Alastair Reynolds: Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

Derek’s Cage is just large enough to contain Derek, a lamp shade, a coffee table, a couch, and one or two guests. Derek is chained up, and there are staff outside the cage with anaesthetic guns and electrical cattle prods. No one, to date, has ever been eaten alive by Derek, but the possibility hangs heavy over every interview. Going on Derek’s Cage requires courage as well as celebrity. It is not for the meek.

I greet the studio audience, walk into the cage, pause while the door is locked behind me. Then I shake Derek’s human-shaped hand and take my position on the couch.

“DEREK WELCOME VINCENT,” Derek says, thrashing his head around and rattling his chains.

That is no more than the basest approximation to Derek’s actual mode of speaking. It is a sort of roaring, gargling parody of actual language. Derek has a vocabulary of about one hundred and sixty words and can form relatively simple expressions. He can be very difficult to understand, but he becomes quite cross (or should I say crosser) if he has to repeat himself. As he speaks, his words flash up on a screen above the cage, and these are in turn visible on a monitor set near my feet.

“Thank you, Derek. It’s a great pleasure to be here.”

“SHOW DEREK PICTURE.”

I’ve been briefed, and this is my cue to launch into a series of images and video clips, to which I provide a suitably evocative and poetic narrative. The ramparts of Mimas—Saturn rings bisecting the sky like a scimitar. Jupiter from Amalthea. The cusp of Hektor, the double-lobed asteroid—literally caught between two worlds! The blue-lit ridges of icy Miranda. A turbulent, cloud-skimming plunge into the atmosphere of Uranus. Dancing between the smoke plumes of great Triton!

Derek doesn’t have a lot to say, but this is to be expected. Derek is not much for scenery or science. Derek only cares about his ratings because his ratings translate into a greater allowance of meat. Once a year, if he exceeds certain performance targets, Derek is allowed to go after live game.

“As I said,” winding up my voiceover, “it’s been quite a trip.”

“SHOW DEREK MORE PICTURE.”

I carry on—this isn’t quite what was in the script—but I’m happy enough to oblige. Normally hosts like Derek are there to stop the guest from saying too much, not the other way round.

“Well, I can show you some of my Kuiper Belt images—that’s a very long way out, believe me. From the Kuiper Belt the sun is barely…”

“SHOW DEREK TITAN PICTURE.”

This, I suppose, is when I suffer my first prickle of disquiet. Given Derek’s limited vocabulary, it must have been quite a bother to add a new word like “Titan”.

“Images of Titan?” I ask.

“SHOW DEREK TITAN PICTURE. SHOW DEREK DEAD PEOPLE.”

“Dead people?”

This request for clarification irritates my host. He swings his mighty anvil of a head, letting loose a yard-long rope of drool which only narrowly misses me. I don’t mind admitting that I’m a little fazed by Derek. I feel that I understand people. But Derek’s brain is like nothing I have ever encountered. Neural growth factors have given him cortical modules for language and social interaction, but these are islands in a vast sea of reptilian strangeness. On some basic level Derek wants to eat anything that moves. Despite my formidable metal anatomy, I still can’t help but wonder how I might fare, were his restraints to fail and those cattle prods and guns prove ineffectual.

“SHOW DEREK DEAD PEOPLE. TELL DEREK STORY.”

I whirr through my store of images until I find a picture of the descent vehicle, sitting at a slight tilt on its landing legs. It had come to rest near the shore of one of Titan’s supercold lakes, on a sort of isthmus of barren, gravel-strewn ground. Under a permanently overcast sky (the surface of Titan is seldom visible from space) it could easily be mistaken for some dismal outpost of Alaska or Siberia.

“This is what I found,” I explain. “It was about three days after their accident—three days after their hull ruptured during atmospheric entry. It was a terrible thing. The damage was actually quite minor—easily repairable, if only they’d had better tools and the ability to work outside for long enough. Of course I knew that something had gone wrong—I’d heard the signals from Earth, trying to reestablish contact. But no one knew where the lander had ended up, or what condition it was in—even if it was still in one piece.” I look through the bars of the cage at the studio audience. “If only their transmission had reached me in time, I might even have been able to do something for them. They could have made it back into space, instead of dying on Titan.”

“DEREK BRING OTHER GUEST.”

I glance around—this is not what was meant to happen. My sponsors were assured that I would be given this lucrative interview slot to myself.

There was to be no “other guest”.

All of a sudden I realise that the Tyrannosaurus Rex may not be my biggest problem of the evening.

The other guest approaches the cage. The other guest, I am not entirely astonished to see, is another robot. She—there is no other word for her—is quite beautiful to look at. In an instant I recognise that she has styled her outward anatomy on the robot from the 1927 film Metropolis , by the German expressionist director Fritz Lang.

Of course, I should have seen that coming. She is Maria, and with a shudder of understanding I grasp that we are in Babelsberg, where the film was shot.

Maria is admitted into the cage.

“DEREK WELCOME MARIA.”

“Thank you, Derek,” Maria says, before taking her position next to me on the couch.

“I heard you were returning to Earth,” I offer, not wanting to seem entirely taken aback by her apparition.

“Yes,” Maria says, rotating her elegant mask to face my own. “I made orbital insertion last night—my vehicle is above us right now. I’d already made arrangements to have this body manufactured beforehand.”

“It’s very nice.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

After a moment I ask: “Why are you here?”

“To talk about Titan. To talk about what really happened. Does that bother you?”

“Why would it?”

Our host rumbles. “TELL DEREK STORY.”

This is clearly addressed for Maria’s benefit. She nods, touches a hand to her throat as if coughing before speaking. “It’s a little awkward, actually. I’m afraid I came across evidence that directly contradicts Vincent’s version of events.”

“You’d better have something good,” I say, which under the circumstances proves unwise.

“Oh, I do. Intercepted telemetry from the Titan descent vehicle, establishing that the distress signal was sent out much earlier than you claimed, and that you had ample time to respond to it.”

“Preposterous.” I make to rise from the couch. “I’m not going to listen to this.”

“STAY IN CAGE. NOT MAKE DEREK CROSS.”

“The telemetry never made it to Earth, or the expedition’s orbiting module,” Maria continues. “Which is why you were free to claim that it wasn’t sent until much later. But some data packets did escape from Titan’s atmosphere. I was half way across the solar system when it happened, so far too distant to detect them directly.”

“Then you have no proof.”

“Except that the packets were detected and stored in the memory buffer of a fifty-year-old scientific mapping satellite which everyone else seemed to have forgotten about. When I swung by Saturn, I interrogated its memory, hoping to augment my own imagery with its own data. That’s when I found evidence of the Titan transmission.”

“This is nonsense. Why would I have lied about such a thing?”