The Star Fraction

19

The Sieve Plates

They spent the night in the tunnel, with the respectful robots. From shortwave communication with others of their kind, the robots had learned of the nuclear destruction of Jay-Dub’s land-crawler. They discussed it solemnly as the humans struggled to sleep. The last thing Dee saw, before she dozed off in a relatively dry niche with her arms around Ax, was the glow in the eyes of the robots as they adopted as an article of their faith the proposition that Jay-Dub was not dead.

In the first light of morning the humans rose and kitted themselves out in the robot disguises. Their main purpose was to fool observers in the sky; on the ground, up close, they’d deceive nobody.

‘How do you know we’ve got to do all this?’ Ax grumbled. He was peeved at having to wear an even more ludicrous robot-shell than the others, because of his small size. He looked like a litter-bin with legs.

‘Jay-Dub told me what to do,’ Dee said, her voice deep and strange through the speaker-grille of her headpiece.

‘When?’

She gave a clanking shrug. ‘When we were in his VR together,’ she said. ‘And just before I left the truck, I jacked in again. He told me exactly what to do, if he didn’t make it.’

‘And you’re not going to tell us?’ demanded Tamara, trying to find a suitable place on the robot body to stow her pistol. (‘Worse than pockets in a skirt,’ she’d muttered.)

‘No,’ said Dee firmly. ‘If I don’t make it, you can’t do anything. And if any of you don’t, it’s better you don’t know.’

‘Nothing like dying happy,’ said Wilde.

The robot who’d done most of the talking bade them farewell, assured them they’d always be welcome in the camps of the Metal People, and gave them some advice as to how to behave if confronted. Its bass voice trailed off as it looked at Dee.

‘You are a machine too,’ it said. ‘You will know.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dee, her voice sounding even stranger as she tried not to laugh. ‘But my human friend here is more familiar with the wild machines.’

‘Avoid them,’ the robot told her. ‘They are not like us.’

The humans walked along the tunnel towards the arch of distant light. When they reached it and turned for a backward glance, their own vision had adapted, and the paired pinhole glints of the robots’ eyes had vanished in the dark.

Tamara sneezed. It made a mess inside her headpiece, and she surreptitiously lifted it off to wipe away the snot and spittle.

‘Great,’ said Ax, from behind her. ‘That’ll look real convincing, a robot pulling its own head off.’

‘Not to mention sneezing,’ said Dee. ‘What’s the matter, anyway? That’s your…seventeenth sneeze in thirty-five minutes.’

‘Fallout.’ Tamara sniffed aggressively. ‘It fucking gets up my nose, OK?’

They were walking in single file along a back street at the northern edge of the Fifth Quarter, the side opposite to the one that faced the human quarter. Their objective, Dee had told them, was to continue along that course, past the tip of the Quarter where it tapered into the sand, and on until they intersected the Stone Canal. The only activity they’d encountered was that of small biomechs, hopping or crawling across their path, heading into the wind that was bringing the radioactive dust in off the desert. Eventually, Tamara had explained, whole flocks of them would congregate at the blast-site, to feast on the rich unstable isotopes.

‘Kind of ecological,’ she’d added. ‘Keeps it out of the carbon-life food-chain, see?’

They walked on. The sun got higher in the sky, and the suits became increasingly uncomfortable. Dee, with more conscious control of her pain-tolerance than the others, allowed her impatience to goad them on.

‘The sooner we get there,’ she said, ‘the sooner we can get this clutter off.’

‘Those of us who get there,’ Ax protested. ‘Bury me in something else, that’s all I ask.’

‘Try a bin-liner,’ Wilde called back callously.

Dee urged them all to be quiet. Badinage wasn’t a feature of the humanoid robots. The shadow of a swooping aircraft emphasised her point, and, fortunately, none of them looked up.

Eventually the Fifth Quarter petered out, the street running into the sand. The canal gleamed in the distance. They approached it across desert and, later, fields. Tamara guided them carefully around those fields whose owners were unlikely to tolerate robots clumping across their crops. In some of the fields the crops were difficult to distinguish from the irrigation-systems. There was a kind of modified cane that could be harvested as jointed plastic pipes, and these fields they walked through, parting the tall synthetic stalks.

They reached the bank of the Stone Canal. The pathway along which Wilde and Jay-Dub had entered the city, four days earlier, was on the opposite bank. The canal itself had no traffic in sight.

Dee had led them to the exact spot where the boat, in which Jay-Dub had rescued her and Ax, waited for them. Jay-Dub had recalled it from its mooring, many kilometres farther up the canal, by a coded transmission shortly before entering the tunnel. Spy and Soldier between them had had no problem in identifying the co-ordinates, accurate to the nearest metre, which had been among the last pieces of information Jay-Dub had passed to Dee’s mind.

Beside the boat, another robot waited – a patroller. It was smaller and squatter than Jay-Dub had been, but of a similar shape. On first glimpsing it Tamara had given an excited cry, then she fell silent as the robot extended its legs and peered at them.

‘This boat matches the identification of one used to impede an investigation,’ it informed them as they walked up. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ The question was repeated on several microwave channels and in several codes, but only Dee was aware of that. The initial aural query had been a mere courtesy.

Wilde walked on past the patroller, ignoring it. Tamara and Ax, after a moment of hesitation, followed. Dee walked a few steps behind them, her unsteady gait barely a pretence. The patroller’s hull swayed as it tracked backwards and forwards after the marching metal figures. As Dee passed it, she lurched sideways against one of its legs. The robot toppled into the water and sank without trace.

And that was that. They all piled into the boat, cast off, and headed up the canal. As soon as they got inside the cabin, they stripped off their armour. Ax made to heave his hated disguise over the side, but Dee stopped him.

‘We’re going to need the steel,’ she told him.

The sun had long since set when they reached their destination, the limit and source of the canal. There was a small jetty at one bank, and steps cut into the rock up the same side of that steep, barren glen in the Madreporite Mountains. Dee moored the boat and they all stepped out, and stood looking at the hundred-metre-high concrete dam that blocked the valley before them.

‘The Sieve Plates,’ said Dee.

‘You mean there are more?’ asked Wilde, staring up.

‘Oh yes,’ said Tamara. ‘Another five, I think.’

‘Jesus.’ Wilde peeled the cellophane from his final pack of cigarettes and lit one. He couldn’t stop looking up. ‘Who built this? Martians?’

‘Robots,’ Dee said, a trace of pride in her voice. ‘Now come on. There’s no time to waste.’

By starlight and comet-glow they ascended the stair. It zigzagged up and up, until they were above the top of the dam and could see the dark lake of cometary water and, two kilometres farther up the glen, another and higher dam.

‘Martians,’ Wilde said. ‘Gotta be.’

‘New Martians,’ Tamara panted. The air was noticeably thinner, although oddly enough Wilde seemed to cope with it better.

‘Machines,’ Dee insisted.

‘Fuck who built it,’ said Ax. ‘When does this goddamn stair stop?’

Five minutes later he had an answer, as they turned around a buttress of rock and found themselves in the mouth of an artificial cavern. The cave was about three metres high and two across, with a fused-rock floor. Ahead, around several bends, was a faint glow. Dee led them confidently towards it.

The light brightened, the cavern widened, and they turned the final corner and stepped into a far greater cave, a warehouse cut from the rock. A good thirty metres high by fifty wide, it was stacked with crates and machinery and lit by arc-lights hung from the roof. It was hard to tell how far back it went.

‘Who the fuck built this?’ Ax asked.

Tamara wrinkled her nose. ‘Somebody with nuclear blasting-equipment,’ she said. She glanced up at the lights. ‘And nuclear power to burn.’

‘It was built by Jay-Dub,’ Dee said.

‘All by himself?’ Wilde sounded amused.

From behind the nearby stacks of machinery and crates came the unmistakable sounds of firearms being readied to fire.

‘Not quite by himself,’ said David Reid, as he stepped into view. He waved a casual hand. ‘And you are not by yourselves, either, in case that isn’t clear.’

They all stood stock still.

‘It’s clear,’ said Tamara.

Reid gave her a wry smile, Ax a polite one, and Wilde a cold glance. Then he looked Dee straight in the eye.

‘Well hello, Jon,’ he said. ‘Not like you to hide behind a woman’s skirts.’

Behind him, several armed men in black jumpsuits moved into view, and then surrounded the group. Reid checked to see that everyone was well covered. They were. He leaned forward with a slight bow, and offered Dee a cigarette.

‘Mind you,’ he went on, after he’d lit it for her, ‘it’s not like you to die heroically, either. I must say I was quite impressed that you did, even in the knowledge that you had a copy.’

Dee regarded him silently for a moment.

‘I’ll talk to you later,’ she said.

Her expression and stance altered slightly.

‘Hello, Dave,’ her voice said. ‘I should’ve known you knew me better than that.’

‘Shit,’ said Wilde. ‘You bastard.’

Reid laughed at the comprehension on Wilde’s face, the bewilderment on Ax’s and Tamara’s.

‘Wilde, or Jay-Dub if you like, downloaded into her computer,’ Reid explained, as if it should have been obvious.

‘And Meg,’ said Dee’s voice. ‘It’s not even crowded.’

Reid sighed and turned to Ax and Tamara.

‘What makes you people go along with this?’ he asked. ‘What did this machine, or that –’ he indicated Wilde, who was very slowly and carefully pulling his pack of fags from his pocket ‘– tell you? That information wants to be free?’ He laughed. ‘If that’s what you want, go back to Ship City right now – the whole place is in an uproar, with arguments turning into fist-fights, if not yet firefights. Just what you’ve always wanted – anarchy in the streets! Or did it tell you it could raise the dead? What could be worth the risk of replacing humanity with…flatlines?’

‘So what’re flatlines?’ Wilde asked. He’d managed to get his cigarettes out, under the guards’ watchful eyes, and he lit one and absently offered the pack around. Reid watched this performance with an air of being quite unimpressed.

‘You should know,’ he said. ‘Automata that mimic conscious action, but have none themselves. No subjectivity. No…souls.’

Dee’s mouth opened, but Wilde spoke first.

‘Ach, come off it Dave,’ he said. ‘We can argue about that sort of thing till the whisky runs out, like we used to. What you should worry about now is non-human minds, all right, but it’s not any you see standing around here. It’s the ones that’ll come for us all any time now, when they reach the other side of the Malley Mile. That’s when you’ll see what a flatline universe looks like. From the inside.’

The suspicion on Reid’s face was like a relenting of his earlier contempt.

Dee spoke again. ‘That’s why we need to run the fast folk,’ her voice said. ‘To find the way back.’

‘But you do know the way back,’ said Reid, facing Dee but speaking to someone else. ‘That’s what I sent you into the macro to find out, so we could set it all up.’

‘What I know, what I found out back there, is the way here.’ Her voice was uncharacteristically harsh, straining the deeper registers of her vocal chords. Then it shifted up again. ‘But the way here and the way back are not the same thing, and we have to go back. Through the daughter wormhole.’