On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

For as long as Chiku had known of the Watchkeepers’ existence, she had pictured them hanging in the sky like dark chandeliers, imagined them rising above the horizon, vaster and more ominous than any moon.

Now that she was actually on Crucible, she was surprised to discover that the Watchkeepers were hardly ever visible. Improbable as it seemed at first that the twenty-two machines could be so elusive, it was not so surprising when she thought about it properly. The machines were black except for the light that shone from their blunt ends, but no trace of that radiation was detectable from Crucible’s surface. Nor was there any hint of the blue glowing structures they had glimpsed between the plate-like encrustations covering the pine cones. The machines’ black skins rendered them no brighter than the space against which they were backgrounded, and they became as invisible as the Moon’s unlit face. More so, in fact, because Earth’s moon reflected back some of the Earth’s own glow, but the machines were so pitilessly dark that they reflected nothing. They also avoided eclipsing Crucible’s sun from any point on the surface, casting no shadows.

Only at night, when their hanging forms eclipsed whole constellations of stars, was their presence felt. But even then they were no more troubling than rafts of high dark cirrus. She still could not see the blue rays spiking out into interstellar space.

So far, Arachne had persistently fudged around her lack of progress in communicating with the Watchkeepers, but now Chiku had some leverage over her host. For every titbit Chiku disclosed about Eunice or the likely behaviour of the remaining holoships, she demanded an equivalent crumb of insight into the nature of the Watchkeepers.

Presuming any of the things Arachne told her were true, Chiku learned that Ocular had detected the blue beams, which then communicated a message to Arachne, a message that appeared to have been expressly coded for maximum comprehension by another machine-substrate consciousness. In human terms, the message was a form of greeting – a virtual handshake across the stars, from mind to mind.

But it was also a warning, and an invitation. The message cautioned Arachne that as a young machinesubstrate consciousness, she was at her most vulnerable to predation. The Watchkeepers had seen this happen before. Young minds were often snuffed out by their predecessor intelligences before they attained true independence. Being confined to the space around a single star was not healthy – a space already congested and contested by a nervous and resource-hungry organic intelligence.

So Arachne was encouraged to propagate herself. Mandala would provide the necessary incentive for the organic minds to build the means for her conveyance. They would build caravans of holoships, but more importantly they would send swift robotic seed packages ahead of these slow behemoths.

These seed packages would make robots and the robots would make more robots. By insinuating herself into the replicating architecture of the Provider seed packages, Arachne could establish a second facet of herself around 61 Virginis f. Simultaneously, the first facet would continue to consolidate herself by planting roots into the system-wide Mechanism.

This objective had succeeded – to a point.

But now that Arachne had established this outpost, the Watchkeepers remained as remote as ever. Worse – and this was supposition on Chiku’s part – this facet of Arachne had lost confidence in the veracity of the communications originating from the mother solar system. She felt beleaguered, lured across space to engage with another intelligence that appeared incurious or unimpressed by her own intellect. There might well have been a preliminary exchange, but it was clear to Chiku that the Watchkeepers had also communicated in very forceful terms that the Providers were not to approach Mandala. They were not yet ready for that, and in the Watchkeepers’ unfathomable consideration they might never be.

But Arachne was not the only one with a stake in the matter. Humans had set out for Crucible to establish colonies and explore Mandala first hand. They had dreamed of flying its stark canyons, sailing its godlike channels. And perhaps somewhere in Mandala, invisible from space, was a message or a clue to its function and origin.

Whatever the Watchkeepers’ opinion of the robots already in the system, humans would demand the right to explore more thoroughly. And if that was denied them, they would want to know why. Whatever the outcome might be, it was imperative that the humans make contact with the Watchkeepers. Perhaps the alien machines would be more receptive to the overtures of organic intelligence.

Or perhaps… Perhaps there was a third option. A new idea began to crystallise in Chiku’s mind that quickly took on a life of its own. It was not just humans on their way to Crucible. Hidden away among them was a machine-substrate consciousness that contained elements of human neural organisation. An effigy of a dead human woman that was also a true artificial intelligence, able to empathise in equal measure with the kingdoms of steel and flesh. A being that stood at the equilateral pole between humans and Providers, and which possessed an almost reckless appetite for new experience…

Eunice could be the key to everything. So typical of an Akinya, Chiku reflected, to have to be at the heart of events. It was a kind of vanity, the way the members of her family kept jamming themselves into history’s flow. The predisposition was so strong that it even applied to their machine emulations.

Even the images we make of ourselves are monstrous, Chiku thought.