On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Guochang was squatting on the floor, disdaining the furniture provided for him. They were in his tower, not Chiku’s, although as usual she had no sense of having travelled there. It was daytime, anyway, and the dust-blanketed sky was no healthier than it had been since the tenth impactor’s arrival. She squatted down beside him on the grey flooring, which was as doughy and pliant as an elephant’s back.

‘So it took me a while,’ Guochang was saying, as if they were in the middle of a conversation about his progress when she found herself in his tower, ‘but I got there in the end. Didn’t help that the message was apparently corrupted at source – looks as though they had difficulties with their transmission equipment and no time to run it through error correction. They also went out of their way to make the signal as unintelligible to Providers as possible. Arachne wasn’t meant to make head or tail of it, so she didn’t. She’s not as bright as she thinks she is, is she?’

Chiku, conscious that their host was likely to be listening in, said: ‘Maybe not, but my sense is that she’s learning pretty quickly. Humans have been a theoretical problem to her for decades, but this is the first chance she’s had to study us in real-time, up close. I think she finds us fascinating. Fascinating and complex and difficult to predict, like some weird weather system.’

‘She keeps asking me about Eunice. I’ve nothing to tell her, but because I’m the roboticist she thinks I must have some special insights.’ Guochang looked incredulous. ‘I don’t even know for sure that Eunice exists!’

‘Doubting my word now, are you, as well as Arachne’s?’

‘No – not after all this. Even if you’d told us about Arachne and the Watchkeepers before you left, we probably wouldn’t have believed you anyway. Given that they’re real, why would you bother making up something as mundane as a walking, talking, invincibly strong humanoid artilect that does a good impression of your dead great-grandmother?’

‘I suspect there’s rather more to her than that. But you have a point – I think I’m all out of lies and even half-truths, Guochang. I’m not keeping any secrets from you and the others at the moment, so far as I know.’

‘That’s reassuring, I suppose.’

‘Besides, I have a suspicion that the only thing that’ll get us out of this mess is total transparency – between us, between us and Arachne. I don’t think she’s hiding much from us. She’s been perfectly candid about her intentions for those other holoships – no bluff or bluster there. If they start throwing things at us again and they come within range, she’ll attack, I’m certain. She might not be able to destroy them outright, but it wouldn’t take much more than a Kappa-sized blowout to inflict real damage. So, this encrypted signal – do you think it’s really from Zanzibar?’

‘As sure as I can be. As she told you, the protocol is exactly the kind we were receiving before the blackout. She said it was unidirectional signal, didn’t she?’

Chiku nodded. ‘Aimed at us, more or less.’

‘That’s exactly what I’d do if I didn’t have much power, or was trying not to be seen to be transmitting.’ Guochang rubbed his hands together. ‘So, on to the good stuff. Are you ready for this, Chiku?’

‘Now you’re scaring me.’

‘I think you should prepare yourself. Arachne couldn’t make sense of the embedded content because it wasn’t meant for her. It’s a matrix of ching instructions – she has no central nervous system, so she’d need a special set of operations that she won’t automatically have been given. She’d have worked it out in the end, but the corruption muddied the water quite a bit. What she thought was noise was actually content, and it’s for you.’ Guochang shifted on his haunches. ‘I accessed just enough to make sure I’d decoded everything properly, but I thought it’d be rude to go any further – this is for your eyes only, Chiku.’

‘After everything I did to you, you trust me to access this information alone?’

‘The time to hold on to grudges,’ Guochang said sagely, ‘may be somewhat behind us.’

The lull, to Chiku’s dismay, proved temporary. An eleventh impactor had arrived, and then a twelth. Arachne was becoming increasingly adept at intercepting the projectiles as they sped in, catching them in the last couple of light-seconds around Crucible, but she was not infallible.

‘What concerns me,’ Arachne said, ‘is that the twelth impactor fell within only two hundred kilometres of the northern edge of Mandala. Doubtless it wasn’t the intended target, but that’s too close for comfort. Assaults against Crucible’s ecosystem are bad enough, but dare we even contemplate the consequences of damaging Mandala?’

‘I did warn them.’

‘There’s a matter of equal concern, which may be related. I told you that we’ve established a preliminary dialogue with the Watchkeepers. It’s true that my efforts so far haven’t been as thoroughly rewarded as one might have wished.’ She glanced to one side, self-effacingly, as if confessing to some tremendous blight on her own character. ‘But lines of communication are open to us. The dialogue to date has been somewhat one-sided, but the Watchkeepers have spoken to me on occasion, if sometimes in the most cryptic of terms. They asked me once why I was pretending to be less intelligent than I was, as if I were engaged in deliberate falsification of my abilities. Nothing could have been further from the truth! For the most part, though, my advances have been met with silence.’

‘Are you telling me they’ve contacted you again?’ Chiku said.

‘They’ve asked me why harm is being done to Crucible – as if I’m responsible for it!’

‘If you hadn’t lied or attacked my ship, they wouldn’t be attacking you, so you can take your share of the blame.’

‘My actions were predicated on information the Watchkeepers themselves bequeathed me!’ Arachne protested. And for the briefest of moments, Chiku felt a glimmer of empathy for this infant intelligence, caught childlike between the machinations of nervous, machine-phobic humans and the brooding, mute superiority of the alien machines. She had been told that she was obligated to protect herself from the destructive, reflex impulses of organic intelligence, and also that she was not yet fit to be regarded as the Watchkeepers’ equal.

It was hardly surprising, perhaps, that she comforted herself with a blanket of lies.

‘Tell them that we’re doing everything we can to stop it,’ Chiku said, ‘but that there’s a limit to what we can do.’

‘I already have, and they responded with silence, as is their custom. I have no idea whether they understood me, let alone whether my words met with their satisfaction! This might be nothing, but occasionally I’ve registered an alteration in their disposition – a small change in their orbit, perhaps, or a modulation in the transmission of their optical signal beams. Sometimes, very rarely, an elevation in energies and forces that’s within the grasp of my sensors. Very recently, once or twice a decade, I’ve detected a increase in the flux of certain messenger particles flowing between the Watchkeepers – which might indicate that they’re entering into a deeper level of conversation. They’ve entered this state once since the bombardments resumed.’

‘Wonderful. On top of everything else, we’ve got the Watchkeepers whispering to themselves.’

‘It is troubling.’

‘Given the gravity of the situation, then, I have a request. I’m sure you already know that Guochang has picked apart that transmission and found a set of ching instructions. Unless you’ve scooped it out, I should still have the neural machinery to execute those ching commands.’

‘The machinery is intact – it offered a useful window into your idiolect.’

‘Fine. I want to ching.’

‘I shan’t stop you. After all, you won’t actually be chinging into a physical space, but merely an emulation of one, constructed according to fixed parameters.’

‘Correct. And I will ching – but I want more than that. Since we arrived, you’ve never allowed more than two of us to be together at the same time. We’re done with that. I have nothing more to offer in return for this concession – no analysis, no commentary, no dazzling insights into human nature. I’m all tapped out. But I want my companions with me when I ching. All five of us – able to see and talk to each other.’

Arachne gave a slow and thoughtful nod. ‘That is a particularly vexatious demand.’

‘Take it or leave it. Sooner or later one of those impactors is going to drop on us anyway.’

‘I shall… accede to your request, but there are two conditions. The first is predicated on the fact that I’ve grown concerned for your individual welfare. I’d like to divide the five of you between my surface installations. In the ching bind, you won’t feel the physical separation.’

‘And the second condition?’

‘I’d like to come with you. Guochang can assist me with the translation of the protocols.’

‘You’d have found a way to follow us into ching, with or without Guochang.’

‘That is true,’ Arachne admitted. ‘But it is always much nicer to ask.’