Light

11 Machine Dreams

Billy Anker’s location, as disclosed to Seria Mau by Uncle Zip, was several days down the Beach from Motel Splendido. Little would be required in the way of navigation until they encountered the complex gravitational shoals and corrosive particle winds of Radio Bay. Seria Mau checked her supercargo into the human quarters then found herself with nothing left to do. The White Cat’s mathematics took over the ship and sent her to sleep. She was powerless to resist. Dreams and nightmares leaked up from inside her like warm tar.

Seria Mau’s commonest dream was of a childhood. She supposed it to be her own. Oddly lit but nevertheless clear, the images in this dream came and went, framed like archaic photographs on a piano. There were people and events. There was a beautiful day. A pet animal. A boat. Laughter. It all came to nothing. There was a face close to hers, lips moving urgently, determined to tell her something she didn’t want to hear. Something was trying to make itself known to her, the way a narrative tries to make itself known. The final image was this: a garden, darkened with laurel and close-set silver birch; and a family, centred on an attractive black-haired woman with round, frank brown eyes. Her smile was delighted and ironic at once—the smile of a lively student, rather surprised to find herself a mother. In front of her stood two children seven and ten years old, a girl and a boy, resembling her closely about the eyes; the boy had very black hair and was holding a kitten. And there, behind the three of them, with his hand on her shoulder and his face slightly out of focus, stood a man. Was he the father? How would Seria Mau know? It seemed very important. She stared as deeply into the photograph as she would stare into a face; while it faded slowly into a drifting grey smoke which made her eyes water.

A further dream followed, like a comment on the first:

Seria Mau was looking at a blank interior wall covered with ruched oyster silk. After some time, the upper body of a man bent itself slowly into the frame of the picture. He was tall and thin; dressed in a black tailcoat and starched white shirt. In one white-gloved hand he held a top hat by its brim; in the other a short ebony cane. His jet-black hair was brilliantined close to his head. He had eyes a penetrating light blue, and a black pencil moustache. It occurred to her that he was bowing. After a long while, when he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could without actually stepping into it, he smiled at her. At this, the ruched silk background was replaced by a group of three arched windows opening onto the magisterial glare of the Kefahuchi Tract. The picture, she saw, was taken in a room toppling through space. Slowly, the man in the tailcoat bowed himself back out of it.

If this dream’s purpose was to elucidate the one which had preceded it, nothing was achieved. Seria Mau woke up in her tank and experienced a moment of profound emptiness.

“I’m back,” she told the ship’s mathematics angrily. “Why do you send me there? What is the point of that?”

No answer.

The mathematics had woken her, relinquished control of the ship, and slipped quietly back up into its own space, where it began to sort the quanta leaking from significant navigational events in non-local space, using a technique called stochastic resonance. Without quite knowing why, Seria Mau was left feeling angry and inadequate. The mathematics could send her to sleep when it wanted to. It could wake her up when it wanted to. It was the centre of the ship in some way she could never be. She had no idea what it was, what it had been before K-tech webbed them together forever. The mathematics was wrapped around her—kind, patient, amiable, inhuman, as old as the halo. It would always look after her. But its motives were completely unknowable.

“Sometimes I hate you,” she advised it.

Honesty made her amend this. “Sometimes I hate myself,” she was forced to admit.

Seria Mau had been seven years old the first time she saw a K-ship. Impressed despite herself by its purposeful lines, she cried excitedly, “I don’t want to have one of those. I want to be one.” She was a quiet child, already locked in confrontation with the forces inside her. “Look. Look.” Something took her and shook her like a rag; something—some feeling which would eventually marshal all of her other feelings—rippled through her. That was what she wanted then.

Now she had changed her mind, she was afraid it was too late. Uncle Zip’s package taunted her with its promise, then delivered nothing. A sense of caution had led her to isolate it from the rest of the ship.

The visible part of it lay on the deckplates in a small room in the human quarters, in a shallow red cardboard box tied with shiny green ribbon. Uncle Zip had presented it to her in his typical fashion, with a signed card depicting putti, laurel wreaths and burning candles; also two dozen long-stemmed roses. The roses now lay scattered across the deck, their loose black petals stirring faintly as though in a draught of cold air.

The box, however, was the least of it. Everything inside was very old. However Uncle Zip dressed it up, neither he nor anyone else could be sure of its original purpose. Some of these artefacts had identities of their own, with expectations a million years out of date. They were mad, or broken, or had been built to do unimaginable things. They had been abandoned, they had outlived their original users. Any attempt to understand them was in the nature of a guess. Software bridges might be installed by men like Uncle Zip, but who could be sure what lay on the other side of them? There was code in the box, and that would be dangerous enough in itself: but there was a nanotech substrate of some kind too, on which the code was supposed to run. It was supposed to build something. But when you dialled it up, a polite bell rang in empty air. Something like white foam seemed to pour out and spill over the roses, and a gentle, rather remote female voice asked for Dr. Haends.

“I don’t know who that is,” Seria Mau told the package angrily. “I don’t know who that is.”

“Dr. Haends, please,” repeated the package, as if it hadn’t heard her.

“I don’t know what you want,” said Seria Mau.

“Dr. Haends to surgery, please.”

Foam continued to cover the floor, until she closed the software again. If she could smell it, she thought, it would smell strongly of almonds and vanilla. For a moment she had a recollection of these smells so clear it made her dizzy. Her entire sensorium seemed to break its twenty-year connection with the White Cat, toppling away into night and helpless vertigo. Seria Mau flailed about inside her tank. She was blind. She was wrong-footed. She was terrified she would lose herself, and die, and not be anything at all. The shadow operators gathered anxiously, clinging up in the corners like cobwebs, hushing and whispering, clasping their hands. “That which is done,” one reminded another, “and that which remains undone.”

“She is only little,” they said in unison.

Her answering cry could barely contain the force of all her grief and self-disgust and unvoiced rage. Whatever she had told them in the Motel Splendido parking orbit, she had changed her mind. Seria Mau Genlicher wanted to be human again. Although when she looked at her passengers, she often wondered why.

There were four or five of them, she thought. From the beginning they were hard to count because one of the women was a clone of the other. They had come aboard with a round tonne of field-generating equipment and a confident saunter. Their clothes looked practical until you saw how soft the fabrics were. The hair of the women was brush-cut and lightly moussed to have a semiotic of assertion. The men wore discreet brand-implants, animated logos, tributes to the great corporates of the past. The White Cat, with her air of stealth and clear military provenance, brought out the boy in them. None of them had ever talked to a K-captain before. “Hi,” they said shyly, unsure where to look when Seria Mau spoke.

And then, to each other, as soon as they thought they were alone: “Hey! Yes! Weird or what?”

“Please keep the cabins tidy,” Seria Mau interrupted them.

She monitored their affairs, especially their almost constant sexual activity, through nanocameras lodged in corners, or folds of clothing, or drifting about the human quarters like specks of dust. Dial-up, at almost any time, brought in ill-lit, undersea images of human life: they ate, they exercised, they defecated. They copulated and washed, then copulated again. Seria Mau lost count of the combinations, the raised buttocks and straddled legs. If she turned up the sound, someone would always be whispering, “Yes.” All the men fucked one of the women; then the woman fucked her clone while the men watched. In daily life, the clone was pliable, tender, prone to fits of sudden angry weeping or to asking financial advice. She was so unsure, she said. About everything. They fucked her, slept, and later asked Seria Mau if she could turn the artificial gravity off.

“I’m afraid not,” Seria Mau lied.

She was both disgusted and fascinated by them. The poor resolution of the nanocams gave their actions something of the quality of her dreams. Was there some connection?

She practised murmuring, “Oh yes, that.”

At the same time she examined the equipment stowed in the White Cat’s hold. As far as she could see it had little to do with exogeology, but was designed to maintain small quantities of isotopes in wildly exotic states. Her passengers were prospectors. They were on the Beach, just like everyone else, looking for an earner. She became inexplicably angry, and the ship’s mathematics sent her to sleep again.

It woke her almost immediately.

“Look at this,” it said.

“What?”

“Two days ago I deployed particle detectors astern,” it said (although “astern,” it felt bound to warn her, was an almost meaningless direction in terms of the geometries involved), “and began counting significant quantum events. This is the result.”

“Two days ago?”

“Stochastic resonance takes time.”

Seria Mau had the data piped into her tank in the form of a signature diagram and studied them. What she saw was limited by the White Cat’s ability to represent ten spatial dimensions as four: an irradiated-looking grey space, near the centre of which you could see, knotted together, some worms of spectral yellow light, constantly shifting, pulsing, bifurcating and changing colour. Various grids could be laid over this model, to represent different regimes and analyses.

“What is it?” she said.

“I think it’s a ship.”

Seria Mau studied the image again. She ran comparison studies. “It isn’t any kind of ship I know. Is it old? What is it doing out there?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Why?”

“I’m not yet entirely certain where ‘ out there’ is.”

“Spare me,” said Seria Mau. “Do you know anything useful at all?”

“It’s keeping pace with us.”

Seria Mau stared at the trace. “That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s nothing like a K-ship. What shall we do?”

“Keep sorting quanta,” said the mathematics.

Seria Mau opened a line to the human quarters of the ship.

There, one of the men had launched a holographic display and was clearly making some kind of presentation to the rest of them, while the female clone sat in a corner painting her fingernails, laughing with a kind of weak maliciousness at everything he said, and making inappropriate comments.

“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why she never has to do that. I have to do it.”

The display was like a big smoky cube, showing fly-by images from the Radio Bay cluster, which contained among others Suntory IV and 3-alpha-Ferris VII. Low-temperature gas clouds roiled and swirled, failed old brown dwarf stars blinking through them like drunks crossing a highway in fog. A planet jumped into resolution, mushroom-coloured, with creamy sulphurous-looking bands. Then there were images from the surface: clouds, chaotic streaming rain, less weather than chemistry. A scatter of non-human buildings abandoned two hundred thousand years before: something that looked like a maze. They often left mazes. “What we’ve got here is old,” the man concluded. “It could be really old.” Suddenly the camera jumped to an asteroid in full view of the Tract, which blazed out of the display like costume jewellery on black velvet.

“I think we’ll leave that for a later trip,” he said.

Everyone laughed except the clone, who spread her hands in front of her. “Why do you all hate me so,” she said, looking at him over her bright red nails, “that you make me do it and not her?”

He went over and drew her gently to her feet. He kissed her. “We like you to do it because we love you,” he said. “We all love you.” He took one of her hands and examined her fingernails. “That’s very historical,” he said. The hologram blinked, expanded until it measured four or five feet on a side, and was suddenly showing the clone’s face in the throes of sexual arousal. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide with pain or pleasure, Seria Mau couldn’t tell. You couldn’t see what was being done to her. They all sat down and watched, giving the hologram their full consideration as if it were still showing images of Radio Bay, old alien artefacts, big secrets, the things they most wanted. Soon they were fucking again.

Seria Mau, who had begun to wonder if she knew their real motives for being aboard, watched them suspiciously for some minutes more. Then she disconnected.

Her dreams continued to distress her.

They gave her a sense of herself as a kind of bad-natured origami, a space accordion-folded to contain more than seemed possible or advisable, as full of invisible matter as the halo itself. Was this how human beings dreamed of themselves? She had no idea.

Ten days into the voyage, she dreamed of a boat-ride on a river. It was called the New Pearl River and was wider, the mother told them, than a mile. From each bank, benign but exotically tailored vegetation hung down into the water, the surface ripples of which looked firm and nacreous and gave off smells of almonds and vanilla. The mother loved it as much as the children. She trailed her bare feet in the cool pearly water, laughing. “Aren’t we lucky!” she kept saying. “Aren’t we lucky!” The children loved her brown eyes. They loved her enthusiasm for everything in the world.

“Aren’t we lucky!”

These words echoed across a change of scene, first to blackness, then to the garden again, with its dark laurels.

It was afternoon. It was raining. The old man—he was the father, and you could see how puzzled that responsibility made him, how much of an effort it was—had built a bonfire. The two children stood and watched him throw things onto it. Boxes, papers, photographs, clothes. Smoke lay about the garden in long flat layers, trapped by the inversions of early winter. They watched the hot core of the fire. Its smell, which was like any other bonfire, excited them despite themselves. They stood dressed up in coats and scarves and gloves, sad and guilty in the cold declining afternoon, watching the flames and coughing in the grey smoke.

He was too old to be a father, he seemed to be pleading. Too old.

Just as it became unbearable, someone snatched this dream away. Seria Mau found herself staring into a lighted shop window. It was a retro window, full of retro things. They were from Earth, conjuror’s things, children’s things made of bad plastic, feathers, cheap rubber, objects trivial in their day but now of great value to collectors. There were hanks of fake liquorice. There was a valentine heart which lit itself up by means of the loving diodes within. There were “X-Ray Specs” and elevator shoes. There was a dark red japanned box, in which you placed a billiard ball you would never find again, though you could hear it rattling about in there forever. There was the cup with a reflected face in the bottom which turned out not to be your own. There were the trick eternity rings and handcuffs you couldn’t take off. As she watched, the man in the black top hat and tails bent his upper body slowly into the window. His hat was on his head. He had removed his white kid gloves which he now held in the same hand as his beautiful ebony cane. His smile was unchanged, warm yet full of a glittering irony. He was a man who knew too much. Slowly and with a wide, generous gesture he used his free hand to take off his hat and sweep it across the contents of the window, as if to offer Seria Mau the items within. At the same time, she recognised, he was offering her himself. He was, in some way, these objects. His smile never changed. He replaced his hat slowly, unbent himself in polite silence, and disappeared.

A voice said: “Every day, the life of the body must usurp and disinherit the dream.” Then it said: “Though you never grew up, this is the last thing you saw as a child.”

Seria Mau woke shaking.

She shook and shook until the ship’s mathematics took pity on her, flushing the tank so that specific areas of her proteome could be flooded with complex artificial proteins.

“Listen,” it said. “We are having a problem here.”

“Show me,” said Seria Mau.

Up came the signature diagram again.

At its centre—if ten dimensions mediated as four can be said to have a centre—the lines of possibility wrote themselves so close to each other they became a solid: an inert object with the contours of a walnut, which was no longer changing much. Too many guesses had been made, was Seria Mau’s first thought. The original signal, complicating itself towards infinity, had collapsed into this stochastic nugget and was now even more unreadable.

“This is useless,” she complained.

“It seems that way,” the mathematics said equably. “But if we go to a regime that corrects for the dynaflow shift, and set N quite high, what we get is this . . .”

There was a sudden jump. Randomness resolved to order. The signal simplified itself and split in two, with the fainter component—coloured deep violet—blinking rapidly in and out of view.

“What am I looking at?” demanded Seria Mau.

“Two vessels,” the mathematics told her. “The steady trace is a K-ship. Phase-locked to its mathematics is some kind of Nastic heavy asset: maybe a cruiser. One clear benefit is that no one can interpret their signature, but that’s a sideshow. The real issue is this: they’re using the K-ship as a navigational tool. I’ve never seen that done before. Whoever wrote the code is almost as good as me.”

Seria Mau stared at the display.

“What are they doing?” she whispered.

“Oh, they’re following us,” the mathematics said.