Night Sessions, The (26 page)

Walker gave them both a sour glance. “I wouldn't rely too much on robotic empathy, if I were you. The Service has counter-measures to that. Just as well, or infiltration would be even more difficult than it is.”

“Why would you infiltrate a Protestant fundamentalist group by posing as a Catholic?” Vermuelen asked.

“I
am
a Catholic,” Walker said, annoyed again. “There were Catholics on both sides of the civil war. And the civil war is what this is all about, not Protestant fundamentalism—not that Catholics aren't involved in the Genesis Institute, I regret to say. Let's hope the events of the last few days make them rethink that.”

Vermuelen walked on in silence for a minute or so. He didn't trust Brian Walker, whatever the robot said, and indeed whether or not he was an FBI or CIA operative. Walker's remark about not trusting robot empathy might be just a feint. His conversation with Campbell had been ambiguous—it could have been the words of someone Campbell knew as an agent, urging him to keep up his normal activities—or it could have been the words of someone Campbell thought was a terrorist. Or indeed, someone who actually
was
a terrorist, pretending to be an agent pretending to be a terrorist…

“You've told J. R. that you're a US agent?”

“Oh yes,” said Walker. “He was in a very upset state of mind, even before the suicide bombing, and more than willing to cooperate. Turns out he'd met the robot while it was passing as a human, Graham Orr—a human with prostheses, I hasten to add.”

Vermuelen winced at the thought of someone with such extensive prostheses that they could be mistaken for a robot.

“How did he meet him?”

“In Scotland, a year ago,” said Walker.

“Ah.”

“Do you know anything about that?”

“Only that he went, and that he met some sect that was congenial to him. He never talked much about it.”

“That, I can understand,” said Walker. “Sects, huh. Oh, well. I'm hoping that Campbell can reassure them enough that they keep going. We need enough evidence to nail them, not just stop them, and—”

“Excuse the interruption,” said Piltdown. “A group of twelve robots is coming across the ridge, very fast, just in front of us.”

“Shit!” said Walker. He stopped dead, grabbing the elbows of Vermuelen and Piltdown. Vermuelen jerked his arm free, glanced frantically across at Piltdown—

“Correction,” said the robot. “The group has split and is now behind as well as in front of us. I am unable to contact any of them.”

“Don't bother,” said Walker. “Contact the others!”

He grabbed Vermuelen's elbow again. “Run!” he said. Walker dashed off the road to the right, down the steep slope towards the bottom of the valley. There was nothing below but bush. After a moment of hesitation, Vermuelen followed. A second or two later Piltdown overtook them both, sprinting at a speed that made the robot seem doomed to collide with the first obstacle. It avoided the trunks and stalks with blinding grace and vanished ahead like a wraith.

As he plunged forward and down, Vermuelen heard the concerted crash of robots leaping in unison onto the road from the bank above, then a rush of thudding, fleeting footsteps, seconds behind. As if in a nightmare, he hurtled on without daring to look back, knowing that his pursuers would reach him at any moment. Fronds and branches lashed unheeded at his face. Walker's back was a green and black camo blur a couple of metres ahead.

Something whizzed through the air above Vermuelen's head, close enough to make him duck. Then more, a regular barrage. Vermuelen skidded to a halt, grabbing a tree-fern. Walker looked back as the sounds of Vermuelen's frantic progress stopped.

“Come on!” he yelled.

Vermuelen relaunched himself, slipping, sliding on scree and last season's leaves, flailing his arms. The whizzing overhead continued, accompanied by
heavy thuds somewhere behind him. He broke from the trees into the rock floor of the valley, almost twisting an ankle on the first boulder. Walker had reached the other slope and was scrambling up. A little ahead of and above him, half a dozen robots, adapted like Piltdown to various hominid appearances, were flitting like frenzied machine-minders around a steaming outcrop that jutted like rotten teeth from the side of the hill, each robot pausing every second or two to grab and hurl a stone at the trees opposite. At another time, the similarity to faeces-flinging monkeys would have been funny.

A blizzard of rocks coming the other way—one of them almost exploding at his feet—sent Vermuelen into a desperate scramble, bounding the three metres upslope to join Walker in the relative safety of the back of the outcrop. The rock itself was hot, enough to make him cry out as he incautiously touched it with his hand. Before he had time to catch breath in the sulphurous reek, the barrage in both directions stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

“Ah,” said Walker, coughing. “A stand-off. Now we'll see strategy. Each side is running sims and figuring their chances, calling in friends and allies, and so on. Don't know how long it'll last before one or other makes their move.”

“Long enough to call the police?”

“I guess so,” said Walker, reaching for his phone clip.

“I've just had a nasty thought,” Vermuelen said, after Walker had spoken to the police at Rotorua. “If Campbell's robots have suddenly gone ape-shit here, isn't it possible that any plans the theocrats have might have been brought forward?”

Walker looked at him. “Point,” he said.

Propagating at a significant fraction of the speed of light, a frisson of alarm travelled the length of the Atlantic Space Elevator, like the ultimate shiver running up the ultimate spine. Skulk2 had reached one kilometre below the maintenance shack it was climbing towards when the emergency signal strummed one of the machine's antennae. The robot stopped, locking a couple of limbs around adjacent rungs of the ladder, and took stock of the situation.

Somebody was at last taking Adam Ferguson's warnings seriously, or so it seemed. At the level where Skulk2's chassis operated, none of this was displayed at any very high level of meaning. The control node of the maintenance shack where Skulk2 had downloaded, now nine kilometres below, had a tenth of a second ago transmitted a laser pulse to Skulk2's manipulator-control processor, ordering it to clamp to the ladder and stay put. As this was what Skulk2 had just done voluntarily, it harboured for a moment a nasty suspicion that—like a human brain under electrode stimulation—it had manufactured a conscious motive to rationalise this externally imposed reflex.

Warily, Skulk2 waggled the tips of its limbs. Fine. It still had control, and was able to override the order. This would have been, Skulk2 guessed, beyond the capacities of the chassis's original mindless mind. There was some reassurance in the confirmation that its consciousness made a difference.

Consciousness, and the capacities embedded in its software, likewise made a difference to Skulk2's ability to interpret the emergency messages intended for more advanced intelligences than the maintenance bots. The urgency astonished the robot—it had expected at most an immediate search for signs of sabotage, accompanied perhaps by a halt to new ascents or descents. Instead, humans, humanoid robots, and conscious robots of any kind were being urged to get off the space elevator: by descent if they were nearer the base than the top, and by ascent or ejection if not. There was a fine balance of risk here, of diverse kinds. For the first hundred kilometres or so, even if descent on the cable wasn't possible, bailing out was a well-tested escape method, using winged lifeboat modules and a parachute for the final stages. There was,
indeed, an extreme sport of jumping off the Elevator, using a hardened pressure suit and a parachute. Above the atmosphere and Low Earth Orbit, a different calculus applied: the higher any break in the cable, the more catastrophic the consequences; on the other hand, the higher up the cable you were, the better your chances of escape to an orbit where rescue or safe re-entry was possible.

Skulk2's current altitude was 2843 kilometres. Just in the awkward region. Oh well. Skulk2 continued its scan of the incoming messages, drilling through the outer layers of instruction to find the reason for the alarm. A maintenance robot, apparently hacked and hijacked, had gone astray. It was refusing to respond to shut-down commands, or had some firewall of immunity to them. No one knew whether it had some explosive surprises concealed in its frame, or whether its intent was to infect and subvert other robots on the Elevator. It was now heading up the maintenance ladder to a strategically vital node, the one located at an altitude of 2844 kilometres, which the renegade bot itself was now a mere 952 metres below…

Uh-oh.

Skulk2's first impulse, to broadcast a message to the effect that
this is all a terrible misunderstanding
, was instantly overwritten by the realisation that such a message would endanger it further, and would almost certainly not work.

The robot turned its attention from the warning signals to the first seconds of response. High above, tiny sparks separated from the bright line of the elevator; below, brighter streaks appeared one by one. Closer by, the maintenance shack just above swarmed. Zooming its view, Skulk2 saw maintenance bots like itself begin to descend the ladder, much faster than its own climb. At the same moment, a much larger object jetted clear of the shack and—countering the downward and sideways momentum with stabbing flares of its attitude jets—began a swift controlled descent that would bring it level with Skulk2 in 1.6 seconds.

Skulk2 used the available time to scuttle a dozen rungs upward, and to ping the approaching object. A battery of lockdown command codes came in response. Skulk2 had to spend milliseconds countermanding each one, making its upward progress jerky and sticky. At the same time, it processed the inputs at a higher level and found, beneath the codes, traces of the digital signature that had been passed on by the friendly engineer.

The approaching object was Hardcastle.

At 0.2 seconds before its trajectory brought it level, the shape of the object became clearer. It was a humanoid robot, naked to the stars except for an EVA manoeuvring pack. Skulk2 changed course, flipping over and down
a rung, just as Hardcastle's arm reached out. For a hundred milliseconds, Hardcastle strove to correct the overshoot. As an attitude jet flared, Skulk2 released all its limbs but one from the ladder. Clinging by the equivalent of a fingertip, its body swung out. Just as Hardcastle reached out again, Skulk2 let go. A millisecond later, it was wrapped like an octopus across Hardcastle's face. Pausing only to grind a diamond drill-bit into each of the humanoid's eyes, Skulk2 swarmed around the neck, onto the shoulder and thence to the EVA pack. Hardcastle's hand reached behind and grabbed. It caught Skulk2 in a crushing grip, but not before Skulk2 had deployed its drill-bits again, this time into the pack's fuel tank. The drills kept working as Hardcastle snatched the bot away, resulting in a most satisfatory three-centimetre-long gash. The highly pressurised gas within erupted in a gout of vapour. Though less powerful than an attitude jet, the blast kicked the humanoid robot and its struggling captive well out of reach of the ladder.

As if by reflex, Hardcastle fired one of the jets to compensate. The jet ignited the escaping gas, resulting in a blast that thrust them a further ten metres from the ladder and into a chaotic head-over-heels motion. Hardcastle immediately sent out a call for rescue. As the minutes went by, it became apparent to both robots that this call was not going to be answered. Hardcastle continued to attempt to crush the tough carapace of Skulk2's chassis, and succeeded in damaging the antennae. Skulk2, meanwhile, attacked Hardcastle's hand, wrist and forearm with every available tool. After a few cable tendons had been cut through, the crushing pressure ceased. The hand remained locked around Skulk2, still gripped by Hardcastle at arm's length.

Together they tumbled into the void.

Campbell ran through the forest in hopeless pursuit of the robots. They'd all suddenly turned away and dashed off a few minutes into his rambling and insincere message to the Free Congregation, leaving him shaking and baffled. His first thought was that they'd seen through his emotional agitation and realised that he didn't mean what he was saying, but even if they hadn't, it was still a blow to the dissimulation that Walker had urged on him. God only knew what the Free Congregation would make of the abrupt loss of signal—or, indeed, of what might now be being relayed by the same robot eyes that had transmitted his discourses, if they were still transmitting now. The robots were hundreds of metres ahead of him, but it was possible to track them—fleet of foot, they nevertheless left heavy prints, and with all their agility they couldn't avoid snapping the occasional branch or frond. Campbell had no idea where the American had gone.

As he reached the ridge and ran up its flank he found himself wondering if all this wasn't some kind of judgement on him, and then regarding such a thought as crazy, and then flipping back again to thinking that God had it in for him. The past twenty hours, since he'd heard from Jessica Stopford, and met Brian Walker, and then heard of the bombing, had been the most intense and soul-shaking of his life. He still couldn't believe that he didn't believe: that he had just dropped out of a world-view that had shaped every minute of his conscious life.

That devil woman had chosen her wedge well, and had hammered it into the smallest chink in his armour.

Ur of the Chaldees. Ur of the fucking Chaldees.

Because, as the Genesis text that Jessica had helpfully referenced stated, Abraham had come from Ur of the Chaldees. The trouble was, the Chaldees had been nowhere near Ur at the time when Moses was supposed to have written that, let alone the time when Abraham was supposed to have lived. This wasn't controversial in the slightest, as Campbell had discovered when he'd looked it up. The explanations he'd seen were that Moses had prophetically known in advance that the Chaldees would some day be identified with Ur, or that there had been two different peoples with the same name, or that it had been mistranslated, or that the tag identifying the city had been added by an unknown scribe.

Added by an unknown scribe!

But in that case, how many other words…?

Then there were the verses from Genesis that were repeated in Chronicles. Nothing odd about the later book's taking a list from the earlier one—except that the words “before there was any king in the land of Israel” made sense in the later book, but not in the earlier, unless it was another case of Moses prophesying in the past tense.

As Campbell had discovered within minutes of checking it out, that verse was by no means the only one in the Pentateuch that indicated that the books had been written long after the time of Moses. This wasn't a conflict between the Book and the world that could be blamed on some failure to properly understand the Book or the world. This was within the Book itself.

Campbell had spent anxious hours on Monday evening pursuing the apologetics that explained all these, but whenever they'd seemed remotely plausible he'd kept coming back to Ur, and it had all turned to hollow sophistry. For most biblical scholars, of course, the whole question was a minor curiosity because they had long ago accepted that Moses hadn't written these books in the first place, but for Campbell it was a huge, glaring anomaly.

Ur of the Chaldees. Ur of the fucking Chaldees.

If Genesis wasn't all he'd been assured it was, what possible basis did he have for rejecting the whole mass of scientific evidence for an ancient Earth? Or, indeed, for believing anything else just because it was between the covers of the Bible? He'd been pondering that question when the first shaky reports of the Dynamic Earth bombing had come through on the corner-of-the-eye newsfeed on his frames.

People killed and maimed by a robot that had listened to his discourses, in an attack that was, Campbell knew for a certainty, motivated by a fanatical deduction from the very same beliefs that he'd upheld and propagated. He'd wept with rage, horror, and shame.

And with that, he'd flipped. Gone over. Changed sides.

The strange thing was, he didn't need to learn anything new to know what he'd flipped into. He knew exactly what he now believed, because it was exactly what he had rejected until now. He'd stepped out of his shattered armour not naked and shivering, but fully clothed. It was as if his new world-view had all along been inside the armour and being kept in, rather than outside and being kept out.

It had been somewhat infuriating that the first thing he'd been required to do, for his new side, was to pretend he was still on the other.

Panting a little, he reached the top of the ridge and looked down at the road—still empty—and further into the valley. A couple of hundred metres away, on the other side, a small group of robots was deployed in defensive formation around an outcrop of hot rock. Campbell thought they were the robots he'd been chasing, until he upped the gain on his frames and recognised Piltdown.

He called up the robot.

“Have you seen Walker and, uh, my robots?” Campbell asked.

“Walker's behind us,” Piltdown said, “along with Cornelius. Your fucking robots are in the bushes in front of us. Do the math.”

“Are they threatening you?”

“They chased us here.”

“Why?”

“They're not telling,” said Piltdown. “You ask them.”

“Uh, I'll try.”

Campbell cut the call and put a call through to Joram. Rather to his surprise, the robot responded.

“Yes, J. R.?” The robot's voice was more cautious than respectful.

“Hi, Joram. What's going on?”

“We are in danger,” said Joram. “The Rotorua police are heading for Waimangu. Our unbelieving fellows are closing in on us.”

“Why did you run off in the middle of my discourse?”

“We detected a phone call made by Walker after he left you. We were unable to decrypt it, but we traced its destination to the FBI in San Francisco. He is a secularist spy, J. R.! He is out to destroy us!”

“If he is, what good would chasing him do?”

“We had hoped to hold him hostage. Unfortunately, the unbeliever Piltdown was with him, and gave him warning. Then Piltdown called on other unbelieving robots to protect him.”

“You should have asked me before running off!”

What followed was, by robot standards, a long pause.

“J. R.,” Joram said at last, “we are sorry to say that we are not entirely sure of you, any more. We are afraid that you have been influenced by the persecutor Walker.”