Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  Still the Clockmaker loomed over him, the mantra-like rhythm of its humming beginning to fill his brain, squeezing out rational thought. Dreyfus swore he could feel its breath, a cold, metallic exhalation like a steel breeze. But machines didn't breathe, he told himself.

  "I don't know how you ended up in SIAM," Dreyfus went on, "but I'd guess you were in a state of dormancy when you returned from the Shroud. The people who'd sent you there didn't really know what to make of you. They knew they'd got back something strange, but they couldn't begin to comprehend your true origin, your capabilities, what was driving you. So they transferred you to the people in the Sylveste organisation best suited to probe the nature of an artificial intelligence. More than likely, the scientists in SIAM had no inkling of where you'd come from. They were fed a story, led to think that you were the product of another research department in the institute itself. And at first you were very obliging, weren't you? You were like a newborn baby. You made them happy with the clever things you made. But all along you were recovering memories of your true nature. The fury was welling up inside you, looking for a release valve. You'd been birthed in pain and terror. You naturally assumed that pain and terror were what you were meant to give back to the world. So you did. You began your spree."

  After a silence that stretched on for centuries, the Clockmaker spoke again. "Philip Lascaille is dead."

  "But you remember, don't you? You remember how it felt to be him. You remember what you saw in the Shroud, the first time."

  "How would you know?"

  "Because I recognised your face in Delphine's sculpture. You were communicating through her art, finding a channel to the outside world even when you were a prisoner."

  "Did you know Delphine?"

  "I knew her after she was murdered, via her beta-level simulation."

  "Why was she murdered?"

  "Aurora did it. She was trying to destroy you. Delphine and her family got in the way."

  The humming became slower, ruminative. "And the beta-level simulation?"

  "Aurora found a way to get to that as well."

  "Then she has murdered Delphine twice."

  "Yes," Dreyfus said, surprised that the truth of that had never really occurred to him before.

  "Then another crime has been committed. Is that why you came here, to solve a crime?"

  Dreyfus thought about everything that happened to him since he first learned of the destruction of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble. With each step the case had opened wider, until he was embroiled in a full-blown emergency, a crisis upon which the future existence of the Glitter Band rested. It was difficult now to remember how parochial he'd expected the outcome of the inquiry to be. A simple case of revenge or spite. How laughably wrong he'd been.

  But the Clockmaker was right. The path that had brought him here had begun with a simple murder investigation, albeit one that encompassed nine hundred and sixty victims.

  "In a manner of speaking."

  "Aurora would have needed an accomplice. Who did her bidding?"

  "A man called Gaffney. A prefect, like me. He's the one attacking this facility, trying to get to you."

  "A bad man?"

  "A man who believes bad things."

  "I should very much like to meet this Gaffney." The Clockmaker's tone was momentarily pensive, as if it was daydreaming. "What will happen to you now, Prefect?"

  Dreyfus almost laughed. "I don't think that's really in my hands, is it?"

  "You're right, it isn't. I could kill you now, or do something to you that you would find infinitely worse than death. But I could also let you leave."

  Dreyfus thought of the way cats toyed with birds before finishing them off. "Why would you do that?"

  "Murders have been committed, Prefect. Isn't it your duty to investigate those murders, to bring those responsible to justice?"

  "That's part of it."

  "How far would you go to see justice served?"

  "As far as it takes."

  "Do you believe that, in your heart of hearts? Be careful how you answer me. Your skull is a stained-glass window, an open book revealing the processes of your mind. I can tell a lie from the truth."

  "I believe it," Dreyfus said. "I'll do whatever it takes."

  He saw the great fist rise high and then descend, dropping towards his skull like a chrome-plated pile driver.

  * * *

  Gaffney halted at the sight of the figure ahead of him. Her thin form stood silhouetted against the glowing wall to her rear. She had one hand on her hip, her head at an angle. There was something almost coquettish about that stance, as if she'd been waiting for him, like a lover keeping an assignation.

  "As you can see," he said, his voice booming out beyond the suit, amplified to monstrous proportions, "I'm unarmed."

  "As you can see," the woman said, "so am I. You can put down that weapon now, Prefect Gaffney. You have nothing to fear from me."

  "It's more a case of what you have to fear from me. Saavedra, isn't it?"

  "Got it in one. Should I be flattered that you know of me?"

  "You can if you want to be." Gaffney stepped closer. He was limping. He had been injured in the crash and the power-assist of his suit was beginning to malfunction. "I only want one thing from you. You've got the Clockmaker down here."

  "It's already escaped," Saavedra said. "You're too late. Go home."

  "What if I said I didn't believe you?"

  "Then I'd have to prove it to you, wouldn't I?"

  "How would you do that?"

  Still holding that coquettish pose, still mostly in shadow, the woman said, "I could show you the reactor, the tokamak we were using to contain it. You know about magnetic fields and the Clockmaker, don't you?"

  "Of course."

  "We had it pinned down until you showed up. If you hadn't attacked us, you could have infiltrated our facility and then worked out a way to destroy it."

  "Like you wish I'd done that. Where's Dreyfus?"

  "You killed Dreyfus in your attack."

  "So the day hasn't been a complete waste of time."

  "Did you hate him that much, Prefect Gaffney? Did you hate him enough to want him dead?" Only now did she adjust the tilt of her head, moving it with the stiffness of a puppet that needed oiling. Something about the movement triggered a profound unease on Gaffney's part, but he suppressed his qualms. "Did you hate him the way you hated Delphine?"

  "Delphine was a detail that got in the way. She had to go." He waved the muzzle of his rifle. "Do you want to become a detail as well?"

  "Not really."

  "Then show me the tokamak. I want concrete evidence that the thing's escaped. Then you're going to help me locate it, before it gets off-planet."

  "Are you going to kill it as well?"

  "That's the idea."

  "You're a very determined man," she said, with a note of admiration he hadn't been expecting.

  "I get things done."

  "You know, so do I. Maybe the two of us have more in common than we might have imagined." Her hand moved on her hip. Her arms were stick-thin, less like limbs than jointed sword sheaths. She pivoted on her heels, turning with the eerie smoothness of a battleship turret. Gaffney blinked, thinking he'd seen something on her back, tracing the course of her spine.

  "I'd like to see where you had it hidden."

  "I'll show you that and more. I can prove to you that it escaped." She beckoned him forward. "Would you like that?"

  "Very much so," he said.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 33

  * * *

  Dreyfus came around for the third time that day. He was still lying where the Clockmaker had left him, his head still ringing with that last fateful moment when the machine's fist had come crashing down. He'd been expecting to die then, more certain of it than anything in the universe. Yet here he was, looking up at Sparver.

  "I ... " he began.

  "Easy, Boss. Save the questions for later. We've got to get you suited
and out of here. Whole place is starting to cave in." Sparver had his helmet cradled in his arm but was otherwise suited, a Breitenbach rifle slung over his shoulder.

  "My leg's hurt," Dreyfus said, his throat still raw. "I'm going to have trouble walking."

  "You made it here. How did you get out of that collapsed room?"

  "I didn't. I was brought out while I was unconscious."

  "By whom? When I left, Saavedra was gone and Veitch was out cold. I tried shifting that table but I couldn't manage it on my own. Veitch was in a bad way. I don't think he was in any shape to help you."

  "It wasn't Veitch." Dreyfus paused, sucking in his pain while Sparver helped him off the couch. "I came around in here, and I was talking to Paula Saavedra. But it wasn't her. It was the Clockmaker, Sparv. I was in the same room as it. It was talking to me, speaking through her body."

  "You sure you weren't hallucinating?"

  "Later I saw it for what it was. It revealed itself to me when I guessed what was going on. I thought it was going to kill me. But it didn't. I woke up and I'm looking at you instead." As the pain ebbed, Dreyfus was struck by an unpleasant possibility. "It had time to do something to me, Sparv. Is there anything on me? Anything missing?"

  Sparver inspected him. "You look the same way you did when I left you, Boss. The only difference is that thing on your leg."

  Dreyfus looked down with apprehension. "What thing?"

  "It's just a splint, Boss. Nothing to be alarmed by."

  There was a thin metal cage wrapped around his lower right leg made up of a series of thin chrome shafts, bracing his leg at several contact points. The metal shafts had a still-molten quality about them, as if they were formed from elongated beads of mercury that might quiver back to liquid form at any instant. The longer Dreyfus studied it, the more clearly it looked like the work of the Clockmaker, rather than any human artificer.

  "I thought it was going to kill me, or do something worse," he said, in a kind of awed shock. "Instead it did this."

  "That doesn't mean we misjudged it," Sparver said, "just that it has nice days."

  "I don't think that's why it did this. It just wants me kept alive so I can serve a purpose."

  Sparver helped him to begin hobbling towards the door. "Which purpose would that be?"

  "The usual one," Dreyfus said. Then another troubling thought crystallised in his head. "Gaffney," he said. "Veitch said — "

  "I took care of Gaffney. He isn't a problem any more."

  "You killed him?"

  "I shot down his ship. He survived the crash and escaped into Ops Nine before I had a chance to finish him off. But he isn't an issue any more."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I passed him on the way down to fetch you," Sparver said, taking the bulk of Dreyfus' weight as they started ascending stairs. "Most of him, anyway."

  With Dreyfus suited, an outcome that was somehow achieved despite the cumbersome bulk of his splint, they made their way to the surface, taking a different route than the one Sparver had used earlier. Although there were some tight squeezes along the way, neither of them was wearing tactical armour and Sparver discarded the rifle after a while on the assumption that it would prove inadequate against the only foe they stood a chance of encountering.

  "It's gone," Dreyfus said, attempting to reassure his deputy. "You won't be seeing it again."

  "I didn't see it the first time."

  "Figure of speech."

  "Anyway, what do you mean I won't be seeing it?"

  "Wherever it's gone, wherever it ends up, I think it'll be keeping its eye on me," Dreyfus said. "That's why it left me alive. It wants me to see that justice is served."

  "Justice for what?"

  "The murder of Philip Lascaille. It was a long time ago, but some of the people involved may still be in the system, maybe even still working for House Sylveste."

  "You're talking about avenging the Clockmaker?"

  "It still has a right to justice. I don't deny that it's a perversion of whatever Philip Lascaille once was. They took the mind of a man who'd been driven insane by the Shrouders and then fed the mind of that man — terrified even more because he knew he was going to die — into a machine for making contact. What they got back was an angel of vengeance, forged in a strange and alien place. I'm not saying the thing has my sympathies. But the earlier crime still stands."

  "And you'd be the man to look into it?"

  "I don't care who wants justice, Sparv. It's a thing unto itself, irrespective of the moral worth of the wronged party. The Clockmaker may have committed atrocities, but it was still wronged. I'll do what I can to put that right."

  "And then what?"

  Dreyfus grimaced as a spike of pain shot up his leg. "Then I'll go after the Clockmaker, of course. Just because it was wronged doesn't mean it gets an exemption."

  "Presupposing, of course, that this minor business with Aurora blows over. Or had that slipped your mind?"

  "I'm not too worried about Aurora any more."

  "Maybe you should be. The last time I checked, we were getting a whipping up there."

  "The Clockmaker interrogated me," Dreyfus said. "It grilled me on her capabilities, her nature. It wanted to know exactly what she was. Then it escaped. Doesn't that tell you something?"

  "It's going after her."

  "It's at least as smart as she is, Sparv. Maybe smarter. And it has a very good reason to take her out of the picture."

  "At which point we'll be left with the Clockmaker to deal with, instead of Aurora. Is that really an improvement?"

  "It wants vengeance, not genocide. I'm not saying any of us are going to sleep easy with that thing out there, but at least we'll be sleeping. That wouldn't have been an option under Aurora."

  Dreyfus and Sparver completed the last stage of their ascent. They passed through the collapsed remains of a subterranean landing area where Saavedra's cutter was still parked and waiting. A ceiling spar from the sliding weather cover that concealed the landing deck had pinned the ship to the ground. Sparver went aboard and tried to communicate with Panoply, but the cutter was dead.

  "Don't worry," Dreyfus said. "They'll come for us."

  By the time they arrived on the surface, the storm had abated. The starless sky was a moving vault of poisonous black, but according to Sparver it had nothing of the howling ferocity of earlier. Unafraid now to stand on high ground, Dreyfus activated his helmet lamp and surveyed the fractured dark landscape, picking out suggestive details that made him flinch until he saw that they were merely conjunctions of ice and rock, light and shade, rather than the furtive presence of the Clockmaker. He sensed that it had left this place, putting as much distance as it could between itself and the magnetic prison of the tokamak.

  "It must still be out there somewhere," Sparver commented.

  "I don't know about that."

  "It can't have left the planet. It's a machine, not a ship."

  "It can take whatever form it wants to," Dreyfus replied. "What's to say it can't change itself into anything it needs to be? I watched it manipulate its form right in front of me. Now that it's free of the cage, I wonder if there's anything it can't do."

  "It's still a thing. It can be tracked, located, recaptured."

  "Maybe."

  "What are you thinking?" Sparver asked.

  "Maybe it will have taken a leaf out of Aurora's book. An alpha-level intelligence is easy to contain if it confines itself to a single machine, a single platform. But it doesn't have to be like that. Aurora worked out how to move herself around, to embody herself wherever it suited her needs. What's to say the Clockmaker won't do likewise?"

  "To meet her on her own terms, you mean?"

  "If I was it, and I thought she wanted to kill me, that's what I'd do."

  "That would also make it more difficult for us to kill it, wouldn't it?"

  "There'd be that as well," Dreyfus admitted.

  They stood in silence, waiting for something to come ou
t of the sky and rescue them. Occasionally a strobing flash pushed through the darkness: evidence of lightning or — perhaps — something taking orbit around Yellowstone, something that had nothing to do with weather.

  After a long while, Dreyfus started speaking again. "I had a simple choice, Sparv. The nukes were available and ready to go. They'd have destroyed SIAM and taken out the Clockmaker. We'd already got Jane out, so we knew what it was capable of. We knew the things it could do to people even if it didn't kill them. And we knew there were still survivors inside that structure, people it hadn't got to yet. Including Valery."

  "You don't have to talk about this now, Boss. It can wait."

  "It's waited eleven years," Dreyfus said. "I think that's long enough, don't you?"

  "I'm just saying ... I pushed you earlier. But I had no idea what I was doing."

  "There was something else, of course. We still needed to know what we'd been dealing with. If we nuked SIAM without gaining any further intelligence on the Clockmaker, we'd never know what to do to stop something like it happening again. That was vital, Sparv. As a prefect, I couldn't ignore my responsibility to the future security of the Glitter Band."

  "So what happened?"

  "From the technical data we'd already recovered, and Jane's testimony, we knew that the Clockmaker was susceptible to intense magnetic fields. Nothing else — no physical barrier or conventional weapon — seemed able to stop or slow it. I realised that if we could pin the Clockmaker down, if we could freeze it, we could get the surviving citizens out alive. That's when I knew we had to power up the Atalanta."

  "The Atalanta," Sparver echoed.

  "It was a ship designed to undercut the Conjoiners in the starship-building business. Thing is, although it worked, it never worked well enough to make it economical. So they mothballed it, left it in orbit around Yellowstone while they worked out what to do with it. It'd been there for decades but was still perfectly intact, exactly the way it had been when it was last powered down."