“It would need access to the networks.”
“I know.”
“You’re insane. What if it escapes, loses itself in the networks the same way Aurora did?”
“There’d be a risk of that, but it’s one I’m prepared to take given the alternative. I’d rather have a monster on the loose if it’s a choice between that or dying under Aurora.”
“Do you have any idea what the Clockmaker did to its victims?”
Dreyfus thought of everything he had learned since gaining Manticore. Examining those new, fresh memories was like opening a wound that had just begun to scab over.
“I know it did bad things. But it wasn’t indiscriminate. It spared more than it killed. Aurora won’t spare a soul.”
“Show him what it is,” Saavedra said.
“He may as well know what he’s talking about letting loose.”
“You’ve searched him for weapons?”
“He’s clean. Show him the window.”
Veitch stood back from the monitor panel.
“Take a look for yourself, Prefect.”
“It’s on the other side of this glass?”
“Nearly. We usually keep it away from the window. I’ll rotate the magnets to bring it into view for a few moments.”
Dreyfus glanced back at Saavedra, waiting for her permission to move. She nodded. He joined Veitch and stepped onto the small pedestal beneath the viewing window. Two upright handrails provided support on either side of the armoured porthole. Dreyfus touched the pale-green skin of the reactor and felt it tremble under his hands. The tremor was irregular, with powerful surges.
“How did you get it in here?”
“There’s a door on the other side, for swapping out the magnets. We kept the Clockmaker in a portable confinement rig while we moved it from Ruskin-Sartorious. We had to move fast, since the rig’s only good for about six hours. The Clockmaker was testing it all the time, flexing its muscles, trying to break out, even though we did our best to stun it before the relocation.”
“Stun it how?” Dreyfus asked.
“With a heavy electromagnetic pulse. It doesn’t put it under completely, but it does subdue it. But by the time we arrived here, it was back up to full strength. We got it inside and locked down with the big magnets just in time. You know how a tokamak works?”
“More or less.”
“Normally the magnets trap a ring-shaped plasma, steering it away from the walls. You heat and squeeze the plasma to a few hundred million degrees, until you get fusion. There’s no fusion going on inside there now. Just hard vacuum, and the Clockmaker. We had to adjust the magnets to create a localised bottle, but it wasn’t too difficult.”
“It’s still trying to get out, isn’t it?” He touched a hand to the reactor’s throbbing skin again. He was feeling the Clockmaker’s exertions as it tested the resilience of those magnetic shackles.
“It never stops trying.”
Dreyfus looked through the window. At first he saw nothing save a deep-blue darkness. Then he became aware of a faint pink glow encroaching on the darkness from his right. The glow flickered and intensified. To his left, Veitch made delicate adjustments to the configuration of the trapping magnets. The pink became a halo of flickering silver. The silver brightened to incandescent white.
“Why does it glow?”
“The field’s stripping ions off its outer layer, a kind of plasma cocoon. When we collapse the field, the Clockmaker appears to suck the plasma back into itself. It doesn’t suffer any net mass loss as far as we can tell.”
“I can see it now,” Dreyfus said, very quietly.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Dreyfus said nothing. He wasn’t exactly sure how he felt. He had thought of the Clockmaker many times since losing Valery, but the appearance of the thing had never been something he dwelled upon. He had been concerned only with its effects, not its nature. He knew from the victims’ testimonies that the Clockmaker was amorphous, capable of shifting its shape with fluid ease, or at least of conveying that impression. He knew also that some of the survivors had spoken of a humanoid form underpinning its quicksilver transformations, like a stable attractor at the heart of a chaotic process. But those accounts had barely registered. It was only now that he truly appreciated that this was no ordinary machine, but something more like an angel, rendered in glowing white metal.
It hung in the tokamak, pinned in place by magnetic fields fierce enough to boil the electrons off hydrogen. Any normal machine, anything forged from orthodox matter—be it inert or quick—would have been simultaneously shredded and vaporised by those wrenching stresses. And yet the Clockmaker endured, with only that silver-pink halo conveying the extreme physical conditions in which it floated. It had the vague shape of a man: a torso, arms and legs, the suggestion of a head—but the humanoid form was elongated and spectral. The details shimmered and blurred, layers phasing in and out of clarity. For a moment the Clockmaker was a thing of jointed armour, recognisable mechanisms. Then it became a smooth-surfaced, mercurial form.
“He’s seen enough,” Saavedra said.
“Move it away from the window before it breaks confinement.”
Veitch worked the controls. Dreyfus watched the Clockmaker recede from view. He was glad when it had gone. Though its face was featureless, he’d had the overwhelming impression that it was looking straight at him, marking him as a subject for future attention.
“That’s my side of the arrangement,” Saavedra said.
“Now tell me what you know about it.”
“If I do, will you let me talk to it?”
“Just tell us what you know. We’ll worry about the other stuff later.”
“I only came down here for one reason. The longer we delay, the harder it’s going to be to stop Aurora. People are dying up there while we hesitate.”
“Tell us where it came from, like you promised. Then we’ll talk.”
“It didn’t come from SIAM,” Dreyfus said.
“It was created somewhere else, more than ten years earlier.”
“Could you try to be less cryptic?” Veitch said.
“Does the name Philip Lascaille mean anything to you?” Dreyfus asked rhetorically.
“Of course it does. You’re educated prefects. You know your history.”
“What does Lascaille have to do with anything?” Saavedra asked.
“Everything. He became the Clockmaker.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Veitch said, looking away with a dismissive smile on his lips.
“Lascaille went mad after he got back from the Shroud. He died years ago.”
Dreyfus nodded patiently.
“As you’ll doubtless recall, he was found drowned in the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies. It was always assumed that he’d committed suicide, that the madness he came back with had finally caught up with him. But that wasn’t the only explanation for his death. He’d been silent for years, but just before his death he’d opened up to Dan, the scion of the family. He’d imparted clues that allowed Dan to go off on his own expedition to the Shrouders, confident of success where others had
failed. People concluded that Lascaille, having relieved himself of this enormous burden of knowledge, had viewed his life’s work as being complete. Either way, it was still suicide.”
“You don’t think it was,” Saavedra said, curiosity vying with suspicion in her voice.
“Like I said, a man was murdered. I think that’s where this all began.”
“But why?” she said.
“He was already mad. If people were worried about what he might say to Dan, the time to kill him would have been before they spoke, not after.”
“That’s not the reason he died,” Dreyfus said.
“He wasn’t killed because certain people were worried about the knowledge inside his head. He was killed because certain people wanted to get at that knowledge more than anything else in the universe. And killing him was the only way they knew to reach it.”
“You’re not making much sense,” Veitch said.
“He’s talking about alpha-level scanning,” Saavedra said, with dawning comprehension.