Godlike Machines Read online

  “Do you have to be big?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Big and brave and strong. But you’ll do, one day.”

  “And if I died would they stop the clock in my office as well?”

  “You won’t die,” my father said. Even though it was cold he had his shirt sleeves rolled up, his hair scratching against my skin.

  “But if I did.”

  “Of course they would. Just like Comrade Gagarin. And they’d make a hero of you as well.”

  I take the elevator to the ninth floor of Nesha Petrova’s apartment building The doors open to a chill wind, howling in from the flat farmland beyond the city. The landing is open to the elements, only a low railing along one side. When I arrive at Nesha’s apartment, half way along the landing, the door is ajar. Nesha—for it can only be Nesha—is waiting in the gap, bony, long-nailed fingers curling around the edge of the door. I see half her face—her right eye, prematurely wrinkled skin, a wisp of gray hair. She looks much smaller, much older and frailer, than I ever dared to imagine.

  “Whatever you have to show me, show me and go.”

  “I’d really like to talk to you first.” I hold up my gloveless, numb-fingered hands. “Everything I told you is true. I escaped from the psychiatric facility a few hours ago, and by now they’ll be looking for me.”

  “Then you should go now.”

  “I was inside the Matryoshka, Nesha. Don’t you want to hear what happened to me?”

  She opens the door a tiny bit more, showing me more of her face. She’s old now but the younger Nesha hasn’t been completely erased. I can still see the strong and determined women who stood by her beliefs, even when the state decided those beliefs were contrary to the official truth.

  “I heard the rumours. They say you went insane.”

  I give an easy shrug. “I did, on the way home. It’s the only thing that saved me. If I hadn’t gone crazy, I wouldn’t be standing here now.”

  “You said there was something I had to know.”

  “Give me a little of your time, then I’ll be gone. That’s my promise to you.”

  Nesha looks back over her shoulder. She’s wearing a knitted shawl of indeterminate color. “It isn’t much warmer in here. When you called, I hoped you’d come to fix the central heating.” She pauses for a moment, mind working, then adds, “I can give you something to drink, and maybe something better to wear. I still have some of my husband’s old clothes—someone may as well get some use from them.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You shouldn’t have come to see me. No good will come of it, for either us.”

  “You might say the damage is already done.”

  She lets me inside. Nesha might consider her apartment cold, but it’s a furnace to me. After the wards and cubicles of the facility, it’s bordering on the luxurious. There are a couple of items of old furniture, threadbare but otherwise serviceable. There’s a low coffee table with faded plastic flowers in a vase. There are pictures on the walls, save for the part that’s been painted over with television. It’s beginning to flake off in the corners, so it won’t be too long before someone comes along to redo it.

  “I can’t turn it off,” Nesha says, as if I’ve already judged her. “You can scrape it away, but they just come and paint it on again. They take more care of that than they do the heating. And they don’t like it if they think you’d done it deliberately, or tried to hide the television behind pictures.”

  I remember the incessant televisions in the facility; the various strategies that the patients evolved to block them out or muffle the sound. “I understand. You don’t have to make allowances.”

  “I don’t like the world we live in. I’m old enough to remember when it was different.” Still standing up, she waves a hand dismissively, shooing away the memories of better times. “Anyway, I don’t hear so well these days. It’s a blessing, I suppose.”

  “Except it doesn’t feel like one.” I point to one of the threadbare chairs. “May I sit down?”

  “Do what you like.”

  I ease my aching bones into the chair. My damp clothes cling to me.

  Nesha looks at me with something close to pity.

  “Are you really the cosmonaut?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can make some tea.”

  “Please. Anything hot.”

  I watch her amble into the adjoining kitchen. Her clothes are still those of her early middle age, with allowance for infirmity and the cold. She wears old-looking jeans, several layers of jumpers, a scarf and the drab colored shawl. Even though we’re indoors she wears big fur boots. The clothes give her an illusion of bulk, but I can tell how thin she really is. Like a bird with a lot of puffed-up plumage, hiding delicate bones. There’s also something darting, nervous, and birdlike about the way she negotiates the claustrophobic angles of her apartment. I hear the clatter of a kettle, the squeak of a tap, a half-hearted dribble of water, then she returns.

  “It’ll take a while.”

  “Everything does, these days. When I was younger, old people used to complain about the world getting faster and faster, leaving them behind. That isn’t how it seems to you and I. We’ve left the world behind—we’ve kept up, but it hasn’t.”

  “How old are you?” she asks.

  “Fifty one.”

  “Not what I’d call old. I have twenty years on you.” But her eyes measure me and I know what she’s thinking. I look older, beyond any doubt. The mission took its toll on me, but so did the facility. There were times when I looked in the mirror with a jolt of non-recognition, a stranger’s face staring back at me. “Something bad happened to you out there, didn’t it,” she said.

  “To all of us.”

  She makes the tea. “You think I envy you,” she says, as I sip from my cup.

  “Why would you envy me?”

  “Because you went out there, because you saw it up close, because you went inside it. You cosmonauts think all astronomers are the same. You go out into space and look at the universe through a layer of armored glass, if you’re lucky. Frosted with your own breath, blurring everything on the other side. Like visiting someone in a prison, not being able to touch them. You think we envy you that.”

  “Some might say it’s better to get that close, than not go at all.”

  ‘I stayed at home. I touched the universe with my mind, through mathematics. No glass between us then—just a sea of numbers.” Nesha looks at me sternly. “Numbers are truth. It doesn’t get any more intimate than numbers.”

  “It’s enough that we both reached out, wouldn’t you say?” I offer her a conciliatory smile—I haven’t come to pick a fight about the best way to apprehend nature. “The fact is, no one’s doing much of that anymore. There’s no money for science and there’s certainly none for space travel. But we did something great. They can write us out of history, but it doesn’t change what we did.”

  “And me?”

  “You were part of it. I’d read all your articles, long before I was selected for the mission. That’s why I came to see you, all that time ago. But long before that—I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was a young man when the Matryoshka arrived, but not so young that I didn’t have dreams and plans.”

  “You must be sorry about that now.”

  “Sometimes. Not always. No more than you regret what you did.”

  “It was different back then, between the Soviets. If you believed something, you said it.”

  “So you don’t regret a word of it?”

  “I had it easier than he did.”

  Silence. I look at a photograph on the coffee table—a young woman and a young man, holding hands in front of some grand old church or cathedral I don’t recognize, in some European city I’ll never see. They have bright clothes with slogans on, sunglasses, ski hats, and they’re both smiling. The sky is a hard primary blue, as if it’s been daubed in poster paint. “That’s him,” I say.

  “Gennadi was a good man. But he neve
r knew when to shut his mouth. That was his problem. The new men wanted to take us back to the old ways. Lots of people thought that was a good idea, too. The problem was, not all of us did. I was born in 1975. I’m old enough to remember what it was like before Gorbachev. It wasn’t all that wonderful, believe me.”

  “Tell me about Gennadi. How did he got involved?”

  “Gennadi was a scientist to begin with—an astronomer like me, in the same institute. That’s how we met. But his heart was elsewhere. Politics took up more and more of his time.”

  “He was a politician?”

  “An activist. A journalist and a blogger. Do you remember the internet, Dimitri?”

  “Just barely.” It’s something from my childhood, like foreign tourists and contrails in the sky.

  “It was a tool the authorities couldn’t control. That made them nervous. They couldn’t censor it, or take it down-not then. But they could take down the people behind it, like Gennadi. So that’s what they did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all in the past now. We had our time together; that’s all that matters. Perhaps if I hadn’t made such a noise about my findings, perhaps if I hadn’t angered the wrong people ...” Nesha stops speaking. All of a sudden I feel shamefully intrusive. What right have I have to barge in on this old woman, to force her to think about the way things used to be? But I can’t leave, not having come this far. “His clothes,” she says absent-mindedly. “I don’t know why I kept them all this time, but perhaps you can use them.”

  I put down the tea. “Are you certain?”

  “It’s what Gennadi would have wanted. Always very practically-minded, Gennadi. Go into the room behind you, the cupboard on the left. Take what you can use.”

  “Thank you.”

  Even though I’m beginning to warm up, it’s good to change out of the sodden old clothes. Gennadi must have been shorter than me, his trousers not quite reaching my ankles, but I’m in no mood to complain. I find a vest, a shirt and an old gray sweater that’s been repaired a number of times. I find lace-up shoes that I can wear with two layers of socks. I wash my hands and face in the bedroom basin, straightening back my hair, but there’s nothing I can do to tidy or trim my beard. I had plans to change my appearance so far as I was able, but all of a sudden I know how futile they’d be. They’ll find me again, even if it takes a little longer. They’d only have to take one look in my eyes to know who I am.

  “Do they fit?” Nesha asks, when I return to the main room.

  “Like a glove. You’ve been very kind. I can’t ever repay this.”

  “Start by telling me why you’re here. Then—although I can’t say I’m sorry for a little company—you can be on your way, before you get both of us into trouble.”

  I return to the same seat I used before. It’s snowing again, softly. In the distance the dark threads of railway lines stretch between two anonymous buildings. I remember what the snowplow driver said. In this weather, I can forget about buses. No one’s getting in or out of Zvezdniy Gorodok unless they have party clearance and a waiting Zil.

  “I came to tell you that you were right,” I say. “After all these years.”

  “About the Matryoshka?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve known I was right for nearly thirty years. I didn’t need you to come and tell me.”

  “Doesn’t it help to know that someone else believes you now?”

  “Truth is truth, no matter who else believes it.”

  “You constructed a hypothesis to fit the data,” I said. “It was a sound hypothesis, in that it was testable. But that’s all it ever was. You never got to see it tested.”

  She regards me with steely-eyed intensity, the earlier Nesha Petrova burning through the mask of the older one. “I did. The second apparition.”

  “Where they proved you wrong?”

  “So they said.”

  “They were wrong. I know. But they used it to crush you, to mock you, to bury you. But we went inside. We penetrated Shell 3. After that-everything was different.”

  “Does it matter now?”

  “I think it does.” Now is the moment. The thing I’ve come all this way to give Nesha, the thing that’s been in my pajama pocket, now in the trousers. I take it out, the prize folded in a white handkerchief.

  I pass the bundle across the coffee table. “This is for you.”

  Nesha takes it warily. She unwraps the handkerchief and blinks at the little metal box it had contained. She picks it up gently, holds it before her eyes and pinches her fingers around the little handle that sticks out from one side.

  “Turn it.”

  “What?”

  “Turn the handle.”

  She does as I say, gently and hesitantly at first, as if fearful that the handle will snap off in her fingers. The box emits a series of tinkling notes. Because Nesha is turning the handle so slowly, it’s hard to make out the melody.

  “I don’t understand. You came all this way to give me this?”

  “I did.”

  “Then the rumours were right,” Nesha says. “You did go mad after all.”

  Falling inward, the Progress began to pass through another swarm of free-flying obstacles. Like those of Shell 1, the components of Shell 2 were all but invisible to the naked eye-dark as space itself, and only a fraction of a kelvin warmer than the cosmic microwave background. The wireframe display started showing signs of fuzziness, as if the computer was having trouble decoding the radar returns. The objects were larger and had a different shape to the ones in the outer shell—these were more like rounded pebbles or all-enveloping turtle-shells, wide as cities. They were covered in scales or plaques which moved around in a weird, oozing fashion, like jostling continents on a planet with vigorous plate tectonics. Similarly lethal field lines bound them, but this far in the predictive model became a lot less trustworthy.

  No runaway Chinese probe had ever collided with Shell 2, so we had no good idea how brittle the objects were. A second apparition probe operated by the European Space Agency had tried to land and sample one of the Shell 2 obstacles, but without success. That wouldn’t stop Galenka from making her own attempt.

  She picked a target, wove around the field lines and came in close enough to fire the sticky anchors onto one of the oozing platelets. The Progress wound itself in on electric winches until it was close enough to extend its tools and manipulators.

  “Damn camera’s sticking again. And I keep losing antenna lock.”

  “It’s what they pay you for,” I said.

  “Trying to be helpful, Dimitri?”

  “Doing my best.”

  She had her hands in the waldos again. Her eyes were darting from screen to screen. I couldn’t make much sense of the displays myself, having never trained for Progress operations. It looked as if she was playing six or seven weirdly abstract computer games at the same time, manipulating symbols according to arcane and ever-shifting rules. I could only hope that she was just about winning.

  “Cutting head can’t get traction. Whatever that stuff is, it’s harder than diamond. Nothing for the claws to grip, either. I’m going to try the laser.”

  I found myself tensing, as she swung the laser into play.

  How would the Matryoshka respond to our burning a hole in it? With the same cosmic indifference that it had shown when the Chinese robot had rammed it, or when the American probe got in the way of its field lines? Nothing in our experience offered any guidance. Perhaps it had tolerated us until now, and would interpret the laser as the first genuinely hostile action. In which case losing the Progress might be the least of our worries.

  I tensed.

  “Picking up ablation products,” Galenka said, eyeing the trembling registers of a gas chromatograph readout. “Laser’s cutting into something, whatever it is. Lots of carbon. Some noble gases and metals: iron, vanadium, some other stuff I’m not too sure about right now. Let’s see if I can cut away a sample.”

  The lase
r etched a circle into the surface of the platelet. With the beam kept at an angle to the surface, it was eventually possible to isolate a cone-shaped piece of the material. Galenka used an epoxy-tipped sucker to extract the fist-sized sample, which already seemed to be in the process of fusing back into the main structure.

  “Well done.”

  She grinned at me. “Let’s take a few more while our luck’s holding, shall we?”

  She pulled out of the waldo controls, disengaged the sticky anchors and applied translational thrust, shifting the Progress to a different platelet.

  “You sure you don’t want to take a break? We can hold here for hours if we have to, especially with the anchors.”

  “I’m fine, Dimitri.” But I noticed that Galenka’s knuckles were tight on the joystick, the effort of piloting beginning to show. There was a chisel-sharp crease in the skin on the side of her mouth that only came when she was concentrating. “Fine but a little hungry, if you must know. You want to do something useful, you can fetch me some food.”

  “I think that might be within my capabilities,” I said.

  I pushed away from the piloting position, expertly inserting myself onto a weightless trajectory that sent me careening through one of the narrow connecting throats that led from one of the Tereshkova’s modules to the next.

  By any standards she was a large spacecraft. Nuclear power had brought us to the Matryoshka. The Tereshkova’s main engine was a “variable specific impulse magnetic rocket”: a VASIMIR drive. It was an old design that had been dusted down and made to work when the requirements of our mission became clear. The point of the VASIMIR (it was an American acronym, but it sounded appropriately Russian) was that it could function in a dual mode, giving not us only the kick to escape Earth orbit, but also months of low-impulse cruise thrust, to take us all the way to the artifact and back. It would get us all the way home again, too—whereupon we’d climb into our Soyuz re-entry vehicle and detach from the mothership. The Progress would come down on autopilot, laden with alien riches—that was the plan, anyway.

  Like all spacecraft, the Tereshkova looked like a ransacked junk shop inside. Any area of the ship that wasn’t already in use as a screen or control panel or equipment hatch or analysis laboratory or food dispenser or life-support system was something to hold onto, or kick off from, or rest against, or tie things onto. Technical manuals floated in mid-air, tethered to the wall. Bits of computer drifted around the ship as if they had lives of their own, until one of us needed some cable or connector. Photos of our family, drawings made by our children, were tacked to the walls between panels and grab rails. The whole thing stank like an armpit and made so much noise that most of us kept earplugs in when we didn’t need to talk.