there.
The machine trundled to the edge of the pond. It raised the scoop, shining pistons elongating. The angle of the scoop tilted down. The slumped thing Thalia had glimpsed slid free into the water. It was a body, a dead man clothed in the brown overalls of a park attendant. As the body entered the pond, limp enough to suggest that death had been recent, Thalia made out a vivid red gash across the man’s chest, where he had been cut through his clothes. Then he was gone. For a moment an elbow jutted out of the water, before disappearing under. The fountain laid a white froth over the surface of the pond, obscuring the body completely.
Thalia was shaking. She unclipped the whiphound again. She had not believed the recorded message from Lucas Thesiger, if there was such a person. But until that moment she had at least been prepared to believe that the servitors were acting under some dire-emergency protocol. Perhaps the truth was simply too unsettling to reveal to the citizenry, for fear of inciting panic.
But even in a state of emergency, you didn’t bury bodies in civic ponds.
‘There were a hundred of us once,’ Clepsydra said. ‘This room is where we slept, or at least rested our bodies, during interstellar flight. Most of us are still alive, connected via neural connections to the Exordium device.’
‘Where is it?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘Somewhere else in the ship.’
‘Can you show it to me?’
‘I could, but then I’d have to kill you.’
He couldn’t tell if that was an attempt at humour, or whether she was deadly serious.
In total, she’d told him as little about the technology as she could get away with. All Dreyfus was clear about was that Exordium was a kind of quantum periscope, peering into a murky, fog-shrouded sea of overlapping future states. What Clepsydra called the ‘retrocausal probability function’ was generated by future versions of the same dreamers, plugged into the Exordium machine further down the timeline. It took the minds of those selfsame dreamers to shape the nebulous Exordium data into coherent predictions about things yet to happen.
He looked at the wounded sleepers. ‘Please don’t tell me they’re conscious.’
‘It is a state of consciousness akin to lucid dreaming. Their minds have been enslaved for Aurora’s purposes, nothing more. With their minds given over to processing Exordium imagery, the sleepers have scarcely any spare capacity for what you might call normal thought. Aurora has made that impossible.’
‘And yet you escaped,’ Dreyfus said.
‘It was planned, with the full cooperation of the remaining sleepers. In the gaps between monitored thoughts we hatched a scheme. It took us years. We knew only one of us could escape. I was chosen at random, but any one of us would have sufficed.’
‘Why just one of you? Once you’d escaped, couldn’t you… free the others, or something?’
‘We had hopes that I might make it back to civilisation. That proved impossible.’
‘How long have you been free?’
‘A hundred days. A thousand. I’m not sure. Now at least you understand how I kept myself alive. I have a hiding place elsewhere in the rock, away from Aurora’s scrutiny. But I can’t stay there all the time. Periodically I must return here, to the ship, and harvest rations. I do it surgically, a little at a time. Just enough to keep me alive for a couple of days, but not enough to cause any additional complications in the donor. I take the harvested food back with me to my hideaway. I cook it as best I can, using a cauterizing tool.’ She looked at Dreyfus, her expression challenging him to judge her. ‘Then I eat it, slowly and gratefully. Then I return.’
‘It’s monstrous.’
‘It’s what we agreed.’
‘
‘The helmets?’
‘A modification of our own equipment. They connect us to Exordium, but they also administer punishment.’
‘Did she hurt you?’
‘Aurora hurt all of us. But not by administering pain to the entire group of sleepers. Had Aurora done that, it might have engendered a sense of unity through suffering: a rebellious solidarity that might have given us the strength to refuse to dream. Aurora was cleverer than that.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Aurora’s way was to select one of us and make that sleeper suffer for our collective failure. Aurora picked on certain sleepers again and again. Because we are Conjoiners, we always felt something of the other sleeper’s pain: not its totality, but a reflection of it, enough to judge the degree of suffering.’
‘And that worked?’
‘We learned not to fail her. But by the same token we also strove to find a way to cheat. Aurora monitors our thoughts, but not infallibly. We sensed gaps in the flow of our group consciousness when her attention was elsewhere. In these gaps we devised our scheme.’
‘Surely Aurora would have noticed at some point?’
‘Aurora cares only about dreams and punishment. The mechanics of how the Exordium prognostications arrive are of little concern. Had I gone on to cause trouble… then perhaps things would have been different.’
‘How were you selected?’
‘The honour was bestowed randomly. There were some who thought the escapee should be one of the sleepers Aurora was prone to punish, but that would have risked drawing too much attention to our plan, when the time for the next punishment came around.’
‘I understand.’
‘The matter of escape was not simple. It required enormous preparation, artful distraction. I learned how to fool the helmet into thinking I was still in the dreaming consciousness state, while in fact being fully lucid, fully awake. I learned how to interfere with its mechanism, to release it, yet not trigger any alarms. All this required more than a year of preparation.’
Dreyfus reeled at the enormity of what he was hearing. ‘But once you escaped… wouldn’t there still have been an empty position?’
‘That was easily dealt with. I mentioned the accident that had already befallen our ship. There were corpses elsewhere on the vessel, due to be returned to the Mother Nest for component recycling. Before my absence was noted, I retrieved one of these corpses and plugged it into the dreaming apparatus. The life-support system kept the corpse animate. It was incapable of thought, but the other dreamers were able to conceal that from Aurora.’
Dreyfus shook his head, dumfounded, appalled and awed at what he had heard. Speech itself felt like a form of blasphemy, set against so much suffering. ‘But if you haven’t been able to escape… hasn’t all of this been for nothing?’
‘I was beginning to think so. So were the other sleepers. The idea was that I would use my talents to send a message to the Mother Nest, if it still existed. But the machinery in this place would not allow it. I can sense doors opening and closing, the arrival of ships and individuals. But the data architecture depends on optical circuitry, which my implants cannot manipulate.’
Dreyfus nodded grimly. ‘Aurora knew exactly which bars would hold you prisoner.’
‘Yes, she did. Perhaps your deputy will have more success, if he has the right equipment. But I was mute.’
‘But you didn’t give up.’
‘I shifted my efforts to constructing a transmitter of my own. The ship could grow me such a thing in hours if I sent the right commands to it. But if I did that, Aurora would sense the changes in the ship. She almost certainly knows that you are here, Prefect. I could not risk her killing the sleepers. I was forced to scavenge what I could
