The Revelation Space Collection (587 page)

Gaffney was missing.

‘Even for a cockroach, you take a lot of killing,’ Sparver said.

Dreyfus snapped to consciousness again. He had no recollection of sliding back under, although he did remember that he had been about to make another attempt to free himself of the table. Perhaps the pain, or simply the exertion, had been enough to loosen his hold on the waking world. Either way, once more he had no clear idea of how much time had elapsed; whether it was seconds or minutes or hours.

‘Stay still,’ a woman’s voice told him. ‘You’re safe now.’

He realised that he wasn’t pinned under the table any more, and that the overall blanket of pain had dampened to a vague numbness. His ears were still ringing, his eyes still watering, but he did not feel any worse off than when he had been speaking with Veitch.

‘Paula?’ he asked, recognising the voice as Saavedra’s, and that she was standing to one side of the bed or couch upon which he was resting. ‘What happened? Where am I?’

‘I rescued you from the collapsed room. You’re in a different part of the facility, deep enough that it escaped the damage.’

Saavedra was almost lost in the shadows, with only dull red highlights tracing her form. She stood demurely, her hands linked before her, against the ruddy glow from a wall panel.

‘Did you check Veitch?’

She nodded stiffly. ‘He was already dead when I got back.’

Dreyfus moved his head enough to survey his body. It was difficult, since there was hardly any light in the room. The lower part of his right leg was covered with dried blood, but there was no sign of any bones sticking through the fabric. The pain had eased now: his uniform would have begun secreting topical antiseptic and painkillers as soon as it detected his injury, and by now they’d had time to take effect. His right arm was still sore - the uniform was allowing him to feel just enough pain to remind him not to hurt himself further - but again the injury could have been much worse.

‘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’s 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’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.’