore that the majority voted for one particular response out of the options available. Suppose also that action was taken based on that vote, and that with hindsight that action turned out to have been the wrong thing to do. The apparatus is intelligent enough to recognise democratic mistakes like that. It's also intelligent enough to look back into the records and see who voted otherwise. Who, in other words, could be said to have been right, while the majority were wrong."

  Thalia nodded, recalling details she had once learned and then buried under more immediately relevant knowledge. "And then, having identified those voters as being of shrewd judgement, it attaches a weighting bias to any future votes they might cast."

  "In essence, that's how it works. In practice, it's infinitely more subtle. The system keeps monitoring those individuals, constantly tuning the appropriate weighting factor. If they keep on voting shrewdly, then their weighting remains, or even increases. If they show a sustained streak of bad judgement, the system weights them back down to the default value."

  "Why not just remove their voting rights entirely, if they're that bad?"

  "Because then we wouldn't be a democracy," Thory replied. "Everyone deserves a chance to mend their ways."

  "And how does this work for Aubusson?"

  "It's how we make our living. The citizenry here possesses a very high number of weighted votes, well above the Glitter Band mean. We've all worked hard for that, of course: it isn't just a statistical fluctuation. I have a weighting index of one point nine, which means that every vote I cast has nearly double its normal efficacy. I'm almost equivalent to two people voting in lockstep on any issue. One point nine is high, but there are fifty-four people out there who have indices nudging three. These are people whom the system has identified as possessing an almost superhuman acumen. Most of us see the landscape of future events as a bewilderingly jumbled terrain, cloaked in a mist of ever-shifting possibilities. The Triples see a shining road, its junctions marked in blazing neon." Thory's voice became reverential. "Somewhere out there, Prefect, is a being we call the Quadruple. We know he walks amongst us because the system says he is a citizen of House Aubusson. But the Quad has never revealed himself to any other citizen. Perhaps he fears a public stoning. His own wisdom must be a wonderful and terrifying gift, like the curse of Cassandra. Yet he still only carries four votes, in a population of a hundred million. Pebbles on an infinite beach."

  "Tell me how you stay ahead of the curve," Thalia said.

  "With blood, sweat and toil. All of us take our issues seriously. That's what citizenship in Aubusson entails. You don't get to live here unless you can hold a weighted voting average above one point two five. That means we're all required to think very seriously about the issues we vote on. Not just from a personal perspective, not just from the perspective of House Aubusson, but from the standpoint of the greater good of the entire Glitter Band. And it pays off for us, of course. It's how we make our living — by trading on our prior shrewdness. Because our votes are disproportionately effective, we are very attractive to lobbyists from other communities. On marginal issues, they pay us to listen to what they have to say, knowing that a block vote from Aubusson may swing the result by a critical factor. That's where the money comes from."

  "Political bribes?"

  "Hardly. They buy our attention, our willingness to listen. That doesn't guarantee that we will vote according to their wishes. If all we did was follow the money, our collective indices would ramp down to one before you could blink. Then we'd be no use to anyone."

  "It's a balancing act," put in Caillebot. "To remain useful to the lobbyists, we must maintain a degree of independence from them. This is the central paradox of our existence. But it is the paradox that allows me to spend my time designing gardens, and Paula to breed her butterflies."

  Thory leaned forward. "Since we've been on this train, I've already participated in two polling transactions. There's a third coming up in two minutes. Minor issues, in the scheme of things — the kinds of things most citizens let their predictive routines take care of."

  "I didn't notice."

  "You wouldn't have. Most of us are so used to the process now that it's almost autonomic, like blinking. But we take each and every vote as seriously as the last." Thory must have seen something amiss in Thalia's expression, for she leaned forward concernedly. "Everything I've just described is completely legal, Prefect. Panoply wouldn't allow it to happen otherwise."

  "I know it's legal. I just didn't think it had become systematized, made the basis for a whole community."

  "Does that distress you?"

  "No," Thalia answered truthfully. "If the system allows it, it's fine by me. But it just reminds me how many surprises the Glitter Band still has in store."

  "This is the most complex, variegated society in human history," Thory said. "It's a machine for surprising people."

  * * *

  Dreyfus studied the spectacle of the ship floating before him, pinned in the vivid blue lights at the core of the Nerval-Lermontov rock. It was a midnight-black form in a pitch-black cavern. He did not so much see the ship as detect the subtle gradation in darkness between its hull and the background surface of the rock's hollowed-out heart. It was like an exercise in optical trickery, a perceptual mirage that kept slipping out of his cognitive grasp.

  But he knew exactly what he was looking at. Though it was smaller than most, the vehicle was clearly a starship. It had the sleek, tapering hull of a lighthugger, and the two swept-back spars that held the complicated nacelles of its twin drives. He remembered the burning wreck of the Accompaniment of Shadows, its own engines snipped off to become prizes for other Ultras. But as soon as its shape stabilised in his imagination, he knew that this was no Ultra starship.

  Dreyfus smiled to himself. He'd felt the scope of the investigation widening the moment a connection to the Eighty entered the frame. But nothing had prepared him for this shift in perspective.

  "Keep talking to me, Boss. I'm still on the line."

  "There's a Conjoiner ship here. It's just sitting in the middle of the rock."

  Sparver paused before answering. Dreyfus could imagine him working through the ramifications of the discovery.

&nbs
p; "Remind me: what have Conjoiners got to do with our case?"

  "That's what I'm very eager to find out."

  "How did the ship get where it is?"

  "No idea. Can't see any sign of a door in the chamber, and there definitely wasn't one on the outside. Almost looks as if it's been walled-up in here, encased in rock."

  "You think the Conjoiners hid it here for a reason?"

  Dreyfus brushed his hand over the control panel again. "I don't think so. Apart from the ship itself, nothing in the rock looks Conjoiner. It's more as if the ship's being held here by someone else."

  "Someone managed to capture and contain a Conjoiner ship? That's a pretty good trick in anyone's book."

  "I agree," Dreyfus said.

  "Next question: why would anyone do that? What would they hope to gain?"

  Dreyfus looked at the one facet in the chamber that was burnished silver and realised that it was a sealed door rather than an opaque panel in the bank of windows. The chamber's illumination traced the ribbed tube of a docking connector, stretching across space from the door panel to meet the light-sucking hull of the ship.

  "That's what I'm going to have to go aboard to find out."

  "I don't think that's a good idea, Boss."

  Dreyfus turned to the panel again. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to leave. But the policeman in him had to know what was inside that ship; what secret was worth murdering to protect.

  His hand alighted on another toggle control, this one marked {X} — the universal symbol for an airlock actuator. The silver panel whisked aside silently and smoothly. Sensing his intentions, lights came on in sequence along the connector. The golden band arced down until it vanished into a docking port on the side of the lighthugger.

  Nothing now prevented him from boarding.

  "I'm going inside. Call me back as soon as you get through to Panoply."

  * * *

  While Thalia had been talking with her House Aubusson companions, they had crossed another window band spanning a brief ocean of space and stars (most of which were in fact other habitats), and now the train was slowing as it neared its destination. They crossed a series of manicured lawns, skimming high above them on a filigreed wisp of a bridge, then descended back down to ground level. On either side, Thalia saw the tapering stalks of the Museum of Cybernetics, each structure rising at least a hundred metres into the air, each surmounted by a smooth blue-grey sphere, each sphere marked with a symbol from the hallowed history of information processing. There was the ampersand, which had once symbolised a primitive form of abstraction. There was an ever-tumbling hourglass, still the universal symbol for an active computational process. There was the apple with a chunk missing, which (so Thalia had been led to believe) commemorated the suicidal poisoning of the info-theorist Turing himself.

  The train plunged into a tunnel, then slowed to a smooth halt in a plaza under the central stalk of the polling core. People came and went from trains parked at adjoining platforms, but Thalia's party had an entire section of the station to themselves, screened off by servitors and glass barriers. They rode escalators into hazy daylight, surrounded by the ornamental gardens and rock pools clustering around the base of the main stalk. Nearby, a bright blue servitor was diligently trimming a hedge into the shape of a peacock, its cutting arms moving with lightning speed as it executed the three-dimensional template in its memory.

  Thalia craned her head back to take in the entirety of the stalk. It rose from a gradually steepening skirt, climbing five or six hundred metres above the ground before tapering to a neck that appeared only just capable of supporting the main sphere. The sphere was much larger than those balanced on the smaller stalks, banded with tiny round windows where they were blank. Geometric shapes were in constant play on its surface, indicating — so Thalia guessed — the changing parameters of abstraction flow and voting patterns.

  Thalia's party walked into the shaded lobby of the stalk. The structure appeared to be hollow, its inward-leaning interior walls given over to towering murals, each of which depicted a great visionary of the PreCalvinist cybernetic era. A thick column rose up through the middle of the dizzying space, buttressed to the walls by filigreed arches. That had to be the main data conduit, Thalia judged, carrying abstraction services and voting packets to the polling core high above her head. The citizens here might not be as thoroughly integrated into abstraction as those in New Seattle-Tacoma, but their enthusiasm for the voting process would nonetheless ensure hefty data traffic. Thalia imagined the flow of information in the pipe, like high-pressure water searching for a loose rivet or leaky valve. Rising next to the column, but separated from it by a few metres of clear space, was the thinner tube of an elevator shaft, with a spiral walkway wrapped around it in ever-receding vertigo-inducing loops. The data conduit, elevator shaft and spiral staircase plunged through the ceiling at the top of the stalk, into the sphere that sat above it.

  Thalia knew she was rubbernecking, that even this tower would have been considered unimpressive by Chasm City standards, but the locals looked happy that she was impressed.

  "It's an ugly big bastard all right," Parnasse said, which was presumably his way of showing a fragment of civic pride.

  "We go up?" Thalia asked.

  Paula Thory nodded. "We go up. The elevator should already be waiting for us."

  "Good," Thalia said. "Then let's get this done so we can all go home."

  * * *

  Not for the first time in his life, Sparver found himself cursing the inadequacy of his hands. It was not because there was anything wrong with them from a hyperpig's point of view, but because he had to live in a world made for dextrous baseline humans, with long fingers and thumbs and an absurd volume of sensorimotor cortex dedicated to using them. The stubby, gauntleted fingers of his trotter-like hands kept pushing two keys at once, forcing him to backtrack and initiate the command sequence all over again. At last he succeeded, and heard a chirp in his helmet signifying that he was in contact with Panoply, albeit on a channel not normally used for field communications.

  "Internal Prefect Muang," a voice announced. "You have reached Panoply. How may I be of assistance?"

  Sparver knew and liked Muang. A small, stocky man himself, with looks that were at best unconventional, he had no conspicuous problem with hyperpigs.

  "This is Sparver. Can you hear me?"

  "Loud and clear. Is something wrong?"

  "You could say that. Prefect Dreyfus and I were investigating a free-floating rock owned by Nerval-Lermontov, as part of a case we're working. As we were making our final approach the rock opened fire on our corvette and took out our long-range communications."

  "The rock attacked you?"

  "There were heavy anti-ship weapons concealed under its surface. They popped out and started shooting at us."

  "My God."

  "I know. Don't you just hate it when that happens? Thing is, we could use some assistance out here."

  "Where are you now?"

  "I'm patching in via a transmitter inside the rock itself, but I don't know how long this link is going to hold up."

  "Copy, Sparver. With luck we can rustle up a deep-system vehicle. Do you need a medical team? Are either of you injured?"

  "We're separated from each other, but otherwise both okay. If I could put Dreyfus through, I would, but it's all I can do to rig this connection from my own suit."

  "Is your ship flightworthy?"

  "We could limp home if we had to, but it would be better if Panoply sent out a couple of heavy ships to pick over this place."

  "Do you have orbital data for this rock?"

  "Aboard the ship. But all you have to do is check the assets of the Nerval-Lermontov family. We're sitting on a two-kilometre-wide lump of unprocessed rock in the middle orbits. You should be able to image our corvette, even if you can't pick out the debris cloud from the attack."

  "Should narrow it down. Sit tight and I'll get the wheels moving."

&
nbsp; "Tell those ships to come in cautiously. And make sure they know Dreyfus and I are sitting inside this thing, in case anyone gets trigger-happy."

  "I'll get the message through immediately. You shouldn't have to wait more than an hour."

  "I'm not going anywhere," Sparver said.

  He closed the link and re-established contact with Dreyfus, glad when he heard his laboured breathing coming through nice and regularly, as if Dreyfus was pulling himself along a docking connector.

  "I got through, Boss. Cavalry's coming."

  "Good."

  "So now might be the time to rethink that plan of yours to board the ship."

  "I'm nearly there. Might as well go all the way, after coming this far." Dreyfus took deep breaths between sentences. "There's no telling what mechanisms might kick in to destroy evidence if the rock senses our intrusion."

  "Or which might kick in to destroy us. That's also a possibility."

  "I'm still going in. I suggest you return to the corvette and await the back-up."

  That sounded like an excellent idea to Sparver as well, but he had no intention of abandoning Dreyfus inside the rock. Besides, what his boss had just said was equally applicable to the data stored in the rock's router log.

  It did not take very long, now that he knew his way around the architecture. But when the list of outgoing message addresses spilled across his face-patch, he assumed there must be some mistake. He'd been expecting hundreds, even thousands, of entries in the last hundred days. But there were only a few dozen. Whoever was controlling the Nerval-Lermontov rock had been very sparing with their usage.

  Looking down the list, he recognised the address of the Ruskin-Sartorious sphere, with a timetag corresponding to just before the attack by the Accompaniment of Shadows. That was the message that had prompted Delphine to break off negotiations with Dravidian. Yet as pleasing as it was to see that in the log — confirmation that they'd been following the right leads — it was dismaying to see some of the other entries.