Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "Don't be so sure of yourself," Aumonier replied. "You are still in a position of weakness, and I have no proof that you haven't murdered all your hostages. Why shouldn't I assume they're all dead, and just destroy the habitats you now control?"

  "Be my guest, Supreme Prefect. Go ahead. Fire on those habitats."

  "Give me proof that the citizens are still alive."

  "What would be the point? You would rightly distrust anything I showed you. Conversely, even if I showed you a smoking ruin, the corpses of a million dead, you would suspect an ulterior motive, that I was encouraging you to attack for nefarious reasons of my own. You would still not fire."

  "You're wrong," Dreyfus said. "You can convince us that the people are alive in one very easy way. Let us speak to Thalia Ng. We'll trust her testimony, even if we don't trust yours."

  Something crossed her face — a moue of irritation, quickly suppressed.

  "You can't," Aumonier said, "because you've either killed her, or she's out of your control."

  One of the network analysts pushed a compad in Dreyfus' direction. He glanced at the summary. They had narrowed down Aurora's location to a locus of thirteen hundred possible habitats.

  "My concern is for the absolute welfare of the citizens," the child-woman said. "Under my care, no harm will come to any of them. Their future security will be guaranteed, for centuries to come. The transition to this new state of affairs can be as bloodless you wish. By the same token, all casualties incurred during the transition will be upon your conscience, not mine."

  "Why do you care about people at all?" Dreyfus enquired. "You're a machine. An alpha-level intelligence."

  Her fingers tightened on the edges of her armrests. "I used to be alive. Do you think I've forgotten what it feels like?"

  "But you've been a disembodied intelligence for a lot longer than you were a little girl. Call me judgemental, but my instincts tell me your sympathies are far more likely to lie with machines than with flesh-and-blood mortals."

  "Would you stop caring for the citizens if they were slower and weaker, stupider and frailer than yourself?"

  "We'd all still be people," Dreyfus countered. "Tell me something else, Aurora, now that you've confirmed your origin. Are there more of you? Were you the only one of the Eighty who survived?"

  "I have allies," she said cryptically. "You would be as unwise to underestimate their power as you would mine."

  "But for all that power, there's still something that scares you, isn't there?"

  "Nothing frightens me, Prefect Dreyfus." She said his name with particular emphasis, making it clear that she knew of him.

  "I don't believe you. We know about the Clockmaker, Aurora. We know how it keeps you from sleeping at night. It's a machine intelligence stronger and quicker than you, even with your allies to back you up. If it got out, it would rip you to shreds, wouldn't it?"

  "You overestimate its significance to me."

  "It can't be that insignificant. If you hadn't destroyed Ruskin-Sartorious, none of us would have been any the wiser that you were planning this takeover. You'd have achieved your goal in one fell swoop, taking the entire ten thousand at a stroke. But you were prepared to risk everything to remove the Clockmaker. That doesn't sound insignificant to me."

  The analyst drew his attention to the compad again. The locus of habitats had now shrunk to eight hundred candidates.

  "If you had control of the Clockmaker, you would have turned it against me already." She leaned forward slightly, her voice hardening. "In truth, you neither control nor understand it. Even if it was in your possession, you would fear to use it."

  "That would depend on how much you provoked us," Aumonier said.

  "There has been no provocation. I have merely begun the process of relieving you of the burden of care of one hundred million citizens. I care about them more than you do."

  "You murdered nearly a thousand people in Ruskin-Sartorious," Dreyfus answered. "You killed the prefects sent in to regain control of House Aubusson. That doesn't sound like a very caring attitude to me."

  "Their deaths were necessary, to safeguard the rest."

  "And if it takes a million, or ten million? Would they be necessary deaths as well?"

  "All that matters is that no one else need suffer. We have already discussed the inevitability of my success. If you resist me, people will die. People will die anyway, because people panic and do irrational things and I cannot be held accountable for that. But there is a way to bring this to an immediate conclusion, with the absolute minimum of fatalities. You have my takeover code: it's the instruction set your agent so helpfully installed in the first four habitats. Make it universal. Broadcast it to the rest of the ten thousand. I will have them all eventually; this way it will be with the least pain and bloodshed."

  "You're out of your mind," Aumonier said.

  "Then I shall give you an incentive. I am convinced that many millions of lives will be saved by speedy transition to my rule. So convinced, in fact, that I am prepared to sacrifice a certain number of citizens to underline my point. You have six hours, Supreme Prefect. Then I shall begin humane euthanisation of one in ten of the citizens already under my care." The child-woman eased back into her throne. "You may stop the deaths at any time by broadcasting the code to the ten thousand. If you choose not to, the deaths will continue. But my weevils will still give me the ten thousand, whatever you do."

  "One hundred and thirty habitats," the analyst whispered in Dreyfus' ear. "We're zeroing in."

  "Before I sign off," Aurora said, "let me assist you in one matter. Doubtless you are trying to localise the origin of this transmission. If you are employing your usual search methods, you will have narrowed the field down to between one hundred and one hundred and fifty habitats by the time I utter these words. Were I to stay on the line, you would locate my point of origin inside two minutes. I'll spare you the trouble, shall I? You will localise me to Panoply. I'm sure it's one of your candidates."

  Dreyfus looked at the analyst. The analyst nodded briefly, his face losing colour.

  "I'm not really in Panoply. It's a mirror bounce; very difficult to crack in the time I'm giving you." Aurora smiled slightly. "Just in case you were thinking of turning those missiles on yourselves."

  * * *

  It had never exactly been day in House Aubusson — the dust-smeared window panels hadn't let in enough light for that — but now even that half-daylight was sliding back into twilight, and another machine-stalked night would soon be upon them. Thalia supposed they had done well to last this long, but she could extract no comfort from the realisation. They had pushed their luck, that was all. They would not see another dawn unless they left Aubusson, and there was only one way that was going to happen.

  She refrained from more detailed elaboration until Jules Caillebot had returned with the barricade squad. Paula Thory was almost incandescent with rage and incomprehension, and her mood was beginning to rub off on some of the others. But Thalia held her ground, standing with her arms folded in front of her. Nothing would be gained by showing even the slightest trace of doubt now. She had to appear in absolute command, utterly certain of success.

  "We're leaving," she said as soon as Parnasse and Redon managed to quieten the party. "Cyrus and I have already made the preparations. We either do this or wait for the servitors to arrive. No one's going to rescue us in the meantime."

  "We can't leave," Thory said. "We're in a building, Prefect. Buildings don't move."

  Without answering her, Thalia walked to the architectural model. It was now resting on the flat, damaged surface of the transparent casing that had once covered it. Between them, Meriel Redon and Thalia had removed most of the structures surrounding the stalk, corresponding to the actual demolition work that had taken place overnight.

  Thalia reached into her pocket and removed the white ball that represented the sphere of the polling core, dusted it against her thigh and placed it gently atop the stalk. "For the bene
fit of anyone who hasn't been paying attention, this is us. Machines are trying to get at us through the stalk, and more than likely they're climbing up the outside as well. So we have to leave. Here's how it's going to happen."

  She touched a finger against the side of the ball and toppled it from the stalk. It dropped to the side and rolled away across the denuded grounds of the Museum of Cybernetics until it ran off the edge of the model and fell to the floor.

  "Oh. My. God," Thory said. "You're insane. This isn't going to happen."

  "That ... doesn't look survivable," said Jules Caillebot.

  "It's not as bad as it looks," Thalia said. "For a start, we're not going to just drop half a kilometre. We're going to topple and roll. The sphere will travel down the side of the stalk, but it won't ever hit the ground. The stalk widens near the base and then flares out until it's almost horizontal. We'll be moving fast, but there's nothing to stop us rolling around the bend and continuing along a horizontal trajectory. It's going to be bumpy, sure, but with the momentum we'll have gained during the drop we should roll a long way, particularly as there isn't much left out there to slow us down. We can thank the robots for that. If they'd left the surrounding stalks in place, we wouldn't have a hope."

  "Girl's right," Parnasse said, standing next to Thalia with his arms folded and a look on his face that dared anyone to contradict him. "Structurally, the sphere'll hold. We can expect to roll two, three kilometres before we run out of momentum."

  "But surely we won't be able to just roll off the stalk like that," said the young man in the electric-blue suit. "What do you want us to do? Run back and forth until we topple over?"

  "We've taken care of the rolling part," Thalia said. "Cyrus and I have weakened the connections between the stalk and the sphere. It'll hold for another hundred years as it is, but I'm going to give it a little nudge in the right direction with my whiphound. I'll set it to grenade mode, on maximum yield. It'll give us a pretty big bang. It should sever the remaining connections and push us in the right direction. We'll topple."

  "We'll be smashed around like eggs in a box," Caillebot said.

  "Not if we secure ourselves first." Thalia indicated the metal railings encircling the polling core. "You're going to strap yourselves to these guards, as tight as you can. Meriel's going to make sure everyone has enough clothing to do a good job. You'll need to be secure during the roll. I don't want anyone breaking loose when we end up upside down."

  "Maybe I'm missing something," Caillebot said. "You talk of us rolling two or three kilometres."

  "Correct," Parnasse said.

  "That isn't going to help us much, is it? By the time we've unlashed ourselves, the robots will have caught up with us again."

  Parnasse glanced at Thalia. "I think you'd better tell them the rest, girl."

  "The robots won't be catching up with us," she said.

  Caillebot frowned. "Why not?"

  "Because we're not stopping. We said we could roll two or three kilometres. That should be enough to take us across the nearest window band."

  "Oh no," Thory said, shaking her head. "Don't even think — "

  Thalia grimaced. She walked over to the woman and faced her down. "Here's the deal, Citizen. I don't have a fully functional whiphound any more. If I did, I'd run you through some of the more interesting things I can do with it. But I do have a pair of hands. If you make one more remark, if you open your mouth to speak, even if you so much as give me a funny look, I'm going to wrap those hands around that fat neck of yours and keep squeezing until your eyeballs pop into your lap."

  "I think you'd better listen to the girl," Parnasse said.

  Thalia stepped back and resumed her earlier position. "Thank you, Cyrus. Yes, we're going to roll across the window band. The band's pretty tough, I admit — it's already holding back air at atmospheric pressure, and it's designed to tolerate occasional stresses above and beyond its normal loading. It could withstand collision by a small ship, a volantor or a train coming off one the bridges. But it isn't designed to cope with something as substantial as the sphere. Parnasse and I both agree that the band will collapse under our weight, allowing us to drop into open space."

  "Where we'll suffocate and die," Caillebot said. "Followed quickly by everyone else still inside House Aubusson as the air rushes out through the hundred-metre-wide hole we'll have just dropped through."

  "There's no one else to worry about," Thalia said. "We've kept it from you until now, but all the evidence at our disposal says that the machines have embarked on the systematic murder of all the other citizens. They've been rounded up, euthanised and shipped off to the manufactory to be stripped down and scavenged for useful elements."

  "You can't be certain that there are no other survivors," said the woman in the red dress, her face pale.

  Thalia nodded. "No, we can't. Some other groups may have held out for a while. But we're the only party able to protect ourselves by virtue of being near the polling core. No one else will have had that security. There'll have been nothing to stop the machines storming everyone else en masse."

  "But what about us?" asked Cuthbertson, his mechanical owl still perched on his shoulder. "We'll still need air, even if everyone else is already dead!"

  "We've got it," Thalia said. "There's enough air inside here to keep us alive until we're rescued. It won't be going anywhere because the sphere's already airtight. Provided the portholes hold, we'll be fine. Internal doors will stop the air leaking out of the bottom of the sphere, where it used to meet the stalk. If there's a slow leak, we can live with it. Rescue should be on us within a few minutes of breakout, if my guess is right."

  "You're confident of that?" Caillebot asked.

  "I'm even more confident that we won't have a chance against those machines when they break through." Thalia planted a hand on her hip. "That good enough for you, or do you want it in writing?"

  Meriel Redon coughed. "I know it sounds like madness, at first. That's what I thought initially when they told me about this plan. But now that I've had time to think things through, I see that this is the only way we're going to survive. It's roll or die, people."

  "How soon?" Cuthbertson asked.

  "Very," Thalia said.

  "We need to think about it. We need time to talk it over, see if we can't come up with another plan."

  "You've got five seconds," Thalia said, looking at him belligerently. "Thought of anything? No, didn't think so. Sorry, but this is the plan, and there's no opt-out clause. I want you all to start securing yourselves. Anything you can't do, I'll help you with. But we haven't got time for a debate on the matter."

  "It's going to work," Redon said, raising her arms to silence the party. "But we have to do it fast, or those machines are going to be through to us before we know it. Thalia's given us a way out when we had nothing. Don't think for one second that I'm thrilled about what we're going to attempt, but I see that we have no choice."

  "What about the polling core?" Caillebot asked. "Have you forgotten about sabotaging it?"

  Thalia produced the whiphound, gripping it in a glove-wrapped hand. "I'm going to take it down now. Then I'll head downstairs to see if I can hear any activity behind the barricade. If I don't, and there's no sign of the machines trying to break in elsewhere, then I may reconsider our escape plan. But if I decide to go ahead, I won't have time to come back up and tell you until we're almost ready to roll. You'd better assume that's what's going to happen."

  She stepped through the gap in the railinged enclosure, extending and stiffening the whiphound's filament. Without ceremony, she swung it into the polling core's pillar at chest height, straining to push it deeper until the resistance was too much. The core flickered in protest at the damage she was inflicting, fingers of sharp-edged black radiating away from the wound. She withdrew the filament and came in again, slicing at a different angle. The whiphound buzzed fiercely, the handle throbbing in her hand. Thalia sweated. If she failed to disable the core and somehow
incapacitated the whiphound's grenade mode, it would all have been for nothing.

  She removed the whiphound. Now most of the pillar was consumed by geometric black shapes. At some level it was still functioning — her glasses confirmed that there was still some low-level abstraction traffic — but she had certainly impaired it, perhaps to a degree where it would not be able to send coherent packets to the servitors. That would have to suffice. The marrow of quickmatter at the heart of the core would prove resilient against the whiphound, healing as the filament passed through it, and she could not risk overtaxing the weapon.

  Thalia let the filament go limp and spool back into the handle. She had done all that she could.

  "Let's see if we did any damage," she said to Parnasse.

  She left the polling core level, glancing back to make sure the citizens were all engaged in securing themselves to the railings. She was pleased to see that they were, despite the ramshackle nature of some of their bindings. There was some grumbling going on, some indignation, but Meriel Redon was doing her best to make them understand that there was no other way.

  Maybe it wouldn't be necessary, she thought. Maybe taking down the polling core would be the end of it.

  But when Thalia and Parnasse reached the top of the barricade, she knew that the machines were still alive. If anything they sounded louder and closer than ever. Thalia had the palpable impression that they were about to break through the obstruction at any second. The machines sounded enraged, their dim mechanical fury only doubled by what she had just attempted.

  "Roll it is," Parnasse said.

  "Looks like it."

  They started jogging away from the barricade, towards the next set of stairs.

  "Any idea why those things are still moving if we just took down the core?"

  "Your guess is as good as mine, Cyrus. Could be they were uploaded with enough autonomy to keep functioning even without direct supervision. Could be I didn't damage the core enough. Could be they made another one, somewhere else. It isn't that difficult if you know the protocols."