Paul Mcauley - Ancients of Days

“I cannot know about every machine, Tamora. One could hang high above us, and I would not know. Besides, Prefect Corin knows that we are going downriver. The river is wide, but it is not infinite.”

Tamora stared hard at him. Sunlight dappled her skin, glittered in her green eyes. She said, “I will lay my life down for you, willingly and gladly. But I would hope it is not because some fool thinks to line his pockets.”

The cook prepared a sumptuous meal after sunset, roasting a side of ribs from the slaughtered shoat and serving it with a sauce of apricots and plums, riverweed fried with ginger, and side dishes of candied sweet potatoes and cassava porridge flavored with cumin. Most of the crew ate heartily, in a fine spirit of gallows humor, and all drank the ration of heart of wine Aguilar had broached.

“There’ll be another ration at the beginning of the first morning watch,” Aguilar announced. “All hands to deck then.”

She did not need to say that by then the picketboat would be in cannon shot of the Weazel . Before they bedded down for the night, Eliphas told Yama, “Our captain hopes to hail another ship tomorrow. She steers toward the nearside shore for that reason. Not because she hopes to reach it before being overtaken, but because that is where the shipping lanes are. If you are right about Prefect Corin’s motives, brother, if he has no official sanction but pursues you for his own ends, he will not attack us in plain sight of others.”

“I think that Captain Lorquital underestimates Prefect Corin.”

“He is only a man. Don’t make him more than he is, brother. You will find a way.”

Yama had surprised himself by eating his fill, and he found sleep surprisingly easy, too. Perhaps it was because he had come to a decision, a way of ending the uncertainty of the chase. It had crept into the base of his brain during the feast, as cruelly sharp as a knife. He would wake in a few hours, cut the dory free, and make off into the darkness. Once he was far enough from the ship, he would put out the dory’s drag anchor and wait for the picketboat to bear down on him. Attracting attention would be easy enough—he had only to call on Prefect Corin’s machines.

He would allow himself to be captured, and at the first opportunity he would kill the Prefect. He would gather all the machines within the range of his powers and kill everyone on the picketboat, and then continue downriver alone.

He had become a soldier after all, he thought, and realized that the war reached further upriver than the battlefields where armies clashed.

Yama slept and, freed by sleep, his mind ranged far down into the lightless depths of the river, where vast segmented monsters blindly humped through abyssal ooze.

Wholly aware that he was sleeping but that this was not a dream, Yama engaged with the minds of these ancient machines. He learned of the immemorial routes they followed among the slow, cold currents at the bottom of the river, of their endless work of pushing sediment into the subduction channels which transported it to the Rim Mountains for redistribution by glacial melt. Theirs was a world defined by the echoes of ultrasonic clicks and pulses, by touch and chemical cues. Neighbor constantly reassured neighbor with little bursts of data; they moved through a web of shared information that mapped the entire river bottom, its braided currents and thermal gradients, its deltas of mud and plains of chalky ooze.

As the machines plowed the river bottom, they were accompanied by their sharers. The sharers fed on the shell fish and blind crabs exposed by the machines, and in return scouted the layers of water above the trenches and channels of the river bottom, and cleaned away parasites which sought lodging on the overlapping plates of the machines’ armored hides.

We will help , the machines told Yama, although he had not asked them for help. He expected them to begin to rise toward the surface—any one of them could have sunk the picketboat by ramming it—but when he pictured this the machines told him that they could never leave the river bottom. They would help in their own way.

A league beneath the Weazel ’s keel, the machines abandoned their routines for the first time in thousands of years.

They altered their buoyancy, lifting from the long trenches they had made in the ooze and drifting on cold currents until they reached the maws of nearby subduction channels. As the machines blocked the channels, the cold river bottom currents were deflected upward, where they spread out beneath warmer layers until they reached the steep drop-off at the coastal shelf. The machines saw, by an increase in the echo delay of their ultrasonic chirps, a huge unsteady lens of cold water growing beneath the warmer layers over the coastal shelf, pushing upward and sideways in unstable equilibrium…

He was woken by Pandaras. It was dawn, but the light had a diffuse cast. It was like waking inside a pearl. The mainmast stabbed upward, vanishing into streaming whiteness. Fog had settled damply over his blanket and drops of water hung everywhere from stays and ratlines.

“There’s something wrong with the weather,” Pandaras said. He had wrapped a blanket around his narrow shoulders like a cloak, but was shivering all the same.

“Where are the crew?” He would kill them all, if he had to, beginning with this silly little boy. Kill everyone who stood in his way when he took the dory. Or kill everyone now, and let the picketboat overtake the Weazel .

“Master, are you all right?”

Yama found that he was awake, standing beside Pandaras in the middle of a fog so dense he could not see the bow of the ship. Something had possessed him, horrible thoughts like ooze from the bottom of his brain. His power, he thought. It would survive any way it could, at any cost. He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes.

Red and black jags of light. He suddenly had a terrible headache, He said, “I am going to steal the dory. You and Tamora will help me.”

“Tamora is with Aguilar. They are laying out the weapons, master, as sorry a collection of antiques that I’ve ever seen. As for the dory, you’ll have to explain your plan to the Captain. She came up on deck an hour ago, when the fog bank rolled across the river.”

“The machines of the river deeps,” Yama said, remembering the dream which had not been a dream after all. A small hope kindled in his breast.

“Machines, master? At the bottom of the river? What would machines be doing down there?”

“I found them and talked to them, and they said that they would help me.”

“They would be dredgers,” Eliphas said, looming out of the fog. Like Pandaras, he had wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. His eyes were dull pewter in the diffuse light; droplets of water beaded his smooth black skin and clung to the stiff curls of his white hair. “I once saw the carcass of a dredger that had been washed ashore. They are divided into segments like worms, and each segment bears a pair of paddles or other appendages. They clear mud and detritus that collects in the deeps; without them the river would soon silt up.”

Yama tried to think it through. The headache was like a spike driven through his forehead. He said slowly, “They changed the currents at the bottom of the river. The water is colder in the deeps, and perhaps it is now coming to the surface. Cold air is denser than warm air, so that as the air above the river is cooled, it draws down more. That is what drives the wind. The fog forms as the warm air cools, and can no longer carry as much moisture.” He felt a sudden surge of hope. “They are hiding us from Prefect Corin!”

Eliphas nodded, but Pandaras did not believe a word of it. He said scornfully, “Nothing can change the course of the river!”