Behind me, in those corridors, a plaintive female voice called after me. It grew stronger as time passed, but I ignored it, desperate to understand the terrible debate. I was learning – something vital. The voice cried after me. Eventually I turned. Meg’s anguished face conveyed the strain of an operating system at the limits of its capacity.
‘Come out!’ she said. ‘Come out of it now!’
I stared at her, puzzled. Everything felt slow, the corridors whiting-out like the Kazakh snow-drifts. With a sudden access of impatience Meg grabbed me and shoved me at the wall. It collapsed, and I was –
– out, and drifting away from the macro. At the same moment I fell back into the room, back into the mind of my own machine, and into the warm arms of my dear, sweet operating system, my succubus and surrogate soul-mate. Tears were in my eyes and an insistent ringing in my ears.
I recognised it as an alarm. Outside, out towards the Ring, a light flashed and a radio-beacon beckoned. The beacon was approaching, fast.
‘What’s going on?’
Meg stared at me. ‘Oh, Jon Wilde,’ she said. ‘You were in there for a fucking year, real time! The macros are all crazy or dying.’
A year. ‘What’s happened?’
Meg caught my hand. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘We gotta go. I’ll take us out.’
She stepped into the frame. As I watched, slack-jawed and in no fit state to handle so much as an exercise-bike, she kicked us off towards the beacon.
I saw what the beacon marked.
Coming out of the Ring towards us was the most disgraceful contraption that ever passed for a spacecraft, a bolted and kludged conglomeration of space-stations and habitats at least two kilometres long and half a kilometre across its widest diameter. If a Mir-Shuttle lash-up from the early decades had been given a million generations to breed for size and against elegance, it might have produced this. It spun dizzyingly on its axis and it steered a perilous course alongside the continuing lethal ravenous jet – the ultimate live wire – of the supply-line to the probe.
All the robots were scooting towards the ship. As soon as each tiny machine arrived it grabbed on to whichever of the many protruding bits of junk it had reached. The macros, too, were moving, but not as before. Frozen now, skeletal, they drifted and stirred as the huge craft crashed with brutal majesty through the structure on which we’d toiled.
The craft’s surface rushed at the window. I almost closed my eyes. But Meg brought us to a matched velocity. I saw the robot’s arms and grippers reach out. The instant they had found a handhold, Meg flipped the viewpoint, and then stepped out of the frame.
She sat down on the bed beside me and we clung to each other as frantically as our machine did to the craft. The sky rolled over, and over, and over. The white line of the fuel-jet lashed past, closer and closer.
‘I’ll try to patch,’ Meg said. She stared, and as if by an effort of her will the view suddenly became a stabilised scene from somewhere up towards the front. The rainbow ring almost filled it, its blue backwash flaring as stray, shattered girders tumbled in. Off to the side, I saw macros thrust away by the ship’s attitude jets. By accident or by design, they were falling towards the surface of Jupiter. The planet, already visibly altered by their activities, the Great Red Spot repeated like a rash across its face, would receive those snowflake structures, and perhaps warm them to a renewed and unimaginable life.
In my last minutes in the Solar System, I felt my initial reaction vindicated. The minds in the macros had fallen into a trap of their own devising, a gamble they may have consciously – how other? – embraced. For as the speed of their thoughts had increased, so had their subjective time – and therefore, so had space. Even interplanetary distances had yawned into gulfs, with journey-times which would have been to them what interstellar journeys – without the wormhole – would have been to us. Their own virtual realities had become more absorbing – in every sense – than the fast-receding universe of actuality.
The time-span of their great project was greater than their attention span, longer than any human civilisation had ever lasted. They had taken with them our weaknesses as well as our strengths, and multiplied and accelerated both. Humanity, better adapted to space by virtue of its very inferiority, would outlive them.
As had I. In a more literal sense than I’d ever intended, I had made it to the ships.
The bells of hell go ding-a-ling-a-ling
for you, but not for me
O death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?
Where, grave, thy victory?
The Cherenkov radiation rose to an intolerable blue glare as the forward part of the ship we clung to passed into the wormhole gate.
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.’