The Prefect (78 page)

‘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's 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.

‘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.

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.