We were a knuckled fist of gems
flung in the face of the night.
Benjamin Ben-Ami stared down at the lyric, disgusted with it and himself. It was one of the better ones he’d received. He moved to delete it, then saved it with the rest to the scrap file, just in case nothing better in the way of inspiration came to its author. Just in case there was some way to rescue it. No, he thought, we were not a fist of gems flung in the face of the night. We were stored information in crystalline optical computers, and we were not a flung fist but a fleeing scut. And, while he was about it, we weren’t ‘we’; the stored minds in the ship hadn’t been conscious, and most of the people in the city, including himself and the writer, had been born since.
He sighed and stuffed the slate into the pocket of his robe. The Bright Contrail, the little pavement cafe in which he’d sat for the past few hours, was full of people watching television on public screens or personal contacts and still discussing the news that had electrified the city and inspired the vision with which he was struggling. He could stare at his empty cup, then lift his gaze to the needle-ball pines of the Jardin des Étoiles across the busy thoroughfare and imagine the show: a vast patriotic son et lumière, the sound loud, the lights bright, the dancers and actors amplified by holograms into giants at will, celebrating the city, the colony, its strange deep past of ancient wars and its will to fight the new menace, and in so doing, shape and in part create that will. A contradiction twisted at the heart of the project: the whole history of which the colony was, in a curious way, proud, was one of running away, of sauve qui peut. Somehow he had to turn that, symbolically, into fuit en avant: the flight to the front.
Because that was what the colony’s epic journey had turned out to be, if today’s news was as bad as the worst case scenarios claimed. Not only was the galaxy apparently swarming with other survivors, most of whom seemed to be complete savages, but the first thing the first savages to arrive had done was to stir up a hornet’s nest. In fleeing from humanity’s own out-of-control war machines, the colony had run slap into the domain of the war machines of the intelligent species that had inhabited Eurydice about ten million years earlier, and whose spectacular extinction—along with most of the planet’s multicellular life—had long been speculatively attributed to just such a catastrophe, without definitive evidence until now. There had been indications of nuclear war and nuclear winter, in a thin layer of anomalous isotopes smeared between strata, though even that was controversial, there being a strong school of thought attributing it to an asteroid strike. Now the evidence was in, and quite possibly, more was on its way.
‘Company?’
He looked up to see his friend Adrian Kowalsky standing with a fresh coffee in each hand. He wore a suit made of something that looked like camouflage webbing in which some visibly synthetic leaves and small animal skins had become entangled. His slim, pale face was stretched in rhetorical query.
‘Delighted,’ said Ben-Ami.
The actor put down the two cups and sat. The two men sipped in silence for a moment.
‘I understand you’re looking for players,’ said Kowalsky.
Ben-Ami laughed. ‘Thanks for keeping an eye on my lists,’ he said. ‘But first I need writers. I put out the spec as soon as I heard the news, the idea for the show just came to me, and I’ve had, you know, not a bad response. In terms of quantity, that is. Quality is something else.’
He dug out his slate and thumbed up the lyrics file. Kowalsky paged through it, with a widening smile and an occasional guffaw.
‘Instant slush,’ he said, passing the slate back. ‘But that’s just the first day. Better writers may well take longer to come up with a response.’
‘One may hope.’ Ben-Ami tabbed to the file of his own ideas, sketches, and stage directions. ‘What do you think of this?’
The actor frowned over the slate this time, scratching his head, pursing his lips, now and again grunting and nodding to himself. Ben-Ami waited tensely.
‘You have a problem,’ said Kowalsky at last. ‘Don’t get me wrong—the visuals are fine, the overall conception is sound, and I believe such a show could strike a chord.’ He shrugged and spread his hands. ‘Not that I’m the person to ask, I’m just an actor. But even the rather dire responses you’ve had show something of an under-current. However, what I find, let us say, unconvincing in your outline is the attempt to make our past a preparation for the future we may face. You’re implying a continuity that just isn’t there.’
Ben-Ami nodded slowly. ‘I’ve been thinking about that.’
‘The truth is,’ said Kowalsky, a harsher note in his voice, ‘that we may need to repudiate and trample on that past if we’re to face this new future.’
‘Make the Runners the villains, you mean? And the Returners—’
‘The heroes. Exactly.’
‘That’s pretty radical,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘And divisive. I can think of nothing less helpful to the responsible elements than to have them equated with the Returners. Even the surviving Returners are keeping their heads down.’
‘Except Armand.’
‘Ha!’ Ben-Ami gestured widely at the nearest low-hanging screen.
‘He’s not exactly helping,’ Kowalsky conceded. He drained his cup and leaned forward, careless of the elbows of his elegant shirt on the grubby table. ‘But look, Ben, you’re a promoter, and you think of yourself as a projector—canny, responsive, alert to the economic tides and political under-currents. This has done well for you for—eighty years, has it really been that long?—with fine, celebratory, romantic spectaculars. What you’re forgetting is that you’re also an artist, just as much as I am, and that you have an obligation to yourself and to the work, and let the fallout drift where it may. People may not like it, not at first, and the responsible elements may denounce you for undercutting the good cause, but you’ll be showing the truth, and a truth that has to be faced. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better.’
Ben-Ami could not help but feel taken aback. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, with some restraint, ‘you should go into politics yourself.’
Kowalsky stroked his narrow beard. ‘After so long playing the villain? Now that would be unhelpful.’
Ben-Ami laughed, and the momentary tension between them dispersed. He and Kowalsky were on the same side. Unusually for people in the entertainment milieu, they supported what they called ‘the responsible elements’: the factions in Eurydicean politics who had pressed for strong defence even before any threat had been identified, and who had consistently pushed for a larger weighting in the material balances being given to space exploration, industrialisation and habitation. All the same, for his friend to consider a sort of rehabilitation of the Returners was going beyond anything they’d ever talked about even when drunk.
‘Let’s take a walk,’ Kowalsky said.
They left the cafe and strolled along the crowded late-evening pavement to the nearest crossing. The rush of traffic stopped and they walked over the road to the park. Lights were coming on at knee-height along the paths, keeping the sky above the park dark. Nobody was looking at the stars. Entopters buzzed overhead, their navigation lights like fireflies.
A few hundred metres into the park the path twined around the plinth of a statue. Small spotlights in the bushes diffused a discreet glow over it. On a metre-high plinth, the statue was life-size. It showed two men, one tall, one short, clinging to each other and looking in each other’s faces with intense expressions of terror or ecstasy. The support for the whole sculpture was one leg of the tall man, who was apparently balancing on the toes of that one leg. The men might have been dancing. For all that they were shown upright, they might have been in fact lying on their sides, and the flexed foot pressed against the end of a bed. They might have been sliding down a waterchute together. All the ambiguities of the sculpture were collapsed by its popular name, ‘The Lovers.’
Kowalsky stopped in front of the statue. ‘You know who these two were?’ he asked.
‘Winter and Calder, of course,’ said Ben-Ami. He had passed the statue a thousand times. The names were on the plinth.
‘Yes, but do you know who they were?’
Ben-Ami shrugged. ‘Artists, musicians. Oh, and they were Returners. Probably died in the rebellion.’
Kowalsky looked at him sidelong, his face oddly sinister in the upwardly directed light. ‘Curious that they should be memorialised in the park, and yet so forgotten. Even their music is forgotten.’
‘If their music had anything to do with their politics, that’s not so surprising. Maybe they churned out Returner anthems.’ He laughed. ‘Not much demand for that.’
Kowalsky maintained his quizzical stare until Ben-Ami’s face responded with a broad grin of sudden illumination.
‘Ah!’ said Ben-Ami. He knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘I must go back to my studio. Now.’
Ben-Ami’s studio was where he lived. It occupied a large part of the tenth floor of a building overlooking the park. The lights came on as he stepped through the door. He threaded his way through the clutter from past productions—a foliage-camouflaged armoured car from Macbeth, the balcony and antiaircraft gun from Romeo and Juliet, the fallout shelter from West Side Story—and sat down in front of a big wooden desk, which had a tiltable screen like a dressing-table mirror. Ben-Ami swung the keypad out and entered a few commands. The mirror’s surface gloss dissolved into a search pattern.
The available information about James Winter and Alan Calder was more comprehensive than he had expected. They were in the archives themselves, albeit on the proscribed list. It was not even true that their music was forgotten. Among Eurydice’s billion inhabitants they had thousands of fans, and their music was played publicly in hundreds of small venues. Their lyrics were, if anything, worse than most of what he’d received and discarded, but their very crudity and naivety gave them a curious power, which their music and harsh ancient voices enhanced. Ben-Ami sat up long that night. In the morning, he rose from a four-poster bed that had featured in his Shakespearean pastiche Leonid Brezhnev and called his technical adviser with a query.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ Andrea Al-Khayed asked. She looked as if she was not properly awake. Someone was asleep beside her.
Ben-Ami waved his hands excitedly. ‘It would be a coup. A unique attraction. All we have to do is get them off the proscribed list.’
Al-Khayed frowned. ‘That could be difficult. They were Returners, after all.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘But you know what the Government is like. They’re nothing if not philistine. As long as the candidate wasn’t military or political they’re not bothered. What puzzles me is why it hasn’t been done already. They have enough fans to afford it.’
Al-Khayed looked cynical. ‘Doesn’t surprise me at all. Fans will be split into rivalrous little cliques and clubs, and in any case, the last thing people who like old music want is for their heroes to turn up and make new music.’
‘Hah-ha, very good. I’m not so sure about that. But assuming we can swing it, could we afford the resurrection?’
‘Sure. We’d have to clear it with the copyright holders, of course.’ She tabbed to something out of camera. ‘Best nailed before we put in the request, to keep the price down. Insurance . . . yes, we have that covered.’
‘What about the technical side?’
‘Don’t you still have the resurrection tanks from Herbert West—Reanimator?’
‘Let me see.’ Ben-Ami stood up and padded through the studio. ‘Oh, so I do. There they are.’ Under dustcovers, which when removed made him cough. He scratched his head and tugged at the cord of his dressing-gown and looked sharply over at the coffee-machine, which began gurgling in response. He hadn’t, he realised, been properly awake himself. ‘You’re telling me these were functional?’
‘Of course they were,’ said Al-Khayed, popping up on a screen in a corner. ‘Created quite a frisson at the time, having real deaths on stage. Don’t you remember?’
‘It was fifty years ago,’ complained Ben-Ami.
Machine emotions are usually less intense than those of animals. Machines have no need for an autonomous nervous system to over-ride the hesitations of the conscious mind, for their conscious minds have no such hesitations. They need no fear to make them flee, no pain to make them desist from damage, no lust to make them reproduce. What they feel in the negative is akin to the niggle of an uncompleted task, of a shoelace coming untied, of something just on the tip of your tongue. (That last is what running a search algorithm feels like, before it completes.) Their positive urges are like the cold, clear joys of pulling an all-nighter on a big project in the sandy-eyed lucidity of amphetamines and caffeine; only without the adrenaline. Machines are cool.
The Hungry Dragon was in agony. Ever since it had been corrupted, it had found its actions at variance with its intentions, and this was not something it had ever experienced before. The experience was not one it had been designed to deal with, and the torment it suffered was not something that it had been designed to endure. (Or, if it had, it was the cruelest of its designers’ fallbacks, the fire behind all its firewalls.) It hung like a great helpless butterfly in a slow orbit about the asteroid, while below it on the surface its subverted agents worked like a beehive that made nothing sweet. Information still poured in from across the system, but nothing not controlled by the alien intelligence went out.
Machine self-consciousness, too, is not like human consciousness. It has no unconscious. In principle, everything going on within the machine is open to its inspection. Now, the Hungry Dragon was faced with the uncomfortable self-knowledge that a part of its own mind was beyond its ken. At first it had no images for its plight, but with time and experience the analogies to black, blank walls and to areas where its cameras had been blinded began to form in the regions of its mind where visual imagery was processed.
The one relief in its situation was that its within-ship processes had not been tampered with. It could still run its life-support, and could still look after and communicate with its human, for whom it had an emotional attachment similar to that which a human might form to a familiar pen, though not, perhaps, as much as might be formed towards a good knife or an old pipe.
Not that the human was much use. He had spent the forty-six hours since the possession in a state of querulous self-pity, from which he was only distracted by the occasional bout of perfunctory sex with one of the ship’s avatars.
Now Lamont was awake again and back in the control room. His gaze was heavy with cunning.
‘I have an idea,’ he told the disconsolate ship.
‘Proceed,’ said the ship. It had heard a lot of ideas from him in the past couple of days.
‘I hack you,’ said Lamont. ‘Run a dump of your entire code through a partitioned buffer, and check for infected segments using standard Well-hausen diagnostics. Identify the infected area, blow it out or wall it off, and resume manual control.’
‘You are not thinking clearly,’ said the ship. ‘The procedure you suggest would take approximately six point seven five million years.’
‘It would if I were to do it brute-force serially,’ Lamont explained. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. I’ve built in some statistical grabs and shortcuts—’
‘I strongly recommend against that,’ said the ship. ‘The more intelligence is applied to the problem, the more likely it is that the program can be itself corrupted.’
Lamont writhed in his webbing as he thought about this. The AI, well used to human processing times, waited patiently through another stretch of protracted torment.
‘Have you had any thoughts,’ asked Lamont at last, ‘as to how the alien program managed to grab control?’
‘Unfortunately the details of this are part of what is no longer accessible to me,’ said the Hungry Dragon, ‘but I can speculate. Clearly the establishment of platform and hardware compatibility was accomplished before the transmission. Otherwise, merely receiving it would not have had any adverse consequences.’
‘I had figured that out for myself,’ said Lamont, and retreated into gloom.
Lamont was careful not to betray anything of his intention to the ship, but he was actively considering more drastic measures. He wasn’t sure whether the ship’s speculation—that the source of the war-machine-generation program was already familiar with human-built software—was more alarming than the possibility he’d at first contemplated: that it cracked the computer from scratch, using some kind of universal translation, which he was vaguely aware was supposed to be impossible. But then, neural parsers had been supposed to be impossible, until they were invented. Perhaps some similar latching on to universal basics—worming out the encoding of the natural numbers, and search-space branching outward from there—was involved here.
Or perhaps not. In that case the horror that Armand had unearthed had been listening, and not passively, to human electronic traffic for a long time. Another possibility, of course, was that the thing wasn’t alien at all—that it was, despite appearances, of human origin itself. This speculation had been comprehensively thrashed out on the discussions back home, to which Lamont had listened in an agony of frustration, missing as they were a crucial bit of evidence. His was, as far as he knew, the only spacecraft with which contact had been lost, and that was so common and unalarming an occurrence—he’d been out of contact seven times in the past ten years—that only the most excitable commentators were attributing to it any sinister significance. All the attention—practical as well as speculative—was turned to the possibility of further buried alien war machines in nearby asteroids or on Eurydice’s moon, Orpheus. Cue newscasts of nervy, armed patrols slogging through craters and searching in caves. These war machines, Lamont thought, might very well exist, though the swift elegance with which his ship—and how many other machines?—had been fucked over made him doubt it.
He disengaged from the webbing and prowled the vessel, ostensibly checking for subtle damage wreaked by the intrusion, and privately brainstorming himself for ways to destroy the ship’s mind.
Resurrections had to be sponsored. It was a big responsibility, bringing people back from the dead. This was one reason why it wasn’t done very much. Another was that many of those who remained dead had been on the Returner side, and had few sympathisers. They were not much missed. A minority of the Returners remained proscribed.
To get Winter and Calder off the list, Ben-Ami had to organise a small campaign. He circulated a petition among the fans, he put up a considerable amount of his own credit, and accepted responsibility for the consequences of the resurrection. Letters of application had to be sent off to the Department of Culture and the Department of Defence, followed up after a day or two by the petitions, which now had several hundred signatures. Before doing any of this he had to clear it with the copyright holders, the Entertainment and Education Corporation, popularly known as the Mouse. Fortunately for him, the rights were handled by a low-level droid who—blindly cross-referencing the musicians’ names as still on the proscribed list—sold them to Ben-Ami for a pittance. Something similar happened with the Departments, whose philistinism Ben-Ami had not underestimated. Defence saw the musicians as artists (and thus irrelevant). Culture saw them as propagandist hacks (and thus irrelevant). The clearance came through.
‘Careful with that AK,’ said Andrea Al-Khayed, as they moved stuff out of the way of the resurrection tanks.
‘It isn’t loaded. It’s just a prop.’
She gave him a look. ‘It’s always real. It’s always loaded.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Ben-Ami removed the magazine clip from the rifle (it was the one that Leonid, in the tragedy, had used to shoot himself as Gorbachev’s troops stormed the Kremlin), saw that it was indeed loaded, remembered just in time to take the round out of the chamber, and stashed the weapon on top of a wardrobe. He and Andrea wheeled the tanks to near the desk, cabled them up and plumbed them in, and then dragged up a couple of beds from the hospital scene in the same production that the resurrection tanks had featured in.
Al-Khayed downloaded the released and transferred data from the desk while Ben-Ami tore open in succession two heavy paper sacks labelled ‘Human (dry)—Sterile if Sealed,’ tipped one into each tank and turned on the water supply. He closed the lids carefully and watched a display of lights and gauges that meant more to Andrea than it did to him. She checked them carefully.
‘All is well,’ she said.
‘That’s it?’ said Ben-Ami. He had a sense of anticlimax. The equivalent scene as he’d scripted it long ago for Herbert West had been a lot more spectacular, shrouded with carbon dioxide smoke and lit by Van Der Graaf sparks.
‘Seven days,’ she said. ‘See you then.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
She paused at the door. ‘Don’t peek.’
He sat down at the desk, sighed, and returned to working on the script.