“I don’t know what’s happened to Gaffney, but we should probably think about getting out of here,”. Dreyfus said.
“Before he lost consciousness, Veitch told me that there’d been a containment breakdown. He was convinced that the Clockmaker would have escaped.”
“Do you think there’d be any point in running from it?”
“I’d rather run than sit here waiting for an audience.”
“Well, you don’t need to worry just yet. Containment failed, but not long enough for the Clockmaker to escape. It’s still inside the tokamak. The back-up generators won’t keep it there for ever, but we’re safe for an hour or so.”
“I’m glad. But you should still be thinking about getting out of here now.”
She cocked her head, puzzled by his response.
“Me, Dreyfus? After all that’s happened?”
“You came here by ship, Paula. Find Sparver, then collect your cutter. If you have fuel to reach orbit, do so. Otherwise get back to Chasm City and contact the authorities. If there’s anything left of Panoply, they can probably put you in touch.”
“And then what?”
“Tell them what I told you concerning the Clockmaker. Make sure someone finds out about it. If Jane Aumonier is still alive, tell Jane.”
“How will that knowledge help matters?”
“Maybe it’ll come in useful when they have to put the Clockmaker back in the bottle.”
“You are not seriously injured, Dreyfus. You don’t have to die down here.”
“Someone has to go down to the tokamak. Someone still has to talk to the thing and persuade it to do what it can to turn back Aurora.”
“You think you can persuade the Clockmaker?”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
“How? You don’t even know how to communicate with it.”
“I’ll find a way. Even if I have to open the tokamak and let it out.”
“It would almost certainly kill you.”
“But it might want to talk first. I’ll have to count on that. If I can make it see what a threat Aurora presents… if it hasn’t already worked that out for itself, of course.” Saavedra unclasped her hands. She touched one index finger to her lips, studiedly conveying thoughtfulness.
“I made a mistake in not trusting you when you arrived, didn’t I? I should have listened to you properly; learned everything I could about Aurora.”
“You can make amends by getting through to Panoply.”
“I’ll do what needs to be done. But first I need to know more about Aurora, not just the Clockmaker.
You said she was one of the original Eighty, didn’t you?”
Dreyfus nodded wearily. It seemed unnecessary to rake over this again, given what he had already told Saavedra.
“My colleague knows about as much as I do.”
“But I’m asking you, not your deputy. What was her full name?”
“Aurora Nerval-Lermontov. She was just a girl when they scanned her. I don’t think she was a monster then. Maybe it was society’s hatred and fear that drove her to become what she is, when they knew what Calvin Sylveste had brought into existence. Or maybe she always had it in her, like a seed waiting to flourish. Maybe she was a sick little girl from the moment she was born. Either way, she has to be stopped, wiped out of existence, before she takes over the entire Glitter Band. She won’t stop there, either.”
“Where is she located?”
“We’ve been over this, Paula. We don’t know. There’s about ten thousand habitats up there, any one of which could be hosting her unawares.”
“Could she distribute herself, like a program executing on a massively parallel architecture? A piece of
herself running on thousands of habitats, so that the loss of any one processing centre would not be catastrophic?”
“Like I said, she won’t do that because the timelag would slow her thought processes down to a crawl.”
“All the same. If she is to coordinate a takeover, she must make use of the network infrastructure to send commands and receive intelligence.”
“Yes, but she’s obviously become expert at concealing herself. We just don’t have the overview to pick out the signal from the noise.”
“Whereas you think the Clockmaker may be able to.”
“That’s the idea.” He was growing increasingly irritated at having to repeat the argument he’d already presented to Saavedra and Veitch.
“Paula, why are we going over this again? We don’t have time. Either you agree or you don’t.”
“I do agree,” she said, so quietly that he almost didn’t catch the reply.
“It’s your only hope of survival. Put one alpha-level mind against another. What could be more logical?”
That was when Dreyfus had the first tingling suspicion that something was very wrong.
“Paula?” he asked.
She turned away from him so that he was looking at her face in profile. Silhouetted against the illuminated wall, her body held the erect pose of a dancer about to begin some demanding routine. Dreyfus saw that there was something attached to the back of her head, neck and spine. It was like a thick metal caterpillar, a segmented thing with many legs. Her sleeveless black vest had been gashed open from neck to coccyx. As she turned even more, he saw that this was also true of her skin. He could see her backbone, grinning white through meat and muscle. The caterpillar had dug its needle-tipped feet through to her spinal nerve column.
Quite without warning, she dropped to the floor.
Dreyfus lay perfectly still, paralysed by the horror of what he had just witnessed. It must have found her, tortured or tricked her just enough to extract the basic details of Dreyfus’ mission. Then it had slashed her open and made her into a meat puppet.
Now it was done with the puppet. On the floor, Saavedra twitched and spasmed like a fish out of water.
“You’re here,” he said, finding the strength to speak.
“You’re with me, aren’t you? In this room. You did escape after all.”
There’d been a humming sound all along, but it was only now that his ringing ears became fully attuned to it. Moving his neck by the tiniest of degrees, he looked around to face the other side of the bed, opposite where Saavedra had been standing. That side of the room was dark, but he was still aware of the form waiting there. It was larger than a man, towering towards the ceiling, stooping over to fit into the confined space. The red light gleamed off a dripping chrome ribcage, off the sickle-shaped fingers of a huge metallic hand, off the hammerhead width of a huge eyeless skull. The humming intensified. To Dreyfus, it became the most malevolent sound in the universe.
“What do you want with me?” he asked, expecting no answer.
But the Clockmaker spoke. Its voice was surprisingly soft, surprisingly avuncular.
“It was very brave of you to come here, to find me. Did you expect that it would end like this?”
“I didn’t know what to expect. I had no other choice.”
“You expected to persuade me to help you?”
Dreyfus licked his lips. They felt as dry as clay. His heart was trying to tunnel its way out of his chest.
“I only wanted to show you the way things are.”
“With Aurora?”
“Yes. She won’t stop. You’re the only thing that can touch her. Therefore she has to destroy you. And she will, sooner or later. Unless you destroy her first.”
“Aurora will murder all of you.”
“I know.”
“What makes you think I’m any better?”
“Because you didn’t kill everyone in SIAM.”
The Clockmaker sounded amused.
“And that gives you hope? That makes you think I’m the lesser of two evils?”
“I don’t think you’re evil. Not really. I think you’re furious and driven, like an avenging angel. You’ve been hurt and you want to give back some of that hurt. I think that makes you bad. But I don’t think it makes you evil
.”
The Clockmaker contorted itself even more, bending at the middle to lower its upper chest and head to only a metre above Dreyfus. Still he could see only highlights, where the red light caught a sleek metal edge. The head, which had appeared hammer-like only a moment ago, now had the form of an anvil.
“You presume to know what I am?”
“I know who you are,” Dreyfus said, each word feeling as if it might be his last.
“I know what they did to you, Philip.”
The Clockmaker did not answer. But something sliced through the air, one of its arms moving so quickly that the motion became a scything blur of darkness and shadow. The whipping arm touched Dreyfus’ forehead. His skin felt suddenly cold. Something trickled into his eye, warm and stinging.
“I know what they did to you,” he repeated.
“They took you and burnt out your mind, trying to extract an alpha-level simulation. Then they dumped your body in a fish pond and made it look like suicide. They only wanted those alpha-level patterns for one thing, Philip. Not to give you immortality, but to help them program a machine that could travel into the Shroud without being ripped apart. You’d survived, where others hadn’t. They made a robot and loaded your alpha-level simulation into it, in the hope that something in those brain patterns would make a difference.”
The Clockmaker was listening. It hadn’t killed him yet. Perhaps it was planning something worse than death, some ingenious new cruelty that would make even Jane Aumonier’s eleven years of sleeplessness seem like a kindness.
“They must have sent you into a Shroud,” Dreyfus continued.
“One within a few light-years of Yellowstone, so that you had time to go there and back before you showed up in SIAM. That’s what happened, isn’t it? You were sent into the Shroud as a machine running Philip Lascaille’s alpha-level simulation, and you came back… changed, just the way Philip had all those years before. Something inside the Shroud had remade you. You were still a machine, but now you were a machine with alien components. And you were angry. You were worse than angry. You were a machine that knew its soul had been stolen from an innocent man, a man who’d already been driven half-mad by the things he’d seen inside the Shroud.”
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.
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