Note147
Destruction, Clavain? Why on Earth would we want to destroy them?
Note148
That remains the case, yes.
Note149
Recovery is our preferred outcome.
Note150
Very much preferred, Clavain.
Note151
No one. Only a handful of us have ever visited here, and no one ever stays permanently. All activities have been totally automated. Periodically a Closed Council operative arrives to check on things, but for the most part the servitors have worked unsupervised.
Note152
Ours are.
Note153
Clavain, Remontoire… let me introduce you to the Master of Works.
Note154
The Master’s more than just a servitor, I assure you.
Note155
Come on. It doesn’t really like visitors, and it’ll start getting irritated if we stay too long.
Note156
You mean it’s not irritated yet?
Note157
A servitor, of course, only somewhat brighter than the norm… does that disturb you?
Note158
It just needs to know it can trust us.
Note159
Higher. As smart as an alpha-level, at the very least. Oh, don’t give me that aura of self-righteous disgust, Clavain. You once accepted machines that were almost as intelligent as yourself.
Note160
Is it that you feel threatened by it, I wonder?
Note161
I agree with Clavain. We’ve managed to do without intelligent machines until now, Skade. Not because we fear them but because we know that any intelligent entity must choose its own destiny. Yet that servitor doesn’t have any free will, does it? Just intelligence. The one without the other is a travesty. We’ve gone to war over less.
Note162
I regret that we had to do it. But we didn’t have any choice. We needed clever servitors.
Note163
It’s slavery,
Note164
Desperate times call for desperate measures, Remontoire.
Note165
Impressed?
Note166
Now you understand why the Master was so concerned about the risk of an unintentional weapons discharge, or even a powerplant overload. Of course, you’re wondering why we’ve started building them again.
Note167
Perhaps you should tell me why you think we ever stopped making them.
Note168
You’re an intelligent man. You must have formed a few theories of your own.
Note169
Yes, and there are at least half a dozen other theories in common currency, ranging from the faintly plausible to the ludicrously paranoid. What was your understanding of the reason?
Note170
A very pragmatic answer, Clavain.
Note171
There is, of course, quite a grain of truth in that. Economic and political factors did play a role. But there was something else. It can’t have escaped your attention that our own internal shipbuilding programme has been much reduced.
Note172
True, but even those ships have not been active. Routine interstellar traffic has been greatly reduced. Travel between Conjoiner settlements in other systems has been cut back to a minimum.
Note173
Had remarkably little to do with it, other than providing a convenient cover story.
Note174
Had the real reason ever come out, there would have been widespread panic across the whole of human-settled space. The socio-economic turmoil would have been incomparably greater than anything caused by the present war.
Note175
You were right, in a sense. It was to do with the wolves, Clavain.
Note176
Why not?
Note177
That’s true, in a sense. Certainly, it wasn’t until Galiana’s return that the Mother Nest obtained any detailed intelligence concerning the nature of the machines. But the fact that the wolves existed — the fact that they were out there — that was already known, many years before.
Note178
No. She was merely the first to make it back alive — or at least the first to make it back in any sense at all. Before that, there had only been distant reports, mysterious instances of ships vanishing, the odd distress signal. Over the years the Closed Council collated these reports and came to the conclusion that the wolves, or something like the wolves, was stalking interstellar space. That was bad enough, yet there was an even more disturbing conclusion, one that led to the edict. The pattern of losses pointed to the fact that the machines, whatever they were, homed in on a specific signature from our engines. We concluded that the wolves were drawn to us by the tau-neutrino emissions that are a characteristic of our drives.
Note179
When she returned we knew we’d been right. And she gave a name to our
