Divergence (28 page)

Constantine had been led to believe there were possibly three ways intelligence could arise. The first two methods were generally accepted as having been convincingly proven. Intelligence could appear as the result of evolution. Human intelligence was an example of this.

Second, intelligence could be written. The AIs of Earth did this all the time, writing new minds to order, minds to fill spaceships and robots and Von Neumann Machines.

Could I write a mind? Could I sit down and describe a scene, a thought and an emotion so well that it took life on the page? No, the page is not a suitable medium to allow movement, and this language is too ambiguous and overblown to capture the simplicity of the underlying mechanism of thought.

Constantine had once been told that a mind was a sentence that could read itself. A book might have thoughts written within it, but something external had to be applied to the book in order to read the words. But what if words could be written in some medium that allowed the words to take on a life of their own and refer back to themselves? What if the instructions telling the book how to read itself were also written in the book itself?

The periphery of the rainstorm was at the edge of the mountains. Constantine stood at the borderline of the storm, seemingly at the edge of a new world. Down there, on that dry, sleeping plain, something wonderful was awakening. The ancient machinery that filled the stone halls of the ziggurat had lain in wait for nearly forty years. A baited trap.

Something was beginning to move in there. Patterns rippled through the many-dimensional volumes enclosed by the processing spaces, repeating themselves, reflecting, constructing new patterns…

A third possible way that intelligence could arise had also been postulated: divine intervention. A dizzying feeling gripped Constantine at the enormity of what he was witnessing. This was what the Watcher believed: it believed itself to be the result of an interstellar computer virus, written long ago. It had set up the ziggurat on this forgotten planet in order to test this theory. It had filled the ziggurat with ancient machinery, hoping to catch the virus there.

Constantine had been brought to this planet by the Watcher in order to observe what happened there. A suitable vessel had been left open under the vast star-lit night, and Constantine had been charged with waiting for something to pour down from the unguessed heavens and fill it with the spirit.

And, unbelievably, it was happening now. The event that Constantine had not really believed would happen, the one he had waited nearly forty years to observe—and it was happening. Something was straining within the ziggurat, something was straining to be. A thread was blowing back and forth across the ranks of symbols aligned in the processing spaces that filled the building. If the Watcher’s theory were correct, then the same virus that had caused the Watcher to be born would now be taking root in the ziggurat.

Constantine had robot eyes; he was looking straight into the processing spaces. He jumped. Something was looking back at him: eyes, unaware of themselves, receptors for the patterns that flickered across them from outside.

Constantine stepped from the rainfall into the still night beyond. He descended the mountainside, preparing to receive the message that would be carried to humanity.

A low growl sounded. It began to climb in pitch. It was joined by another, and another. Sirens began to sound, rising howls in the night that sent the sleeping colonists tumbling from their beds. Arc lights slammed on and the sides of the ziggurat were lit up in red and yellow.

The ziggurat was armed—Constantine felt a hollowness inside at the thought. This was the secret pain he had carried inside himself for the past forty years. The Watcher wanted proof, not competition. The Watcher controlled a vast area of space; it did not want a challenger for its domain. There was a bomb in the ziggurat….

Judy gasped.

“What is it?” asked Constantine.

“Nothing,” said Judy. “Go on…”

Random symbols emerged from the processing space. They carried the edge of meaning

…Would you like to engage…

Constantine could see what was forming in there. But it was not at all what he had expected…

The siren’s note changed and horror lanced through him. No! He had to stop it. This was not what anyone had expected. He began to run across the plain. It was too far…

…and a magnetic pulse washed across the night. The howl of the sirens rattled and died. Motors stopped. Constantine only just got his own shields up in time to save his mind. But the rest of his body caught the full force of the pulse…

The rest of the crew were too busy gazing at Constantine to notice the way the venumbs were moving about.

“What happened?” pressed Saskia.

“Should they be doing that?” Constantine asked, pointing to the white body of one of the great wooden dinosaurs. It was twisting around on itself, almost overbalancing.

“They’re fine,” Maurice said, not bothering to look. “Answer her.”

Constantine shrugged. “Okay. We killed it. The Watcher killed it. Once it had proof of its theory, it killed that being.”

“But why?”

“I told you, it didn’t want competition. Look at the Enemy Domain. That was a result of the rise of another AI. The Watcher didn’t want a repeat of that conflict. It doesn’t trust other powerful AIs.”

“That’s a good excuse,” Maurice muttered sarcastically.

“What happened to
you
?” Saskia asked, ignoring the interruption.

“The colonists found me three days later. I was half buried in mud, my body completely shut down, most of the circuits tripped by the magnetic pulse. The colonists argued for a whole day about whether they should jump-start me. They were angry about what had happened to them, feeling as if they had been tricked, and indeed they had been. The Watcher’s scheming had left them marooned on a planet where nothing now worked. All their machinery was ruined.”

Constantine had worked long and hard himself to build that colony. The memory of a Geep, half submerged in the mud, its motor beyond repair, rose up in his mind.

“But they obviously got you started in the end,” Maurice was saying.

“Yes, they started me in the end.”

“So what are you doing here?”

There was an edge to Judy’s voice that none of them had heard from her before. She had folded her arms across her chest, and there was a haunted look in her eyes.

“Are you okay, Judy?” Edward asked hesitantly.

She didn’t appear to hear him.

“Why are you
here,
Constantine?” Judy shouted. “What happened to you? What did you see inside that ziggurat?”

Constantine patted her arm. Then Maurice and the rest of the crew looked on in astonishment as the robot placed a plastic hand behind her head and drew her close in a gentle embrace. “You knew, Judy, didn’t you? You knew about the ziggurat.”

“What did she know about the ziggurat?” shouted Maurice.

Constantine went on. “I had to get to Earth,” he said. “I was trapped on a forgotten planet with possibly the key to life itself in my grasp. The Watcher, it had been wrong all of this time. Nobody had guessed, let alone the Watcher itself. And now I had to get to Earth. But how?”

“‘Key to life itself’?”

“What had the Watcher been wrong about?”

“About everything. About what it was and where it came from. About its place in the universe. I saw it all there in that moment before the ziggurat was destroyed.”

“What did you see?”

But Constantine wasn’t going to say. That information was for the Watcher. He went on: “Look, there was no machinery working there anymore. We spent two years doing what we could just to grow enough food to feed the colonists; it was nearly three years before I managed to get a communications antenna up.”

“And then what happened?”

Constantine looked at the slowly flexing fingers of his right hand. “Lots of things,” he murmured. “And then one day an FE ship arrived on the planet.”

“What’s the matter, Maurice?” Judy asked.

“You know, don’t you?” Maurice said.

Judy scowled. “I know? What do I know?”

“You know what he’s talking about.”

“Come on, Maurice. What’s the matter with you? You’ve been in a foul mood ever since yesterday morning.” She gave a nasty smile. “I would have thought that sleeping with Saskia would have relaxed you a little bit.”

“You
are
upset,” said Maurice. “Look at you, you’re arguing with me. Showing emotion, not hiding in impassivity.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Judy, her emotion evaporating into the wide-open space of the large hold. Saskia and Edward stood still, not wanting to interrupt. They wanted answers, too. Constantine noted the faintest suggestion of a twitch at the corner of Maurice’s eye.

“You’ve been lying to us from the very start, haven’t you, Judy? You’ve been playing with us. You see, it wasn’t until yesterday morning that I realized, not until I understood the way you manipulated Saskia into sleeping with me.”

“What?”

“Stay out of this, Saskia.”

Saskia blushed hotly. “Don’t you tell me what to do, Maurice. She didn’t manipulate me. I make my own decisions.”

Maurice threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, she lets you think that, Saskia,” he said. “We’re all doing what she wants. She’s been manipulating us ever since she came aboard this ship. She’s been putting us off guard, catching us at our most vulnerable moments, doing what she can to keep us thinking only about ourselves and to stop us thinking about her.”

A cold breeze. Suddenly a venumb was towering over Judy, swinging its headless neck back and forth, as if searching for something. How had it got so close so quickly? What was it doing? Judy didn’t seem to notice, a still black shape with a pale face.

“I was trying to help you,” she explained softly. “It’s what I do.”

Judy’s reply seemed a measured moment of calm amidst the torrent of emotions. Constantine could see that it only infuriated Maurice more.

“Hah, it’s what you
did
,” Maurice corrected. “Of course you were trying to help. But you were manipulating us, too. You’re Social Care.”

Judy made no reply to this.

“Is this true?” asked Edward.

Judy was a silent china doll, black eyes glittering in a porcelain face.

“Of course it’s true, Edward.” Maurice laughed. “Social Care are experts at it. Just because she’s retired doesn’t mean she can give it up—especially when she has reasons for wanting to hide something. And she does. Come on, Judy, tell us the truth. How do you know
him
?” He pointed at Constantine.

“I don’t,” Judy said, “or at least, not firsthand. But I have heard about him.”

“How?”

What was going on with the venumbs? What could they hear? Constantine had half an ear trained on the space around the ship, listening for whatever it was. The other ear, however, was fixed firmly on Judy’s story.

“At night I dream of a hand over my face—”

“What do you mean by that?” Maurice demanded.

“It’s an anxiety dream,” Judy explained. “When I’m feeling stressed, I dream of a hand hovering just over my face. It reaches down from the ceiling, like it’s trying to smother me.”

A long creak echoed through the large hold. The farthest wooden venumb looked as if it was crouching, ready to spring. Slowly the humans turned back to face Judy.

“You’re changing the subject. How do you know Constantine?”

And it all came out. Judy spoke.

“I told you most of it already when I first came on board. Twelve years ago I met a robot called Chris. It told me that the Watcher had actually
killed
someone. It told me that it was going to kill again in the future.”

“That’s silly,” Edward protested. “The Watcher doesn’t kill.”

“He does,” Constantine said. “I witnessed the murder. I felt the EM pulse that ripped through that ziggurat.”

A spasm of pain crossed Judy’s face. “Chris told me that was going to happen. I was supposed to prevent that murder.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because I’ve spent the last ten years running. Trying to get away from Chris and the Watcher! Both of them want me to help them—”

“Why? Why you?”

“
I don’t know why me!
Chris wants me to help him to destroy the Watcher. He says that I will help him in the end. What if he’s right? He is more intelligent than I am. I feel like a puppet.
I am a puppet!
”

And at that, the first little crack in the dam that had held back forty years’ worth of emotion appeared. A tear ran down Judy’s white face. She wiped it away. The dam held steady.

And then, in perfect synchronicity, both of the venumbs pounced.

There was a cracking explosion of wood. White splinters crackling across the floor. Saskia yelped and slapped a hand to her cheek, blood welling through her fingers, a white sliver protruding. Constantine was behind her, his body arched as he absorbed the force of three larger pieces of wood.

“How did you get there so quickly…?” she began.