[Clavain, Remontoire… let me introduce you to the Master of Works.]
The servitor?
[The Master’s more than just a servitor, I assure you.]
Skade shifted to spoken language. ‘Master… we wish to see the interior. Please let us through.’
In reply Clavain heard the buzzing, wasplike voice of the Master. ‘I am not familiar with these two individuals.’
‘Clavain and Remontoire both have Closed Council clearance. Here, read my mind. You’ll see I am not being coerced.’
There was a pause while the machine stepped closer to Skade, easing the full mass of its body from the collar. It had many legs and limbs, some tipped with picklike feet, others ending in specialised grippers, tools or sensors. On either side of its wedge-shaped head were major sensor clusters, packed together like faceted compound eyes. Skade stood her ground while the servitor advanced, until it was towering over her. The machine lowered its head and swept it from side to side, and then jerked backwards.
I will want to read their minds as well.‘
‘Be my guest.’
The servitor moved to Remontoire, angled its head and swept him. It took a little longer with him than it had spent on Skade. Then, seemingly satisified, it proceeded to Clavain. He felt it rummaging through his mind, its scrutiny fierce and systematic. As the machine trawled him, a torrent of remembered smells, sounds and visual images burst into his consciousness, and then each image vanished to be replaced by another. Now and then the machine would pause, back up and retrieve an earlier image, lingering over it suspiciously. Others it skipped over with desultory disinterest. The process was mercifully quick, but it still felt like he was being ransacked.
Then the scanning stopped, the torrent ceased and Clavain’s mind was his own again.
‘This one is conflicted. He appears to have had doubts. I have doubts about him. I cannot retrieve deep neural structures. Perhaps I should scan him at higher resolution. A modest surgical procedure would permit…’
Skade interrupted the servitor. ‘That’s not necessary, Master. He’s entitled to his doubts. Let us through, will you?’
‘This is not in order. This is most irregular. A limited surgical intervention…’ The machine still had its clusters of sensors locked on to Clavain.
‘Master, this is a direct command. Let us pass.’
The servitor pulled away. ‘Very well. I comply under duress. I will insist that the visit be brief.’
‘We won’t detain you,’ Skade said.
‘No, you will not. You will also remove your weapons. I will not permit high-energy-density devices within my comet.’
Clavain glanced down at his suit’s utility belt, unclipping the low-yield boser pistol he had barely been aware he was carrying. He moved to place the pistol on the ice, but even as he did so there was a whiplike blur of motion from the Master of Works, flicking the pistol from his hand. He saw it spin off into the darkness above him, flung away at greater than escape velocity. Skade and Remontoire did likewise, and the Master disposed of their weapons with the same casual flick. Then the servitor spun round, its legs a dancing blur of metal, and then thrust itself back into the hole.
[Come on. It doesn’t really like visitors, and it’ll start getting irritated if we stay too long.]
Remontoire pushed a thought into their heads. [You mean it’s not irritated yet?]
What the hell is it, Skade?
[A servitor, of course, only somewhat brighter than the norm… does that disturb you?]
Clavain followed her through the collar and into the tunnel, drifting more than walking, guiding himself between the throatlike walls of compactified ice. He had barely been aware of the pistol he carried until it had been confiscated, but now he felt quite vulnerable without it. He fingered his utility belt, but there was nothing else on it that would serve as a weapon against the servitor, should it chose to turn against them. There were a few clamps and miniature grapples, a couple of thumb-sized signalling beacons and a standard-issue sealant spray. The only thing approaching an actual weapon — while the spray looked like a gun, it had a range of only two or three centimetres — was a short-bladed piezo-knife, sufficient to pierce spacesuit fabric but not much use against an armoured machine or even a well-trained adversary.
You know damned well it does. I’ve never had my mind invaded by a machine… not the way that one just did.
[It just needs to know it can trust us.]
While it trawled him he had tasted the sharp metallic tang of its intelligence. How clever is it, exactly? Turing-compliant?
[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.]
I’ve had time to revise my opinion on the subject.
[Is it that you feel threatened by it, I wonder?]
By a machine? No. What I feel, Skade, is pity. Pity that you let that machine become intelligent while forcing it to remain your slave. I didn’t think that was quite what we believed in.
He felt Remontoire’s quiet presence. [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.]
Somewhere ahead of them was a pale lilac glow that picked out the natural patterning of the tunnel walls. Clavain could see the servitor’s dark spindly bulk against the light source. It must have been listening in to this conversation, he thought, hearing them debate what it represented.
[I regret that we had to do it. But we didn’t have any choice. We needed clever servitors.]
[It’s slavery,] Remontoire insisted.
[Desperate times call for desperate measures, Remontoire.]
Clavain peered into the pale purple gloom. What’s so desperate? I thought all we were doing was recovering some lost property.
The Master of Works brought them to the interior of Skade’s comet, calling them to a halt inside a small, airless blister set into the interior wall of the hollowed-out body. They stationed themselves by hooking limbs into restraint straps attached to the blister’s stiff alloy frame. The blister was hermetically sealed from the comet’s main chamber. The vacuum that had been achieved within was so high-grade that even the vapour leakage from Clavain’s suit would have caused an unacceptable degradation.
Clavain stared into the chamber. Beyond the glass was a cavern of dizzying scale. It was bathed in rapturous blue light, filled with vast machines and an almost subliminal sense of scurrying activity. For a moment the scene was far too much to take in. Clavain felt as if he was staring into the depths of perspective in a fabulous detailed medieval painting, beguiled by the interlocking arches and towers of some radiant celestial city, glimpsing hosts of silver-leaf angels in the architecture, squadron upon squadron of them as far as the eye could see, receding into the cerulean blue of infinity. Then he grasped the scale of things and realised with a perceptual jolt that the angels were merely distant machines: droves of sterile construction servitors traversing the vacuum by the thousand as they went about their tasks. They communicated with each other using lasers, and it was the scatter and reflection of those beams that drenched the chamber in such shivering blue radiance. And it was indeed cold, Clavain knew. Dotted around the walls of the chamber he recognised the nubbed black cones of cryo-arithmetic engines, calculating overtime to suck away the heat of intense industrial activity that would otherwise have boiled the comet away.