Zima Blue and Other Stories (12 page)
With a strip of cloth looped over her shoulders, she wore the wooden tray the whole time, the Kodairas lacking sufficient prestige to afford a stall. Come noon, tired from the endless haggling and arguing, Lucky would leave Cockatoo's Crest for an hour and walk into the latticed shadow of Broken Bridge. There she would sit and eat fruit and dried-meat pastries. She listened to the music coming from the Cockatoo's drummers. She dipped toes in the water and turned the holograms in her necklace against the sky. She liked gazing into the faces of the dead, rilled in rainbow colours of great subtlety. As the drums rattled, Lucky filled in the gaps with half-formed melodies, imagining that she had made the real music, from which her melodies were traceries, in another life not far from where she now sat.
With sunset, she would leave the markets, money in a purse, and walk across the bobbing pontoons of New Bridge to the south where she would meet her uncle in the auto-repair shop and then catch the bus home. That was her favourite time of day, the setting sun lighting the barrage balloons tethered from the skyscrapers, turning them into gold Christmas baubles.
Each year there were fewer balloons. Sometimes the tethers snapped, sometimes balloons came down overnight, draping across the canopies of the plane trees. In the past, when there had still been Enolas in the air, a constant effort was required just to maintain the barrages. But because no one had seen an Enola for years, the barrage balloons had been allowed to fall into quiet disrepair. Only the old worked on the balloons now, camped in the penthouses, furiously sewing, repairing the quilted mylar, criticising the youngsters for their all-night carousing.
Once, her uncle said, the balloons had formed a curtain surrounding the city. She didn't like the sound of that, for surely the sun would have been blocked out most of the time. But the old days seemed unpleasant all round, if the stories that the Pastmasters told were halfway accurate.
But as Uncle Kodaira always said: Who could honestly tell?
They lived in one room of a red building called the Monk's Hostel, shrouded by cool trees, home to nomadic families during summer. Kodaira knew most of the other traders; they had met out in the Empty, pausing to swap engine parts or oil for their overlanders. The Empty was big enough, the city itself big enough, that no one encroached upon the potential wealth of anyone else. So much had been manufactured before the Hour that you only had to scrape away a few centimetres of dirt anywhere in the Empty before you found something bright, new and unfamiliar that some city-dweller would cough up plenty for.
Nightly, in the atrium of the Monk's Hostel, families converged around trestles and dined, then invariably drank and sang together. There were stories to relate, reminiscences to rekindle. Lucky, when she was allowed to stay up late, gulped in the atmosphere, wide-eyed with joy.
A woman trader passed the elder Kodaira a stein of beer, telling him that she'd seen a Maker out in the desert, still crawling along the flats, scavenging for metal and plastic. If there were Makers, someone said, in a tone of grim warning, then there might also be Enolas. But he was rebuffed; the Makers were made by people around the time of the Hour, while the Enolas had come from the sky, from the stars. The Enolas were all gone; none had been seen for ten or twenty years, and it was possible that for many decades there had only been one left, a straggler wily enough to avoid being shot down by the defences of the Makers. A roving Maker - that was interesting, no doubt about it - but no one should lose any sleep over it.
Uncle Kodaira laughed. 'There's more crazy stuff out in the Empty than any one of us imagines,' he said. 'Things I've seen . . . distant shapes on the horizon . . .' He took a swig of the beer. 'Way I reckon is, if there are still machines out there, they want to leave us alone as much as we want to leave
them
alone. Because it's only the smart ones that survived. And smart ones don't want trouble.'
them
alone. Because it's only the smart ones that survived. And smart ones don't want trouble.'
'But Uncle, are there still Enolas?' asked Lucky.
'No way,' said the trader tenderly. 'The Enolas were bad things, once upon a time, but they're all gone now. Just like the dinosaurs I showed you in the museum, remember?'
And she did; she remembered the fallen bones, downy with dust, sprawled across shattered marble. But she didn't remember where the museum had been, what town it was.
She nodded. 'But the old people say the Enolas will return, don't they? And they don't say the dinosaurs will return.'
The trader knelt down, until he was face level with his niece. 'Darling,' he said. 'Why do you think they have to say that?'
She shrugged. 'Don't know. Maybe so they don't think they're wasting their time sewing all day.'
He laughed. 'That's half of it, for sure. The rest is so we younger people keep believing they're doing us some kind of big favour.' He stroked her chin. 'Because, darling, we keep them fed and warm. If we stopped thinking it was worth it, we'd have to run to the top of the skyscrapers and throw them all out of the windows. That'd stop them moaning, wouldn't it?'
For a moment she thought he was serious, then she caught the curve of his mouth, his mocking grin. If he could make light of them so easily, she thought, maybe they were wrong after all. Maybe they just liked sewing so much that they had to have a reason.
Kodaira wiped a rime of beer from his chin, then put down the stein and swept her from the floor.
'Know what I think, little princess?'
She looked into his eyes, fearing what he might say. 'No,' she said.
'Reckon it's way past your bedtime.'
She shook her head. 'I'll have the bad dream again, I know it.' But all along knowing that her words would have no effect, and who could blame her uncle anyway? She never could remember what the dream was about in the light of day.
Her eyes were closed to the walls of the Monk's Hostel, closed to the nicotine-darkened images of the Crucifixion. What she saw instead were the contrail-smeared skies of the battlefield, smoke rising into the stratosphere from wrecked machines on the ground.
She searched the horizon and noted the same silence she had heard for almost two hundred megaseconds. She was the last in the air; all the rest had gone to ground, burrowed or been destroyed by the hemispheric grid.
Stirring fitfully, she found a cooler place on her pillow, remembering faintly the globe she had hawked around Cockatoo's Crest. Saw it webbed over with a tracery of red lines, radiating out from two land masses she couldn't name, but knowing that she owed allegiance to one of those territories; saw flecks of golden light spangling the continents, filaments of the red tracery darkening permanently.
Then she slipped into the dream fully, drowning in memory rather than treading its sleepless shallows.
Into a dream of war.
The war, inasmuch as it meant anything to those who had initiated it, was now over. The grid was gone, neither side able to communicate with its scatterlings. Most population centres had suffered some attack, with many cities simply cratered out of existence. War zones were chaotic: troops deserting and reaggregating into mutinous brigades, hunting food, water and medical aid. Machines that had survived the first fifty minutes were loitering, awaiting instructions.
Machines like herself, prowling near enemy installations when she targeted the Factory module, rumbling across a sea of dunes.
She had dreamed of the encounter with the Factory many times, enough now to see it as the beginning of her transmigration. She had hardly been conscious when she engaged it, yet it had begun an evolution that had brought her . . . this far, across this much time and distance. Although it was just a damaged machine, long since wrecked, she felt strange affection for it. It was the affection she might have felt for an old, moth-eaten toy. She had planned to destroy it with a salvo of diskettes, deigning it too small a target for her warhead. Like a bee, she only had one sting, and she would not be around too long after using it.
She had cusped her wings and swooped in low, skimming the ground in a hypersonic approach profile.
She was a second from kill when the target lasered her.
The laser burst was not an attempt to shoot her down, but a message coded for the smartware of her electronic brain. It looked safe on first pass. All the same she spent several microseconds filtering the transmission for viruses before allowing it into her mind.
She cogitated on it for a few mikes more.
She grasped that it was a form of defence. It was unloading thousands of simulations into her brain. They showed her attack profile, releasing the diskettes, spreading into a nimbus of spinning flecks, then each being parried by counter-weapons from the Factory, before they had a chance to wreck it.
She understood the point of the argument after several more mikes:
Go away; you're wasting your time with me - save your weapons for a target you'll have a chance of destroying for good. You're only looking at collateral damage here - a little degradation of my armour, a few minor systems failures
. . .
Go away; you're wasting your time with me - save your weapons for a target you'll have a chance of destroying for good. You're only looking at collateral damage here - a little degradation of my armour, a few minor systems failures
. . .
And she thought,
Yes, but what about the attack profiles you haven't considered?
She saw other approach angles and release points. Working from the simulations she had been sent, she ran her own to investigate whether the Factory could parry those as well.
Yes, but what about the attack profiles you haven't considered?
She saw other approach angles and release points. Working from the simulations she had been sent, she ran her own to investigate whether the Factory could parry those as well.
The results pleased her. According to her own predictions, the Factory would not be able to survive those particular attack strategies.
But what if she were wrong?
Rather than attacking, she decided to return one of her sims instead. She wanted to see how the Factory would respond to that. She still had time; she wouldn't have to commit to a particular profile for another point-two seconds.
All the time in the world.
She waited for the response, idly running self-diagnostics and weapons checks. After an age the Factory responded, blipping out another laser burst. She unpacked it, examined it from every angle.
It was too comprehensive, she realised. The Factory had run these sims already. It was playing games with her, calling her bluff. What it was telling her now was that, yes, she could take it out. But the catch was that it would destroy her as well.
Try that trick, I'm taking you with me
, it seemed to say.
, it seemed to say.
It wouldn't even bother trying to limit its own damage.
So think about it
. . .
. . .
Yes, she needed time to think. More than point-two seconds. The situation was outside her smartware parameters. This was not a contingency anticipated by her designers, clever though they had made her.
She pulled out of the attack, sheathed her wings and went to ground, burrowing deep into the sand. When safe she deployed a remote to talk to the Factory, sending out a little, clawed decoy that popped out of the sand a kilometre from her actual position.
Straining hard against the inbuilt limitations of her programming, she considered the nature of the Factory.
It was a construction unit, scavenging for waste and wreckage, and manufacturing anything in its memory. It made equipment and weapons. It made, for instance, the enemy counterparts of herself.
She thought about that, letting the idea tick over for several more mikes.
Her brain lit up like a bagatelle board. She had an idea.
She hit the Factory with a detailed blueprint of herself, showing component failures, fatigue points, battle damage. Much of it true, some of it deftly exaggerated. She was careful to stress the functionality of her warhead, while making the rest of herself seem in bad shape. She hoped the point of the schematic was clear enough:
Think again. I'm not going to be around much longer anyway. I might as well blow and take you out from where I'm sitting now
. . .
Think again. I'm not going to be around much longer anyway. I might as well blow and take you out from where I'm sitting now
. . .
She got an answer more swiftly than she'd expected. A burst of schematics, waves of blueprints and performance numbers.
Don't be hasty, I'm sure we can come to some . . . agreement. I can fit you up with a new turbine subsystem, or a new fuselage assembly . . . Why don't we discuss this in more detail
. . .
?
. . .
?
She considered, then pulsed out data on some motor parts she badly needed. The Factory responded, projecting a profile that showed her flying into its forward landing bay, robotic arms replacing parts of her motor, her flying into the sunset, both machines still in one piece.
Yes
. . .
. . .
She retracted the remote, then lifted herself out of the ground in a mini-tornado of noise, fire and sand.
She never saw the Factory again, after leaving it intact on the ground. Perhaps it was killed later by some duller machine incapable of appreciating the potential trade-off. Or maybe it had just burrowed into permanent reclusion.
Whatever the case, she had become addicted to its game.
She met other machines on her travels, not all of them of enemy manufacture. Eventually she stopped distinguishing between friend and foe. All that mattered was whether or not they had something she needed. If they did, she used the same gambit of threatening to trigger herself. If not, she left them alone. There was an evolutionary pressure in action: the machines that had survived this long into the war had to be smarter than the rest. Like her, they had to be capable of grasping the niceties of a fair bargain. They had to have learned negotiation.
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