you to fire?
Now the sulk — if that was what it had been — shifted to something closer to indignation. [How could I not know about it?]
I was just checking, that’s all. About this code, Seventeen…
[Yes?]
I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you ignoring it, is there?
[Ignore the code?]
Something along those lines, yes. You having a certain degree of free will and all that, I thought it might just be worth raising, as — shall we say — a matter for debate, if nothing else… Of course, I know it’s unreasonable to expect you to be capable of such a thing…
[Unreasonable, Ilia?]
Well, you’re bound to have your limitations. And if, as Clavain says, this code is causing a system interrupt at root level… well, there’s not a lot I can expect you to do about it, is there?
[What would Clavain know?]
Rather a lot more than you or I, I suspect…
[Don’t be silly, Ilia.]
Then might it be possible… ?
There was a pause before the weapon deigned to reply. She thought for that moment that she might have succeeded. Even the degree of fear lessened, becoming nothing much more than acute screaming hysteria.
But then the weapon etched its response into her head. [I know what you’re trying to do, Ilia.]
Yes?
[And it won’t work. You don’t seriously imagine I’m that easily manipulated, do you? That pliant? That ridiculously childlike?]
I don’t know. I thought for a moment I detected a trace of myself in you, Seventeen. That was all.
[You’re dying, aren’t you?]
That shocked her. How would you know?
[I can tell a lot more about you than you can about me, Ilia.]
I am dying, yes. What difference does that make? You’re just a machine, Seventeen. You don’t understand what it’s like at all.
[I won’t help you.]
No?
[I can’t. You’re right. The code is at root level. There’s nothing I can do about it.]
Then all that talk of free will… ?
The paralysis ended in an instant, without warning. The fear remained, but it was not as extreme as it had been before. And around her the weapon was shifting itself again, the door into space opening above her, revealing the belly of the shuttle.
[It was nothing. Just talk.]
Then I’ll be on my way. Goodbye, Seventeen. I’ve a feeling we won’t be talking again.
She reached the shuttle. She had just pushed herself through the airlock into the airless cabin when she saw movement outside. Ponderously, like a great compass needle seeking north, the cache weapon was re-aiming itself, sparks of flame erupting from the thruster nodes on the weapon’s harness. Volyova sighted down the long axis of the weapon, looking for a reference point, anything in the sphere of battle that would tell her where weapon seventeen was pointing. But the view was too confusing, and there was no time to call up a tactical display on the shuttle’s console.
The weapon came to a halt, stopping abruptly. Now she thought of the iron hand of some titanic clock striking the hour.
And then a line of searing brightness ripped from the maw of the weapon, into space.
Seventeen was firing.
It happens in three billion years, she told him.
Two galaxies collide: ours and its nearest spiral neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. At the moment the galaxies are more than two million light-years apart, but are cruising towards each other with unstoppable momentum, dead set on cosmic destruction.
Clavain asked her what would happen when the galaxies met each other and she explained that there were two scenarios, two possible futures. In one, the wolves — the Inhibitors or, more accurately, their remote machine descendants — steered life through that crisis, ensuring that intelligence came out on the other side, where it could be allowed to flourish and expand unchecked. It was not possible to prevent the collision, Felka said. Even a galaxy-spanning, super-organised machine culture did not have the necessary resources to stop it from happening completely. But it could be managed; the worst effects could be avoided.
It would happen on many levels. The wolves knew of several techniques for moving entire solar systems, so that they could be steered out of harm’s way. The methods had not been employed in recent galactic history, but most had been tried and tested in the past, during local emergencies or vast cultural segregation programmes. Simple machinery, necessitating the demolition of only one or two worlds per system, could be shackled around the belly of a star. The star’s atmosphere could be squeezed and flexed by rippling magnetic fields, coaxing matter to fly off the surface. The starstuff could be manipulated and forced to flow in one direction only, acting like a huge rocket exhaust. It had to be done delicately, so that the star continued to burn in a stable manner, and also so that the remaining planets did not tumble out of their orbits when the star started moving. It took a long time, but that was usually not a problem; normally they had tens of millions years’ warning before a system had to be moved.
There were other techniques, too: a star could be partially enshrouded in a shell of mirrors, so that the pressure of its own radiation imparted momentum. Less tested or trusted methods employed large-scale manipulation of inertia. Those techniques were the easiest when they worked well, but there had been dire accidents when they went wrong, catastrophes in which whole systems had been suddenly ejected from the galaxy at near light-speed, hurled into intergalactic space with no hope of return.
The slower, older approaches were often better than newfangled gimmicks, the wolves had learned.
The great work encompassed more than just the movement of stars, of course. Even if the two galaxies only grazed past each other rather than ramming head-on, there would still be incandescent fireworks as walls of gas and dust hit each other. As shockwaves rebounded through the galaxies, furious new cycles of stellar birth would be kickstarted. A generation of supermassive hot stars would live and die in a cosmic eyeblink, dying in equally convulsive cycles of supernovae. Although individual stars and their solar systems might pass through the event unscathed, vast tracts of the galaxy would still be sterilised by these catastrophic explosions. It would be a million times worse if the collision was head-on, of course, but it was still something that had to be contained and minimised. For another billion years, the machines would toil to suppress not the emergence of life but the creation of hot stars. Those that slipped through the net would be ushered to the edge of space by the star-moving machinery so that their dying explosions did not threaten the newly flourishing cultures.
The great work would not soon be over.
But that was only one future. There was another, Felka said. It was the future in which intelligence slipped through the net here and now, the future in which the Inhibitors lost their grip on the galaxy.
In that future, she said, the time of great flourishing was imminent in cosmic terms; it would happen within the next few million years. In a heartbeat, the galaxy would run amok with life, becoming a teeming, packed oasis of sentience. It would be a time of wonder and miracles.
And yet it was doomed.
Organic intelligence, Felka said, could not achieve the necessary organisation to steer itself through the collision. Species co-operation was just not possible on that scale. Short of
