Recursion (16 page)

Robert Johnston sat down on the next chair along.

“What’s going on? Let me put it this way.” Robert lifted his feet, resting them on the bank of controls before him, and raised a finger.

“Imagine it like this,” he said. “Look at the first finger of your right hand. Got it? Okay, now look at the first two joints of your finger. Imagine that’s the volume of Earth-controlled worlds. It’s about the right shape, too; we seemed to have expanded more sideways than up or down. Now hold out your hand, just like this, see?”

Robert moved his palm downward, in front of his body. His pale pink nails were reflected in the window just before him. Slowly, Herb copied him.

“Look at the first two joints of your index finger: the Earth volume. According to that scale, the planet we are currently floating above would be at the bottom of your right earlobe. You’ve got to get the idea of the scale of things, yeah? Now contrast the size of the tip of your finger with the size of your head and your neck. Run a line down the front of your body, down past your waist, down your legs, right to the tips of your little toes, and then all the way back up to your right shoulder. Think how big all that is compared to those tiny little joints on your right hand. That volume equates to the Enemy Domain.”

Herb looked down at his feet, seeming so far away on the floor. He looked back to his hand in disbelief.

Robert continued softly. “Now, we’re at your right earlobe. Above a planet that lies at the edge of the wave of expansion of the Enemy Domain. Think about your right arm, down to the elbow, along to the hand, think of the palm of your hand, your knuckles, down that first finger of your right hand, all of that space. All of it now occupied by the Enemy Domain’s machines. Think of all those tiny metallic bodies creeping over each other, feeding, and reproducing in their own image. Hungry metal tendrils reaching forward, jumping from world to world. Searching for something. And there, at the end of that first finger, that tiny little finger joint, Earth, all those people, everyone you ever knew, all happily unaware of that smothering, suffocating tide of machinery bearing down upon them. Imagine a single ant scuttling over the sand on a beach and looking up to see the tsunami bearing down upon it.”

A moment’s silence, and then Robert spoke at his softest.

“Don’t think alien or human. Just think destruction. That’s what we’re talking about.”

Herb stared at his fingernail for a moment; stared at the veins that stood up on the back of his hand, at the whorls that ridged the top of his knuckles, the pale blond hairs that marched up the back of his forearm. He suddenly shuddered.

“You’re shaking.” Robert was speaking at his normal volume again. “All this,” he gestured through the window at the few sparse ships floating here at the edge of the vast fleet, “all these ships, that elevator, the Necropolis, the bumblebee robots that buzz around on the planet, the spiders that creep through the tunnels, all of this system in which our consciousnesses find themselves…”

He paused for breath, easing back into the huge green chair. “All of this system is the tip of the tiniest hair that grows from the most insignificant pore on the very edge of your right earlobe. So, don’t think human or alien, Herb. Just think about being afraid. Being very afraid.”

When Herb spoke there was just the faintest tremor in his voice.

“I
am
frightened,” he said. “I’ve never denied it. Come on, who wouldn’t be?” He smiled sardonically. “An agent of the EA has entered my spaceship via a secret passageway, has captured me, fired my consciousness across the galaxy to the edge of an Enemy Domain, and then that same agent tells me that I am going to help fight something so big I can barely imagine it. It could be said that, yes, I’m slightly nervous.”

Robert studied him closely, then shook his head. “No. You’re being flippant. Not nervous enough. Do you know what that tower is used for now? The one we just came up?”

“Of course not.” Herb licked his lips nervously. “But I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“Launching cannon for VNMs. The Enemy Domain is seeding the galaxy with copies of itself.”

Herb gave a shrug. “Figures. That’s how the Enemy Domain got so big, I suppose.”

“Okay. Have you figured out what all these ships are doing here, then?”

“No. Have you? You said they were going to be filled from the planet below. I think it would be the other way around. These ships are bringing humans to populate the planet. They would unload them onto the space elevator and take them down below to live in the Necropolis. Would have done if everything hadn’t gone wrong, anyway.”

Robert smiled.

“Good answer. The best—” as Herb smiled, Johnston waited just a moment before smashing him right down again “—given the knowledge you have. Your mistake is in thinking of the human beings who would occupy those coffins as individuals. They weren’t. They were meant to be clones. Clones that were being grown on that planet below us until the VNMs building the city we call the Necropolis malfunctioned. They’re still there, but their growth has been suspended. I felt their consciousness, millions of them, semi-aware in the darkness, as we jumped from the top of the elevator. That planet is almost sentient, there are so many of them down there.”

For a moment, Herb couldn’t be sure; it almost looked as if there was a tear in the corner of Robert’s eye. As he tried to look closer, Johnston rose from his seat and went to gaze from the window, out into space. He continued speaking, his voice slightly hushed.

“If you look down on that planet with the right eyes, it’s a dark ball embedded with the brightest little lights. All lost and alone and forgotten at the edge of the Enemy Domain…”

His voice trailed away and Herb felt a sickening lurch of vertigo. He imagined the ship’s floor splitting open beneath him, imagined the long drop back through the silent, empty fleet of ships, passing their hollow, forgotten shells as he tumbled faster and faster toward the planet below, rushing toward the up-reaching, deformed spires. And there, buried beneath them all, like so many unwatered seeds, the half-formed, twisted consciousness of things that would never become people. What were they like? he wondered. Half-grown adults? Children?

It was too much. He finally began to shiver.

“It’s too big,” he said. “You’re right. It’s too big. We can’t fight this.”

Robert turned back to him.

“Oh, yes, we can. Come on. We can use this ship’s communication devices to upload ourselves. It’s time to go back.”

Herb wouldn’t have believed it possible to feel bored and terrified at the same time, but somehow he was. Four days had passed since Robert Johnston had first appeared on his ship, and since then they had done nothing. The ship still floated a few hundred meters above the restless silver sea of VNMs, the mechanical remains of his converted planet. Robert Johnston’s mysterious errands caused him to pass constantly between his own ship and Herb’s. Herb had been told in no uncertain terms not to attempt to look down the passageway that linked the two ships, and Herb was sufficiently frightened of Robert not to attempt it.

Apart from the occasional presence of an agent of the Environment Agency, life aboard Herb’s ship carried on as normal. He spent time preparing elaborate meals and eating them; he played games—chess, Starquest, dominions, bridge—against the ship or alone. He worked out the bare minimum in the gym to stop the ship’s nanny nagging him and he watched entertainments. Apart from the extreme tension that seemed to tie him down to the comfortingly familiar objects of his living room, everything was perfectly normal.

Except for that time, somewhere in the middle of the night, when he had woken up at the feeling of something being pulled from his head. Herb had sat up in bed and begun raising the room’s temperature out of sleep mode, only to be told by a calm voice to lie down and go back to sleep. Herb had taken one look at the flexible black object hanging like shiny satin from Robert’s hands and quickly obeyed. Robert frightened him.

Apart from that incident, there was nothing to unsettle him. Nothing, of course, except Robert himself.

Herb spent one afternoon sitting on the white leather sofa gazing at the open hole in the floor where the trapdoor lay. A son et lumière played out around him. He ignored it, increasingly wondering about sneaking down through the trapdoor and into Robert’s ship. What did it actually look like? He had had his ship’s computer retune and recalibrate its senses time after time in an attempt to get a look at it, but with a spectacular lack of success. Whatever Johnston had done to his own ship had rendered it invisible to Herb’s senses. In desperation, Herb had even toyed with the idea of climbing out onto the hull of his own craft in an attempt to get a visual on it, but so far had failed to muster the courage. What if he slipped and fell down onto the writhing planet below? If the drop didn’t kill him, his silver creations certainly would.

So why had Robert hidden his ship from view?

Herb suspected it was probably just because he could. Johnston seemed to take a delight in demonstrating his superiority at every occasion. Still, maybe there was another reason….

The thought of escape had been growing slowly in Herb’s mind. If he could cut the link to Robert’s ship and activate the warp drive…

There were only two problems, as far as he could see.

First, how could he be sure that the link was actually broken? How would he know he wasn’t jumping through space with Robert still attached? Maybe that was why Johnston kept his ship hidden. Anyway, there was a second consideration.

Where would he go? Actually, the second point wasn’t so much of a problem. He knew where he would go: straight home to his father’s estate. Back home to Earth and four square kilometers of smooth, green lawn. His father was rich. In the middle of a tiny country with skyscrapers shoulder to shoulder, all jostling for position among farmland and public recreation grounds, his great-great-grandmother had leveled a patch of land in the middle of the Welsh hills and built nothing on it but a low, tasteful mansion. The rest of the land had been converted to a condition that his father liked to refer to laughingly as “unspoiled”: Gentle slopes and pleasant woodlands studded with lakes, a picture of an idyll that would have seemed entirely out of context with the original surrounding countryside. The whole estate was a grandiose gesture of understatement that inflamed envy and resentment in equal measures: Herb’s father was so rich he could leave valuable land untouched. Of course, the space beneath the land did not go unused.

Herb’s father was a rich and powerful man. But, thought Herb, was he powerful enough? Could he stand up to the EA? A second thought caught Herb’s attention.
Would he want to
? Herb quickly suppressed the idea.

So, he decided firmly, he had a place to escape to. Possibly. But first, could he break the link between the two ships? To achieve that he would have to get a look at Robert Johnston’s ship.

The answer finally occurred to him, and he gave a slow smile. So Robert didn’t think that he was that bright?

Maybe he could prove otherwise.

Herb was listening to Beethoven: the late string quartets, opus 127 to be precise. He had read somewhere that these were considered amongst Beethoven’s greatest pieces, if not some of the greatest pieces ever written, and Herb was damned if he wasn’t going to enjoy them as much as the so-called experts.

He had set the sound picture so that the string quartet appeared to be playing just over the trapdoor where Robert would emerge into the room. Maybe it would surprise him, but probably not.

In his head, Herb was rehearsing his plan to get a picture of Robert’s ship. He just had a few words to say, but they had to seem nonchalant. He could not give away the fact that he was plotting something. The idea was actually quite simple. Johnston controlled what was picked up by the senses on Herb’s ship, but those weren’t the only senses Herb had at his disposal. Had Robert forgotten the billions of VNMs swarming below? Each a descendant of a machine built to Herb’s design, and each one sporting a rudimentary set of senses? The question was, how to do it without Robert noticing? And the solution was simplicity itself. Herb spoke.

“Hey, Ship. I would like a chocolate malt and a hot salt-beef sandwich. And would you do a full scan out to point one light year? Include sensory information from all other public sources. I want to gather as much data as possible for the records. The state of this planet may be germane to any future legal action brought against me.”

As he spoke, Robert Johnston strode out of the secret passageway. The sight always turned Herb’s stomach slightly. Robert walked up the side of the passageway, perpendicular to the floor of Herb’s ship. As he stepped from the passage to the floor, his body swung through ninety degrees. That last step was dramatic. Robert straightened his hat and smiled at Herb.

“Full system scan, eh? That reminds me. Now that there is no need for them, I must disable the software blocks I placed on your ship’s senses to prevent them seeing my ship. They must be really putting a hole in the middle of your world picture.”

Herb smiled sarcastically. Robert pretended not to notice.

“I see you were about to have a snack. Good idea; I think I’ll join you. You made a good choice. Ship, I’ll have the same as Herb. Chocolate malt and a salt-beef sandwich, hold the meat.”

He gave Herb an apologetic smile. “I’m a vegetarian, didn’t I tell you?”

“Are you really?”

Herb didn’t care. All around him the ship was sucking up its impressions of the immediate surroundings in a bubble point two light years in diameter. Buried somewhere in that set of data would be the images sensed by the VNMs just below him.

Some of those images would reveal Robert’s ship.