Galactic North (15 page)

“Unlike the worms.”

“Yes. They’re like clockwork toys, programmed with a few simple rules.” Setterholm stooped down and grabbed the ice pick for himself. “They always respond in exactly the same way to the same input stimulus. And the kinds of stimuli they respond to are simple in the extreme: a few gradations of temperature; a few biochemical cues picked up from the ice itself. But the emergent properties . . .”

Clavain forced himself to a sitting position. “There’s that word again.”

“It’s the network, Nevil. The system of tunnels the worms dig through the ice. Don’t you understand? That’s where the real complexity lies. That’s what I was always more interested in. Of course, it took me years to see it for what it is—”

“Which is?”

“A self-evolving network. One that has the capacity to adapt; to learn.”

“It’s just a series of channels bored through ice, Setterholm. ”

“No. It’s infinitely more than that.” The man craned his neck as far as the architecture of his suit would allow, revelling in the palatial beauty of the chamber. “There are two essential elements in any neural network, Nevil. Connections and nodes are necessary, but not enough. The connections must be capable of being weighted; adjusted in strength according to usefulness. And the nodes must be capable of processing the inputs from the connections in a deterministic manner, like logic gates.” He gestured around the chamber. “Here, there is no absolutely sharp distinction between the connections and the nodes, but the essences remain. The worms lay down secretions when they travel, and those secretions determine how other worms make use of the same channels; whether they utilise one route or another. There are many determining factors—the sexes of the worms, the seasons, others I won’t bore you with. But the point is simple. The secretions—and the effect they have on the worms—mean that the topology of the network is governed by subtle emergent principles. And the breeding tangles function as logic gates; processing the inputs from their connecting nodes according to the rules of worm sex, caste and hierarchy. It’s messy, slow and biological—but the end result is that the worm colony as a whole functions as a neural network. It’s a program that the worms themselves are running, even though any given worm hasn’t a clue that it’s a part of a larger whole.”

Clavain absorbed all that and thought carefully before asking the question that occurred to him. “How does it change?”

“Slowly,” Setterholm said. “Sometimes routes fall into disuse because the secretions inhibit other worms from using them. Gradually, the glacier seals them shut. At the same time other cracks open by chance—the glacier’s own fracturing imposes a constant chaotic background on the network—or the worms bore new holes. Seen in slow motion—our time frame—almost nothing ever seems to happen, let alone change. But imagine speeding things up, Nevil. Imagine if we could see the way the network has changed over the last century, or the last thousand years . . . imagine what we might find. A constantly evolving loom of connections, shifting and changing eternally. Now— does that remind you of anything?”

Clavain answered in the only way that he knew would satisfy Setterholm. “A mind, I suppose. A newborn one, still forging neural connections.”

“Yes. Oh, you’d doubtless like to point out that the network is isolated, so it can’t be responding to stimuli beyond itself—but we can’t know that for certain. A season is like a heartbeat here, Nevil! What we think of as geologically slow processes—a glacier cracking, two glaciers colliding— those events could be as forceful as caresses and sounds to a blind child.” He paused and glanced at the screen in the back of the imaging radar. “That’s what I wanted to find out. A century ago, I was able to study the network for a handful of decades, and I found something that astonished me. The colony moves, reshapes itself constantly, as the glacier shifts and breaks up. But no matter how radically the network changes its periphery, no matter how thoroughly the loom evolves, there are deep structures inside the network that are always preserved.” Setterholm’s finger traced the red mass at the heart of the green tunnel map. “In the language of network topology, the tunnel system is scale-free rather than exponential. It’s the hallmark of a highly organised network with a few rather specialised processing centres—hubs, if you like. This is one. I believe its function is to cause the whole network to move away from a widening fracture in the glacier. It would take me much more than a century to find out for sure, although everything I’ve seen here con firms what I originally thought. I mapped other structures in other colonies, too. They can be huge, spread across cubic kilometres of ice. But they always persist. Don’t you see what that means? The network has begun to develop specialised areas of function. It’s begun to process information, Nevil. It’s begun to creep its way towards thought.”

Clavain looked around him once more, trying to see the chamber in the new light that Setterholm had revealed. Think not of the worms as entities in their own right, he thought, but as electrical signals, ghosting along synaptic pathways in a neural network made of solid ice . . .

He shivered. It was the only appropriate response.

“Even if the network processes information . . . there’s no reason to think it could ever become conscious.”

“Why not, Nevil? What’s the fundamental difference between perceiving the universe via electrical signals transmitted along nerve tissue, and via fracture patterns moving through a vast block of ice?”

“I suppose you have a point.”

“I had to save them, Nevil. Not just the worms, but the network they were a part of. We couldn’t come all this way and just wipe out the first thinking thing we’d ever encountered in the universe, simply because it didn’t fit into our neat little preconceived notions of what alien thought would actually be like.”

“But saving the worms meant killing everyone else.”

“You think I didn’t realise that? You think it didn’t agonise me to do what I had to do? I’m a human being, Nevil—not a monster. I knew exactly what I was doing and I knew exactly what it would make me look like to anyone who came here afterwards.”

“But you still did it.”

“Put yourself in my shoes. How would you have acted?”

Clavain opened his mouth, expecting an easy answer to spring to mind. But nothing came; not for several seconds. He was thinking about Setterholm’s question, more thoroughly than he had done so far. Until then he had satisfied himself with the quiet, unquestioned assumption that he would not have acted the way Setterholm had done. But could he really be so sure? Setterholm, after all, had truly believed that the network formed a sentient whole; a thinking being. Possessing that knowledge must have made him feel divinely chosen; sanctioned to commit any act to preserve the fabulously rare thing he had found. And he had, after all, been right.

“You haven’t answered me.”

“That’s because I thought the question warranted something more than a flippant answer, Setterholm. I like to think I wouldn’t have acted the way you did, but I don’t suppose I can ever be sure of that.”

Clavain stood up, inspecting his suit for damage; relieved that the scuffle had not injured him.

“You’ll never know.”

“No. I never will. But one thing’s clear enough. I’ve heard you talk; heard the fire in your words. You believe in your network, and yet you still couldn’t make the others see it. I doubt I’d have been able to do much better, and I doubt that I’d have thought of a better way to preserve what you’d found.”

“Then you’d have killed everyone, just like I did?” The realisation of it was like a heavy burden someone had just placed on his shoulders. It was so much easier to feel incapable of such acts. But Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.

And Setterholm had definitely had a cause.

“Perhaps,” Clavain said. “Perhaps I might have, yes.”

He heard Setterholm sigh. “I’m glad. For a moment there—”

“For a moment what?”

“When you showed up with that pick, I thought you were planning to kill me.” Setterholm hefted the pick, much as Clavain had done earlier. “You wouldn’t have done that, would you? I don’t deny that what I did was regrettable, but I had to do it.”

“I understand.”

“But what happens to me now? I can stay with you all, can’t I?”

“We probably won’t be staying on Diadem, I’m afraid. And I don’t think you’d really want to come with us; not if you knew what we’re really like.”

“You can’t leave me alone here, not again.”

“Why not? You’ll have your worms. And you can always kill yourself again and see who shows up next.” Clavain turned to leave.

“No. You can’t go now.”

“I’ll leave your rover on the surface. Maybe there are some supplies in it. Just don’t come anywhere near the base again. You won’t find a welcome there.”

“I’ll die out here,” Setterholm said.

“Start getting used to it.”

He heard Setterholm’s feet scuffing across the ice; a walk breaking into a run. Clavain turned around calmly, unsurprised to see Setterholm coming towards him with the pick raised high, as a weapon.

Clavain sighed.

He reached into Setterholm’s skull, addressing the webs of machines that still floated in the man’s head, and instructed them to execute their host in a sudden, painless orgy of neural deconstruction. It was not a trick he could have done an hour ago, but after Galiana had planted the method in his mind, it was easy as sneezing. For a moment he understood what it must feel like to be a god.

And in that same moment Setterholm dropped the ice pick and stumbled, falling forward onto one end of the pick’s blade. It pierced his faceplate, but by then he was dead anyway.

“What I said was the truth,” Clavain said. “I might have killed them as well, just like I said. I don’t want to think so, but I can’t say it isn’t in me. No; I don’t blame you for that; not at all.”

With his boot he began to kick a dusting of frost over the dead man’s body. It would be too much bother to remove Setterholm from this place, and the machines inside him would sterilise his body, ensuring that none of his cells ever contaminated the glacier. And, as Clavain had told himself only a few days earlier, there were worse places to die than here. Or worse places to be left for dead, anyway.

When he was done, when what remained of Setterholm was just an ice-covered mound in the middle of the cavern, Clavain addressed him one final time.

“But that doesn’t make it right, either. It was still murder, Setterholm.” He kicked a final divot of ice over the corpse. “Someone had to pay for it.”

Marius Vargovic, agent of Gilgamesh Isis, savoured an instant of free fall before the flitter’s engines kicked in, slamming it away from the
Deucalion.
His pilot gunned the craft towards the moon below, quickly outrunning the other shuttles that the Martian liner had disgorged. Europa enlarged perceptibly: a flattening arc the colour of nicotine-stained wallpaper.

“Boring, isn’t it.”

Vargovic turned around in his seat, languidly. “You’d rather they were shooting at us?”

“I’d rather they were doing
something.
”

“Then you’re a fool,” Vargovic said, making a tent of his fingers. “There’s enough armament buried in that ice to give Jupiter a second red spot. What it would do to us doesn’t bear thinking about it.”

“Only trying to make conversation, friend.”

“Don’t bother—it’s an overrated activity at the best of times.”

“All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?”

“I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature. ”

But Mishenka was right: Europa was an encrypted document; complexity masked by a surface of fractured and refrozen ice. Its surface grooves were like the capillaries in a vitrified eyeball; faint as the structure in a raw surveillance image. But once within the airspace boundary of the Europan Demarchy, traffic-management co-opted the flitter, vectoring it into a touchdown corridor. In three days Mishenka would return, but then he would disable the avionics, kissing the ice for less than ten minutes.

“Not too late to abort,” Mishenka said, a long time later.

“Are you out of your tiny mind?”

The younger man dispensed a frosty Covert Ops smile. “We’ve all heard what the Demarchy does to spies, Marius. ”

“Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?”

“I’ll leave being psychotic to you, Marius—you’re so much better at it.”

Vargovic nodded. It was the first sensible thing Mishenka had said all day.

They landed an hour later. Vargovic adjusted his Martian businesswear, tuning his holographically inwoven frock coat to project red sandstorms; lifting the collar in what he had observed from the liner’s passengers was a recent Martian fad. Then he grabbed his bag—nothing incriminating there, no gadgets or weapons—and exited the flitter, stepping through the gasket of locks. A slitherwalk propelled him forward, massaging the soles of his slippers. It was a single cultured ribbon of octopus skin, stimulated to ripple by the timed firing of buried squid axons.

To get to Europa you either had to be sickeningly rich or sickeningly poor. Vargovic’s cover was the former: a lie excusing the single-passenger flitter. As the slitherwalk advanced he was joined by other arrivals: businesspeople like himself, and a sugaring of the merely wealthy. Most of them had dispensed with holographics, instead projecting entoptics beyond their personal space: machine-generated hallucinations decoded by the implant hugging Vargovic’s optic nerve. Hummingbirds and seraphim were in sickly vogue. Others were attended by autonomous perfumes that subtly altered the moods of those around them. Slightly lower down the social scale, Vargovic observed a clique of noisy tourists—antlered brats from Circum-Jove. Then there was a discontinuous jump: to squalid-looking Maunder refugees who must have accepted indenture to the Demarchy. The refugees were quickly segregated from the more affluent immigrants, who found themselves within a huge geodesic dome resting above the ice on refrigerated stilts. The walls of the dome glittered with duty-free shops, boutiques and bars. The floor was bowl-shaped, slither-walks and spiral stairways descending to the nadir where a quincunx of fluted marble cylinders waited. Vargovic observed that the newly arrived were queuing for elevators that terminated in the cylinders. He joined a line and waited.