Pandora's Star

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘I saw that tar-pit monster coming, didn’t I?’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ the policeman said, ‘you’re clear to proceed.’

  They walked through into the transfer section lounge. A steward gave them each a once-piece overall made of light breathable fabric, with fuseto footpads and cuffs. ‘It’s just for the shuttle,’ he told them. ‘Wear it over your clothes, it stops anything flying loose. And please don’t forget your helmets before you go through. Safety regulations will not allow us to fly unless all passengers are wearing them.’

  Several other people were in the lounge, all of them shrugging their way into the white overalls. Anyone with long hair was fastening it back with bands that the stewards were handing out. Mac nudged Oscar. ‘Isn’t that Paula Myo over there?’

  Oscar followed his gaze. A young-looking woman was fixing her straight black hair with the bands. Her companion was an overweight man in a smart suit who could barely fit into his overall. ‘Could be. She must have come out of rejuve recently. I remember accessing the Shayoni case about six or seven years back, the one where she tracked down the arms seller who’d supplied kinetics to the Dakra Free State rebels. Four days she waited in that house for them to show up. That is what I call dedication.’

  ‘My wife studied her cases when she was in the academy, that’s how I know her. I’m sure it’s her.’

  ‘Wonder who she’s after this time?’

  ‘You know, we should have her in the crew.’

  Oscar gave Mac a startled look. ‘As what? Do you think we’re going to start killing each other on the voyage?’

  ‘Living in close proximity with your farts for a year, more than likely. But she solves problems, right, that’s what her whole brain’s wired for. She’s exactly the kind of talent we should be taking with us.’

  ‘There are different kinds of problems, you know; and we’re heading for the wrong sort.’ Oscar clapped Mac’s shoulder. ‘Keep trying, one day you’ll be command material.’

  ‘The day before you, pal.’

  ‘Right. And by the way, what does your wife think about you going off and leaving her for a year?’

  ‘Angie? She’s fairly cool about it. We talked about splitting up, but that’s being unduly pessimistic. We’ll just leave it and see what happens. If she finds someone else while I’m gone, fair enough. Our partnership contract allows for that.’

  ‘Nice contract.’

  ‘Yeah, so what about you? How are you going to cope for a year? Seen any possibilities among the recruits?’

  ‘Haven’t really thought about it. I’ve got enough OCtattoos for a very high resolution TSI, so I’ll just make do with a harem of nicely shaped pixels.’

  Mac shook his head in sad dismay. ‘Brother, you have got to get out more.’

  A steward led five of them, including Paula and Hoshe Finn, into the departure corridor at the far end of the lounge. Everybody’s feet made crunching sounds as the fuseto pads tried to anchor them on the floor. They were all handed a protective helmet as they went through, the steward making sure they put it on. ‘Are you familiar with zero gee?’ the steward asked.

  ‘I am nowadays,’ Oscar told him grumpily. The helmet was identical to those they used at the starship complex on Anshun. He still hated his trips to the assembly platform, but Wilson was a real believer in hands-on management – obviously a relic of his gung-ho NASA days. There wasn’t a week since Oscar had joined the project that he hadn’t been on some kind of inspection tour.

  ‘The gateway itself is marked by the black rim,’ the steward said, pointing ahead down the corridor. ‘After that you’re in zero gee; please use the fusetos and do not float free. Your shuttle is waiting at dock five. Now if you’ll all follow me.’ As he arrived at the black line, he reached forwards and touched his fuseto cuff on the wall. He eased himself gracefully across the line and his feet floated off the floor. Oscar grimaced in resignation, and followed suit.

  After five metres, the corridor opened out into the middle of a hemisphere measuring fifty metres across. There were no windows, only eight big airlocks set equidistantly round the rim. Number five was open. The steward led them carefully along the curving surface, adhering to it from his wrists and toes, like some giant insect. He waited by the airlock, ready to give assistance as they stopped to manoeuvre themselves through into the shuttle.

  The little craft was a basic tube, ten metres long, with a double line of couches. Oscar strapped himself in, and looked up. Five thick windows were set into what passed as the fuselage ceiling above him. All he could see was the curving outer wall of the departure port.

  There were only fifteen passengers on board. Their steward went along the couches, checking that everyone was settled, then the airlock irised shut. ‘High Angel does not permit CST to put a gateway inside itself,’ the steward said. ‘So we’re about fifty kilometres away. The journey over will take approximately fifteen minutes. If anyone has any real difficulty, please let me know. I have some strong sedatives which will probably help. In the meantime please familiarize yourself with the sanitary tube on the seatback in front of you.’

  Oscar glanced at the flexible hose with its fresh replaceable nozzle, and grimaced. Still, it was an improvement on the bags he’d taken to carrying with him round the starship platform.

  The shuttle vibrated quietly as it disengaged from the locking mechanism, chemical reaction control rockets nudged it away from the docking port. After drifting for a few seconds, the more powerful main rockets flared, accelerating them away. As they retreated from the port, more and more of the structure flowed into view through the shuttle windows, until after a minute Oscar could see the entire gateway station. It reminded him of a quartz cluster, long hexagonal tube sections all rising up out of a central disk; with the twin shuttle departure and arrival ports extending out from the disk’s rim. The end of the hexagonal tubes were giant airlocks where cargo tugs delivered their shipments; sealed pods containing completed satellites, sophisticated solid state devices, compounds, crystals, and biologicals which could only be fabricated in microgee environments. Cargo tugs also used the airlocks to load up with consumer goods and food which the gateway delivered, ferrying them over to the High Angel.

  The rest of the archipelago drifted into view through the window; over a hundred free-flying factories ranging from tiny independent research capsules, barely larger than the shuttle, up to the corporate macrohubs, kilometre-wide webs with production modules sitting on each junction where they glinted like jewels of prismatic chrome. Behind them the gas-giant world, Icalanise, dominated the starfield as the little shuttle rotated slowly. Their orbital position showed it to them as a massive crescent striped by saffron and white cloud bands whose fluctuating edges locked together by counter-spiral curlicues; as if each was extending talons into the other. A pair of small black circles were close together on the equator, eclipse shadows thrown by two of the gas-giant’s thirty-eight moons.

  After ten minutes, the shuttle turned again, aligning itself for the deceleration burn. Oscar found himself looking straight at the High Angel.

  The exploratory division wormhole which opened in the star system in 2163 was unable to locate any H-congruous planet and the Operations Director was about to close it and move on when the dish picked up a powerful, regular micro-wave pulse from Icalanise. They obtained a position lock to a point orbiting half a million kilometres above the brimstone atmosphere, and shifted the wormhole in for a close look. It was a confusing image at first. The telescope had centred on a dark, rocky moonlet sixty-three kilometres long, and up to twenty wide. But it appeared to be sprouting petals of pearl-white light – an angel’s wings. Moving in, and refining the focus, revealed the rock was actually the host body to twelve giant artificial domes of crystal sitting on the end of tall metallic stalks. Not all of the domes were translucent and radiant. Five were clear, revealing the alien cities contained inside. Street grids were illuminated in ruby, turquoise and emerald light, while the th
ousands of windows set into the strange architectural silhouettes of towers, hoops, cones, and spheres blazed away in the spectrums of many different suns.

  What they’d found was a starship, a living behemoth capable of ftl travel. Not that it was any kind of life that humanity understood; a machine that had risen to sentience, or a spaceborn lifeform which had evolved or been engineered into its current nature. The High Angel wasn’t forthcoming about its origin, saying only that its purpose was to provide a habitable environment to the planet-based species it encountered in the hope of learning about them. It was ‘resting’ in orbit around Icalanise – for how long was also not divulged. After some negotiation over a radio channel it agreed to open three of its (at that time, empty) domes to humans, who would use it primarily as a dormitory town for the astroengineering companies. The two most prominent clauses in the settlement agreement were High Angel’s veto on visitors and settlers, and its promise to inform its new human residents before it took flight again . . . whenever that might be.

  Their shuttle manoeuvred underneath the vast base of the New Glasgow dome and down along the tapering stalk underneath. The dome’s spaceport was situated just above the point where the pewter-coloured stalk sank into the starship’s rocky outer crust, a thick necklace of airlocks and ports which ringed the structure. Several of them had shuttles attached, while larger docking cradles were holding cargo tugs that were unloading.

  They docked with a slight tremble, and the plyplastic airlock irised open. ‘Thank you for travelling with us,’ the steward said. ‘Please remember that after you disembark you will still be in freefall until the lift is moving.’

  Oscar waited until all the passengers in front of him had got out before releasing his own straps. The corridor outside the airlock was disappointing, a wide silverish tube with a shallow curve taking it deeper into the stalk; there was no exotic feel to it at all. He drifted across it to the lift opposite. Like everyone else he let his fuseto soles stick him to the floor. Just before the doors closed, he saw Paula Myo and her companion glide past the lift, heading further down the corridor.

  Gravity slowly built as the lift slid up the inside of the stalk. That much Oscar could understand, they were accelerating, after all. When it stopped, he was still in a full standard gravity field. The High Angel had never explained how it did that, along with just about every other technical ability it possessed, like its power source, the nature of its ftl drive, how it shielded itself from particle impacts, where the mass came from to extrude its new domes.

  Their lift was one of ten opening out into a big arrivals lounge. Oscar and Mac took off their overalls and dropped them into a bin, then headed eagerly for the exit. The transit building was at the centre of New Glasgow’s Circle Park, an area of greenery five kilometres wide filled with so many trees it could almost be classed as forest. Behind the outer ring of trees were the skyscrapers, as varied in shape and texture as any New York avenue. The difference here was the skyway loops which coiled round them, thin rails carrying personal pods between public stops at considerable speed. It was day-time, which meant the crystal dome above them had turned translucent, emitting a uniform white light close to Sol’s spectrum. The atmosphere was pleasantly warm, with a touch of summer humidity.

  Oscar took a long moment, his head craned back, turning a slow circle. ‘I have to admit, this is hellishly impressive. Puts the old Second Chance into perspective, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Different strokes . . .’ Mac shrugged. ‘We developed gate-ways and the CST network: every planet just a step away. If we’d spent three hundred years developing starships, I expect we’d be riding round the galaxy in something like this.’

  Oscar glanced at him. ‘You’re impressed,’ he decided.

  ‘It’s a grand chunk of engineering, I admit. But it doesn’t give me an inferiority complex.’

  ‘Okay, okay. So how do we get to Madam Chairwoman?’

  Mac pointed through the woodland ahead. Small footpaths led away from the transit building, meandering through the trees. There was a stream not far away, the glimpse of a lake past the wider trunks. About fifty metres along the path ahead was a small white pillar where three personal pods were parked. ‘They’ll take us as close as you can get,’ Mac said.

  The pods were simple pearl-white spheres with a flattened base, the doors were open ovals on either side, protected by a translucent force field. Mac eased through and sat on the small bench seat inside. Oscar joined him. From the inside, the pod shell was transparent. The force field doors flickered and strengthened.

  ‘Chairwoman’s office, please,’ Mac said.

  The pod slid along the ground for a few metres, then the path surface dilated, exposing the top of a tunnel, and they sank down into it. There was no light in the tunnel, though the pod’s interior remained illuminated.

  ‘Whoh,’ Oscar said. His hands automatically gripped at the inside of the shell, even though there was no sensation of movement through the tunnel. ‘Must be some kind of inertial damping.’

  ‘Stop analysing. Enjoy. Especially this bit.’

  ‘What – wowshit.’

  The personal pod left the tunnel vertically, soaring along one of the skyway rails at what seemed like supersonic speed. Without feeling any acceleration, they were racing parallel to one of the skyscrapers, a tall slender cone of blue steel with a red sphere perched on top. Then the skyway curved round in a leisurely arc and levelled out. Another pod was hurtling towards them. Oscar had to force himself to keep his eyes open as they flashed past each other. Only then did his rattling heart slow enough so that he could take some enjoyment from the spectacle. They were high enough now that he could see right across the dome. There was as much parkland as there was urban area, and the shapes of the big buildings really were remarkable.

  ‘This is much better at night,’ Mac said. ‘That’s when the crystal turns transparent; you can see Icalanise overhead. Then you really know you’re in an alien place.’

  They twisted over a junction to another skyway, which sent them arching round and down towards a building that looked like a silver clamshell. The pod zipped into the huge lobby on the eighteenth floor, and stopped by a white pillar where several others were clustered, waiting.

  ‘Better than your Merc, huh?’ Mac said as they climbed out.

  Oscar pulled a face. ‘Just different.’

  One of the Chairwoman’s political staffers was standing waiting for them – Soolina Depfor, a young-looking woman in an expensive business suit. ‘Welcome to city hall, gentle-men,’ she said. ‘Ms Gall is expecting you.’ She led them straight into the office of the Chairwoman of the Human Residents’ Association, a huge oval room which had to be inside the building’s largest central rib. Its ceiling was a half-cone of stained glass whose colours undulated in a long perpendicular wave pattern. There was only one piece of furniture, a desk right at the far end; an arrangement which made it seem like an old-fashioned throne room. But then, Oscar knew, Toniea Gall had been Chairwoman of the Residents’ Association for over a century. Few of history’s absolute monarchs had reigned for that long.

  The Chairwoman rose to greet them as they approached. A tall woman with blue-black skin, dressed in a traditional African tribal robe. With less than a decade left before her next rejuvenation, her face was dignified and solemn. Grey strands were already infiltrating her tight-cropped cap of hair. It said something of the confidence she had in herself that she didn’t bother having them treated or even dyed. But then she won every election with a substantial majority. Her few critics and opponents claimed it was because nobody else really wanted the job, it was nothing other than a figurehead position since the High Angel ran all the services in the domes with peerless efficiency. To say that was to badly underestimate her ability. The High Angel might have started off as a simple convenient dormitory town for the astroengineering companies; but now the three domes, New Glasgow, Moscow Star and Cracacol were home to a population of over fifteen million soul
s. Two new domes, New Auckland and Babuyan Atoll, which the Chairwoman had negotiated with High Angel, were now almost fully grown and ready for human occupancy. The free-flying factories outside manufactured a small but significant overall percentage of the Commonwealth’s high-technology systems. By any measure, the High Angel was a big success story, and Toniea Gall, who had arrived as a company-contract ion thruster technician with the first wave of residents, was both a mirror and champion of that success story. She was also one of the longest-serving heads of state, and lately the political media had begun to talk of her as a serious potential candidate for the Presidency.

  Oscar clasped the hand which the Chairwoman proffered, feeling dry, cool skin. ‘Thank you for seeing us, ma’am.’

  ‘I was in two minds if I should,’ Toniea Gall said. Her voice lacked any trace of humour or welcome. ‘Along with the rest of the residents, I feel quite insulted that Nigel Sheldon ignored us as a location to build his starship.’

  Oscar’s smile tightened; he didn’t dare risk a glance at Mac. ‘I’m confident that no insult was intended, ma’am.’

  ‘Then why not build it here?’ she asked, genuinely puzzled. ‘We have all the facilities, as well as a huge pool of experience and knowledge. Building it at Anshun must have added a considerable amount to the cost of the project. Why would he do that?’

  ‘Anshun is somewhat closer to the Dyson Pair—’

  ‘Pha.’ She waved a hand dismissively. ‘As if that would make any difference, a few days’ travel time at best. Is he trying to establish a rival space industry?’

  ‘I assure you, ma’am, the only thing being built at Anshun is the starship. There are no freefall industrial facilities. A great many of our components are sourced from the High Angel.’