Godlike Machines (41 page)

Guyonnet bows his head at the damnably faint praise.

“It’s not his job to direct traffic,” she adds.

“This is true,” he acknowledges, “but at the same time I like to think there’s more to being with Terminus than exploring and taking notes. Saving lives, for instance.”

“What happened to looking for spacers?” Cotton asks, and my heart trips between one beat and the next.

He smiles. “One thing at a time, E. C. I can’t be in two places at once.”

“Unfortunately for me, you chose this one.”

Cotton casts me a cautionary glance, and I know that my secret is safe with her. The relief I feel is profound but tempered by the knowledge that others exist like Kindred who would murder me in a second if my true identity became known.

“I know we’ve had our differences in the past, E. C.—”

“Stop playing the saint,” Cotton tells Guyonnet. “You just want what I know. If the Director is following us, what I know must be important, right?”

“One could be forgiven for supposing that.”

The hall is empty now. I have no doubt that Guyonnet and his agents could prevent us leaving any number of ways. Apart from Kindred’s miniscule pistol we are unarmed, and even the most capable Guildsman would be unlikely to prevail in a six-to-one fight.

Cotton sags and offers her hand. “All right, Guyonnet. But I want your word you will actually clear the way for us.

You’re not going to take what I give you and then disappear. Okay?”

“You have my word.”

She and Guyonnet press palms. The data takes a split-second to transfer and not much longer to verify.

“All right.” Guyonnet whistles and his agents converge around us. People begin to rush back into the space. “Have a safe trip. See you at the end of it.”

“Be careful,” I tell him, thinking of what might lie in wait for him in Naar.

“Don’t worry about me, Mister Lough,” he tells me as the doors close between us. “Think only of yourself.”

With that, he and his agents are on their way to Naar, where Trelayne might be hiding and legends speak of death for any who set foot there.

I don’t know how much credit to lend to folklore in a place like this. I just know that Guyonnet will either be dead or not when we arrive-and I am unsure which possibility I like the least.

“We’ll give them a minute,” Cotton said, “just in case he plans to do the right thing for once.”

She fidgets and paces as the seconds count down. She doesn’t speak, but I know what she’s thinking. It’s a race now, a competition, and she may already have lost. Death is not much of a second prize under these circumstances.

My reserves of sympathy are not inexhaustible, however. The trip is going to be a long one, cooped up with that much restless anxiety. I let her needlessly expend her energy and save mine for finding a way to endure.

Our first destination is abandoned. We are the only things moving in the entire space. Although I was expecting it—or at least hoping for it—I am perturbed nonetheless. Guyonnet’s word holds; our travel is guilt-free, inasmuch as we can tell (the Director might still be striking, after all; we are simply not aware of it); but I begin to feel as though we are refugees fleeing through a vast, abandoned subway.

Was this, I wonder, what it was like for the first humans to explore the Structure’s endless, evacuated depths?

After a dozen silent processions from one shaft to the next, the emptiness becomes unbearable.

This time, Cotton is the one who breaks the silence.

“You’d never know it to look at me, but I come from an agrarian community. A small one, too. My mother was a genetic engineer and my father was an artist. They never agreed about anything, but it didn’t seem to matter. Yes, Merraton was a Structure world, but that’s not what this is about. Let me finish, and then you can pump me for information.”

I bow my head, ashamed. She is right. This moment isn’t about the Structure or the knowledge we seek. It is all about her. Life is flashing before her eyes: her birth, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; her upbringing, education, vocation, and career; her hopes, dreams, nightmares, and failures. It is about her death, too, for we both believe that this is imminent.

She talks, and I do not interrupt. Neither do I record the details for my accounts. I will remember without notes and decide later what I will do with this knowledge. Should I consider it data regarding a Structure inhabitant that might prove valuable in future analysis, or something that should be left to fade along with the rest of her?

I know that even by asking that question I am admitting that my objectivity is compromised. If I cared for advancement, I would remove that detail from my account. But I was born a Guildsman, and I have a duty to disclose everything to my master. If the Structure has corrupted me, then that must be known by my fellows on the Great Ship.

Cotton talks on, and I consider for the first time what I will do when she is gone. Until now I have assumed that I will return either to undercover work or to my former life on the Great Ship. I suspect now that it is too late to walk away unscathed. The Structure’s claws are long and thin, and not always as visible in effect as its most malevolent actor, the Director. I may be a dead man walking and not know yet it.

But then I think of the man who delivers Cotton’s body to its ignominious interment—the haunting familiarity of his half-glimpsed profile—and I wonder. That man is definitely not Huw Kindred. He has the look of a Guild clone.

I know the answer now, and I believe that Cotton has known from the beginning.

I’d be careful if I were you,
she told me.
You don’t want to be tied to me when I go down.

The words were meaningless to me then, and their utterance changed nothing. It was already too late.

Time’s twisted skein has entangled us both.

Guyonnet’s arrangement sees us all the way to Uvaya, where we will take the last transcendent shaft to Naar, purported home of the mysterious Trelayne. The entrance is the most secure we have encountered to date, with checkpoints and guard posts, and warning signs in multiple languages. The guards have all been dismissed, however, and none of the automated security systems impede our progress. We come to the doors, input our access codes, and step into the carriage.

“This is it,” she says. Her restless energy has crystallized. She is almost glowing with anticipation.

The floor jolts beneath us. I feel the momentary giddiness that always afflicts me during transcendent transfers.

The doors open, and we step through them to our fates.

The Director does not strike us. We are as unafflicted in Naar as anywhere else. But of Guyonnet and his agents there is no sign. No sign at all. Not a single drop of blood; not a scuff mark on the floor. They have disappeared into the air—which thrums with tension, as though an invisible wire as large as a planet has been strained to breaking point.

Our footsteps echo across the flat, empty expanse of Naar’s reception area. There are no windows, no obvious doors, and no signs.

“Hello?” Cotton calls. “Trelayne?”

The sound of her voice falls flatly back to silence.

“Let’s check the walls,” I say, and we conduct a thorough search.

There are three sliding panels hidden almost seamlessly, one in the center of each empty wall. We try the one opposite the shaft through which we entered.

It glides smoothly open, revealing an expanse so large my eyes struggle to comprehend it. We are standing on a balcony overlooking a hollowed-out world. Scarring on the interior testifies to the massive earthworks that have occurred here in the past. Spherical light sources, like small, white suns, cast multiple shadows, and hum with barely suppressed energy.

We retreat and take the door to our right. There we find a chamber identical to the one we left, and just as empty.

The third door takes us along a corridor to a closed door. It doesn’t open as we approach, or to our touch. Cotton knocks loudly, three times.

We both jump as it hisses open, revealing a gray-haired man in a loose-fitting uniform with a sheet of plastic paper in one hand. He looks at us in surprise and annoyance through bright green eyes.

“Trelayne?” Cotton asks him.

“Yes, I’m Royce Trelayne,” he says. “What took you so long?”

“Sorry about the mess. I’ve been here a month and it’s taken me that long to unpack. What do you mean, you’re not from the expedition? I ordered a re-supply a week ago and nothing’s come yet.

“No, I’ve not seen anyone else today—or any other day, for that matter. Honeyman and his idiots must still be sorting out the supply lines. I tried telling him that automation is the way to go, but he wouldn’t listen. The crew needs to be kept busy, he said. Morale doesn’t fix itself on its own, you know. Well, I do know that, and I dislike being patronized as much as anyone. Bad enough that he’s wasting resources and valuable time playing tin soldiers; worse that I’m going starve down here if he doesn’t get his act together soon.

“Honeyman? Oh, I should probably call him ‘the Professor General.’ He’s chief engineer and leader of the First Expeditionary Mission to Surya, where we found the mine entrance. You say you didn’t come from there? Well, I suppose I’m not terribly surprised. We though we were blazing new territory, burrowing like Carnarvon and Howard into alien tombs, and what did we get? Mines not tombs, signs of human habitation long before our arrival-and a curse as well, most likely. Makes you think, eh?

“See this thing here. It’s a clock, one of several thousand I’ve scattered through the mines, along with the instrument packs you might have seen at the bottom of the stacks. An army of soldiers would have taken years to make and distribute these things, but my drones accomplished the feat in a matter of a fortnight. The data’s been rolling in for a week. Packets cross the transcendent shafts every time a carriage moves from one end to the other. The packets find their own way through the Structure and recombine here, via that thick cable leading into the wall over there. Isn’t it obvious that I could never have accomplished so much on my own? Even with an army, as I said, it’d take forever. Best to leave the machines to it so I can do all the hard work of contemplation. That’s what humans are best at, you know. Good at thinking; not so good at doing. There’s a block somewhere, an execution failure. Everything we create is flawed, somehow. We thrive despite our ineptitude because the universe despises perfection.

“That more than anything convinces me that the Structure is not alien. Look at it! A sprawling insanity that seems from one angle like a clutch of high-rises connected by walkways, and from another a—well, like nothing we’ve ever built before. The kind of thing our armies might build if we left them to it. In would go our flawed designs, and out would come this madness.
Reductio ad absurdum,
except in the opposite direction, whatever that is in Latin. Extrapolation beyond all reason. All we do now is ask what its original purpose might have been.

“Yes, I’m sure that’s one of the many answers you’ve come seeking from me, and I’ve thoughts on the matter, of course. The mines do provide valuable resources for the worlds at the top of each stack; there’s no denying that, although it seems a small ambition for something so grand. I wonder if it is a device of some kind-an antenna, perhaps, transmitting vibrations through the temporal ether; or a generator, similar to wires connecting far-flung points of differing electrical potential. It could be a kind of cosmic glue, or conceivably even a weapon. I’m no closer to knowing the Structure’s intended purpose, and I’m the first to attempt a systematic study of it. See where it’s got me?

“Immortal, my arse. That’s just an error of parallax.

“Let me show you one thing I’ve learned. This is an analysis of the clock data I’ve collected from the bottoms of all the stacks. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I can barely look at it sometimes. It gives me bad dreams. Clocks ticking slow; clocks ticking fast-clocks going backwards, even. What does it all boil down to?

“My theory is that the transcendent shafts connect, not just different locations in the spacetime we come from, but locations in different space-times-universes, continuums, branes, whatever you want to call them. The Structure is the web tying all these different points together. The critical thing is that at some, perhaps all, of these locations, the arrow of time points in a different direction. Not just reverse, but left-right or up-down, or directions we can barely guess at. These different arrows of time exert a drag on the Structure as a whole, twisting and stretching the stacks so that there’s no universal time in the web at all any more. It’s all tangled and warped.

“Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it’s part of a grand design we can only guess at. Either way, that’s how I can have been here a month, yet you think I’ve been here forever.

“And you-you tell me you’re tangled in a loop of some kind. That sounds perfectly possible, maybe even likely, given the mess around us. Why ever not? There’s nothing acausal about such loops, nothing acausal at all. They can be navigated—indeed they
must
be navigated, one way or another. The ravages of information entropy haven’t gobbled you up, so I take that as a proof of concept.

“What this means for the people who live here is a different question. Perhaps it’s nothing especially profound. We go about our lives as we always do, not really noticing any more than is necessary to ensure our day-to-day existence. Perhaps the finest ramification is one that Honeyman and I experienced. We’re among the first wave of explorers to leave Earth, which beyond doubt lacks the capacity to build something like this—but despite this very important fact, humans have somehow beaten us here. If time moved linearly in the Structure, it would have been empty. It wouldn’t even have existed for us to find! Yet everyone who comes to the Structure finds people here ahead of them. Where did they come from? Our future, I suppose. And in their past, they found the same thing. No one got here first. It’s always been inhabited. It always will be. There is no end to it, in time as well as in space. It just continues being. That’s why ‘Terminus’ is a terrible name for this organization you talk about. If there’s no beginning to the mine, there won’t be an end either.