The Prefect (29 page)

They walked into blue-hazed sunlight, shining down from the arc of the window band eight kilometres above. Around them stood ornamental ponds and lawns, crisscrossed by neatly tended gravel and marble pathways. Fountains were still burbling somewhere nearby. Everything looked utterly normal, exactly as Thalia had expected save for the absence of a rampaging mob. Perhaps she was doing the citizens of Aubusson a disservice. But then she recalled how quickly the reception committee had turned against her. If they were truly representative of the citizenry, then there was every reason to expect a similarly unpleasant reaction from the other eight hundred thousand of them.

‘I hear voices,' Caillebot said suddenly. ‘I think they're coming from the other side of the stalk.'

‘I hear them, too,' Parnasse said, ‘but we're not going that way. Straightest path is right ahead, though those trees, directly towards the endcap.'

‘Maybe I should speak to them,' Thalia said. ‘Tell them what's happened, how it won't be long before things are sorted out.'

‘We had a plan, girl,' Parnasse said. ‘The idea was to walk and stay out of trouble. Those voices don't sound too happy, the way I'm hearing ‘em.'

‘I agree,' said Meriel Redon.

Thalia bit her lip. She could hear the voices as well, just above the burble of fountains. A lot of people, sounding agitated and angry. Shouts that were threatening to become screams.

Her hand tightened on the whiphound again. Something was wrong, she knew. That wasn't the sound of a crowd high on its own fury and indignation, wanting the blood of whoever had taken down their precious abstraction.

That was the sound of frightened people.

‘Listen to me,' Thalia said, fighting to keep the fear out of her own voice. ‘I need to see what's happening. That's my duty as a prefect. You four keep going, heading towards the endcap. I'll catch you up.'

‘That's not a pretty sound,' Parnasse said.

‘I know. That's why I need to check it out.'

‘It isn't your problem,' Caillebot said. ‘Our constables will take care of any civil unrest. That's what they're for.'

‘You have a standing police force?'

The gardener shook his head. ‘No, but the system will have called up a constabulary from the citizenry, the same way we were called up to form the reception party.'

‘There is no system,' Parnasse said.

‘Then the people who were called up last time will resume their duties.'

‘When exactly
was
last time?' Thalia asked. The agitated noise was growing louder. It sounded more like the whooping of excited wildfowl than any sound produced by people.

‘I don't remember. A couple of years ago.'

‘It was more like ten,' Meriel Redon said. ‘And even if the constables self-activate, how are they all going to get where they're needed if the trains are down?'

‘We don't have time to talk this over.' Thalia unclipped her whiphound, tightening her hand around the heavy shaft of the handle. ‘I'm going to take a look.'

‘On your own?' Redon asked.

‘I won't have to get too close. The whiphound can give me an advance pair of eyes. In the meantime you keep walking along this path, towards that row of trees. I'll find you.'

‘Wait,' Cuthbertson said urgently. ‘We have Miracle Bird. Let's use him.'

‘How?' Thalia asked.

‘He can overfly the crowd and tell us what he sees when he returns. He doesn't need abstraction for that. Do you, boy?'

Miracle Bird's beak clacked in return. ‘I can fly,' said the mechanical owl. ‘I'm an excellent bird.'

‘He doesn't sound as bright as when he met me at the hub,' Thalia said.

Cuthbertson raised his hand, Miracle Bird responding by unfolding and flexing his glittering alloy wings. ‘He knows what to do. Shall I release him?'

Thalia glanced at the whiphound. She might need its close-up surveillance mode later, but for now an aerial snapshot would be at least as useful.

‘Do it,' she said.

Cuthbertson pushed his arm higher. Miracle Bird released its talons, its wings hauling it aloft with a whoosh of downthrust. Thalia watched it climb higher and recede, sun flaring off its foil-thin feathers with every wingbeat, until it vanished around the side of the stalk.

‘It'll know to come back to us?' Thalia asked.

‘Trust the bird,' Cuthbertson said.

It was an uncomfortably long time before the owl reappeared, emerging around the other side of the stalk. It loitered above them, then spiralled down for an awkwardly executed landing on Cuthbertson's sleeve. He whispered something to the bird; the bird whispered something back.

‘Did he get anything?' Caillebot asked.

‘He recorded what he saw. He says he saw people and machines below.'

Caillebot narrowed his eyes. ‘Machines?'

‘Servitors, probably. But that's all he can tell us himself. He's a smart bird, but he's still PreCalvinist.'

Caillebot looked disgusted. ‘Then we haven't achieved anything, other than wasted time.'

‘Let's find some shade. Then we'll see what we achieved.'

‘What in Voi's name do we need shade for?' Caillebot snapped.

‘Find me some and I'll show you.' The automaton-maker tapped a finger against the owl's delicate jewelled eyes. Thalia understood - the eyes looked very much like laser projectors - and started looking around, hoping they would not have to go back into the lobby.

‘Will that do?' Meriel Redon asked, pointing to the shadow cast by an ornamental arch at the foot of one of the pond-spanning bridges.

‘Good work,' Thalia said. They trooped over to the arch and made room for Cuthbertson to kneel down, bringing Miracle Bird's head to within thirty centimetres of the dark marbled floor.

‘Start playback, boy,' Cuthbertson said. ‘Everything you shot, from the moment I let you go.'

The owl looked down. A square of bright colour appeared on the dark-grey marble. Thalia saw faces and clothes, a huddle of people diminishing as the bird took flight. Its point of view shifted as it looked away from them. Blue haze, textured by the faint roads, parks and communities of the farside wall. Then the ivory-white spire of the polling core's stalk filled the owl's field of view. The stalk widened, then veered to the right as the owl swept past it. Now Miracle Bird's point of view shifted smoothly downwards, tracking towards the ground beneath him. Geometric divisions of grass and water slid across the image square. One of the escalator ramps down to the train station. Then a larger green space dotted with the pale, foreshortened blobs of people, many dozens of them.

‘Hold it there,' Cuthbertson said. ‘Freezeframe and zoom in picture centre, boy.'

The image enlarged. The blobs resolved into individuals. There were at least fifty or sixty people, Thalia judged; maybe more out of sight. They were not just standing around any more, nor had they assembled into the agitated clumps of a restless, bad-tempered crowd.

No. They had formed a single, tight-packed group, jammed closer together than normal social etiquette would have allowed. A thought started to form in Thalia's mind, but Meriel Redon said it aloud.

‘They're being herded,' she said, very softly. ‘They're being herded by machines.'

The furniture-maker was right, Thalia saw. The people had been shunted together by servitors, at least a dozen of them. Their squat forms were quite unmistakable, even from above. Some of them moved on wheels or tracks, some on slug-like pads, some on legs. She thought she recognised at least one of the bright blue gardening servitors that they had passed on the way to the polling core. She recalled the wicked gleam of its trimmer arms as it carved a peacock out of the hedge.

‘This isn't good,' Thalia said.

‘The constables must have tasked the servitors to assist them,' Caillebot replied.

Parnasse pointed a stubby finger at the image, indicating the shoulder of a man wearing a bright orange armband. ‘Sorry to dampen your enthusiasm, but I think that is a constable. The machines seem to be treating him the same way they're treating everyone else.'

‘Then he must be an impostor wearing a constable's armband. The machines would only be acting under the supervision of the officially designated constables.'

‘Then where are they?' Parnasse asked.

Caillebot looked irritated. ‘I don't know. Sending instructions from somewhere else.'

Parnasse looked suitably unimpressed. ‘With no abstraction? What are they using, messenger pigeons?'

‘Maybe the machines are programmed to act this way when they sense a civil emergency,' Redon said doubtfully. ‘They're only doing what the constables would do if they were here.'

‘Has anything like this happened before?' Thalia asked.

‘Not in my memory,' Redon said.

‘There have been disturbances,' Parnasse said. ‘Storms in a teacup. But the machines have never started acting like constables.'

‘Then I don't think that's what we're looking at,' Thalia said.

‘What, then?' Parnasse asked.

He was starting to rankle her, but she kept her composure. ‘I'm starting to worry that this is something more sinister. I'm beginning to think that what we're seeing here is some kind of takeover.'

‘By whom?' asked Caillebot. ‘Another habitat?'

‘I don't know. That's why I need to see things with my own eyes. I want you four to stay here and keep quiet until I'm back. If you don't hear from me inside five minutes, start making your way to the endcap.'

‘Are you insane?' Redon asked.

‘No,' Thalia said. ‘Just on duty. There are people in distress here. Since the local law enforcement appears to be failing them, they've become a matter for Panoply.'

‘But there's just one of you.'

‘Then I'd better make myself count, hadn't I?' Sounding braver than she felt, Thalia tapped her sleeve. ‘Five minutes, people. I'm serious.'

She left the shade of the arch, crouching as she made her way from point to point, the whiphound gripped in her right hand like a truncheon. Away from the group, away from their demands and bickering, she found herself starting to think things through. Servitors were programmed with a degree of autonomy, but - unless they'd been uploaded with some very specialised new crowd-control routines - the kind of coordinated action they had seen via the owl implied that someone was pulling their strings from afar. That in turn meant that abstraction could not be down completely.

She remembered her glasses. Furious with herself for not using them sooner, she delved into her tunic pocket with her left hand and slipped them on. The view hardly changed, confirming that abstraction was absent or at least running at a very low level. But symbols were dancing in her lower-right field of view, indicating that the glasses were detecting signals that very much resembled servitor protocols.
Someone
was puppeting the machines after all. Abstraction wasn't down; it was just that the people had been locked out.

It was all looking too damned coincidental for comfort. She'd been sent in to make a systems upgrade, and at the very moment when the upgrade had gone through, something had thrown a wrench into the system.

Thalia felt dizzy. She'd had a moment of clarity and it had felt like the thin skin of the world opening up beneath her feet.

She reined her thoughts in before they pulled her somewhere treacherous. Still crouched, moving from cover to cover as if evading a sniper, Thalia finally came in sight of the area of lawn where the machines were herding the citizens. She had the protection of a low hedge, just tall enough to shield her when she was crouching. It had been trained into a lattice pattern, offering diamond-shaped peepholes through to the other side. Thalia was grateful for her black uniform. A military-grade servitor would have spotted her already, using thermal imaging or any one of a dozen other sensors designed to sniff out concealed human prey. But these were servitors manufactured to tend formal gardens, not engage in search-and-destroy missions.

From this low angle, it was not easy to tell exactly what was going on. She could see the cordon of robots, with the humans crammed into a mass behind them. The machines had hemmed the people into a corner of the lawn, backed against the angle formed by two tall hedges. About a dozen servitors appeared to be involved in the herding operation. If someone tried to break free of the mass, they would only manage a few steps before one of the fast machines sped around to block their exit.

Most people were making no effort to escape, Thalia noticed. The crowd was more subdued than before. They were quieter, talking more than shouting, and a handful of people even looked quite relaxed. The physical size and mass of the machines was apparently enough of a deterrent against escape - some of the servitors were much taller than a person - but they also had makeshift weapons. Thalia had already seen the blades of the hedge-cutter, but that wasn't all. Amongst their arsenal the servitors also had high-pressure water sprays, to keep the marble tiles clean. They had flails to trim the edges of lawns. They had manipulator arms to handle tools and materials.

Now that the crowd was quieter, she could hear a single voice dominating all others. It was measured, reassuring. It had an amplified edge that suggested it was coming from one of the servitors.

She whispered a command to the whiphound. ‘Forward surveillance mode. Advance twenty metres and hold for one hundred seconds before returning. Extreme stealth posture.'