by Greg Egan
Camille turned to him. “If there’s nothing wrong with you, why don’t you fuck off?”
“Gladly.” He clambered out of the harness and stood beside her, soles clinging to the floor. “But aren’t you going to ask what we were celebrating?”
Camille didn’t reply. The man stared back at her for a few seconds, then smiled and led his companions out of the cubicle.
Camille waited until they were gone to check her link; it was working again. She opened a news feed and brought up the results. Voting was over, and the tax on the Sivadiers had been accepted by a majority of fifty-two percent.
She went into the toilets and sat down in a cubicle; it was the only way she could escape the cameras herself. Then she cradled her head in her arms and wept with rage.
6
“Your partner couldn’t make it?” Olivier asked Anna.
“This isn’t her kind of thing.” Chloe had offered no excuse or apology, and Anna didn’t feel inclined to invent one.
Olivier led her into the crowded apartment. Percussive music with an unfamiliar rhythm was playing softly, almost lost beneath the voices of the guests, and there was a heady aroma of frying spices escaping from the kitchen. When her host began making introductions Anna wondered if she should gently remind him that everyone’s name was visible to her—but he could hardly be unaware of that, and if he wished to provide her with these verbal précis it would be rude to interrupt.
“Laurent and I knew each other for years, back on Vesta,” Olivier explained, of the apartment’s owner. “I doubt I would have made it through medical school if he hadn’t brought out the competitive streak in me.”
Laurent put a brotherly arm across Olivier’s shoulders. “I’m just glad to see him here, in safety. And Camille, before too long.”
Olivier’s smile faltered. “That’s more than a year away.”
“The time will pass quickly,” Laurent insisted. “Before you know it, she’ll be standing on the spot where you are now.”
Olivier didn’t seem to take much comfort from this hyperbole. Anna said, “It looks like you have your strength back. You’re walking around as if you just stepped off the ferry.”
“The muscles don’t get much of a chance to atrophy,” Olivier explained. “If you measure the journey time biologically, it’s only equivalent to a few days’ bed rest.”
“We do have stronger gravity, though.”
“Sixteen percent?” He looked down at his still absurdly slender frame. “I think I’ve compensated for that in other ways.”
The doorbell rang, and Olivier excused himself.
“Your friend Camille is…en route?” Anna asked Laurent.
“Yes. She left about two years ago.”
“I don’t know how anyone can do that,” Anna confessed. “I don’t even like going up to the surface.”
“You’d have no choice,” Laurent replied amiably.
Anna had no wish to offend him, but she wasn’t sure that this was literally true. “If you were captured, how bad would it be?”
“The sentence for insurrection is life in prison. And that’s the best outcome. People die while they’re being arrested, all the time.”
“But it can’t go on like that forever,” she protested. “There must be some way to settle the whole dispute.”
“There must,” Laurent agreed. “But we can’t accept anything less than the restoration of equality, and right now there’s no prospect of that.”
As Olivier rejoined them, Anna noticed that half a dozen other people had turned to face them, tuning in to the conversation. “We’re lucky here,” she said. “At least our founders made that kind of thing impossible.”
“You really believe that?” Olivier asked. His tone was polite, but he sounded incredulous.
Anna hesitated, wondering if the comparison would prove inflammatory—but she doubted that anyone here would think of the system that had ruined their lives as some kind of pinnacle of civilisation. “The wealth we get from Ceres isn’t treated as an inheritance,” she said. “The founders expected a return from their investment, and they got it—but they also accepted that Ceres itself wasn’t conjured out of the vacuum by their money. If this rock belongs to anyone, it’s not the children of whoever got in first with their robots; it’s whoever chooses to live here and make the society work.”
“And what if some group is perceived as not doing that?” Olivier replied. “Making trouble, rather than making things work?”
Anna inclined her head, conceding the point. “All right, that could happen. But at least it would depend on their own behaviour, not someone else’s a century ago. I suppose what we’ve inherited is a strong utilitarian streak: if we had a choice between civil war and letting some perceived infraction pass unpunished, I think most of us would choose the latter.”
Laurent smiled. “But that cuts both ways, doesn’t it? If the Vestan majority were good utilitarians, they would have ‘forgiven’ our ‘debt’…but if we were good utilitarians, we would have swallowed our pride and paid the tax. In the grand scheme of things, a tenth of the population becoming second-class citizens with a little less income hardly compares to the suffering caused by the war.”
Before Anna could frame a diplomatic response to that, one of the onlookers, Céline, interjected disdainfully, “Utilitarianism is for theoreticians, not human beings.”
“Really?” Anna lost interest in diplomacy and gave in to her combative streak. “Then how should human beings choose, say…a public health policy? If minimising harm across the whole society is so naïve and utopian, would you settle for whatever gives the best outcome for a few people closest to the decision-making process? Or would you prefer whatever we could achieve for ourselves in some kind of free-for-all scrabble to monopolise resources?”
Céline said, “Of course, we all accept something more equitable. But it’s not because we put some health statistician’s measures first. For the majority, it’s a matter of enlightened self-interest to have a policy that doesn’t play favourites.”
Anna couldn’t dispute that, but it was hardly the whole story. “And no one feels empathy beyond their immediate circle? No one thinks about what’s just?”
“Do you have children?” Céline asked.
“I have a son.”
“Can you honestly tell me that you view his welfare no differently from anyone else’s?”
“Of course not!” Anna was bemused. “But I never expected Cererian society as a whole to give him special treatment. It’s possible to love your own children more than anyone else’s, and still cede power to a system that treats every child as interchangeable.”
Céline said, “Only if you’ve never really felt the difference.”
Anna was tempted to reply that if the system on Ceres had spared her from feeling the difference, that was probably one more point in its favour. But she had no way of knowing what raw wounds lay behind the woman’s zeal.
Olivier said, “Enough politics. It’s time to eat.”
When Anna arrived home, Chloe was staring at an overlay. It wasn’t private, but Anna had no need to view it herself; she knew exactly what it would contain.
“On this scale, they barely seem to move from month to month,” Chloe mused, holding up a thumb to gauge the corresponding interval on the trajectory.
“Or decade to decade,” Anna replied.
“He should have just frozen himself, right here at home, and waited until interstellar travel became practical. We’re sure to crack uploading in another hundred years.”
Anna said, “That would have seemed so much lazier, though: lying around expecting other people to do all the work.”
Chloe laughed curtly. “As opposed to lying around on a three-thousand-year cruise? Where the only thing that will keep you from being overtaken in a century or two is the collapse of civilisation?”
“If Vesta’s any guide he might have made the right bet.”
Chloe shut off the overlay and
turned to face her. “So how was the party?”
“Interesting.”
“Vesta is not your problem,” Chloe said bluntly. “You shouldn’t get involved.”
“I’m not involved. Or do you think I’m going to fly off on a secret mission to try to overthrow the Vestan oppressors?”
“No one in this family would fly off on a fantasy mission, would they?”
Anna said, “The Vestans are part of our community now. What do you want—everyone keeping to themselves in their own little ghettoes?”
Chloe groaned. “They’re hardly being persecuted here. They don’t need your help.”
“Who said anything about help?” Anna protested. “I just want to talk to someone with different experiences, now and then. I don’t know why you’re so…against that.” She’d almost said jealous, but then it had felt like an unnecessary provocation.
“So Vesta’s gone to hell, but that’s no reason to be circumspect?”
Anna said, “It’s reason to try to understand what’s happening there.”
“I don’t want to understand,” Chloe replied.
“You don’t want to understand?”
Chloe was unrepentant. “They’re welcome here, I’d never turn them away. But I don’t want to feel their pain, or walk in their shoes, or see through their eyes.”
Anna was bemused. “Because…?”
“Because that’s the first step towards following them down: seeing the world the way they do.”
“You think war is an infection, and we can catch it just by talking to them?”
Chloe said, “I know you think I’m some kind of bigot, but it’s the opposite: I think Vestans are exactly like us. They had a life every bit as good as ours—just as safe, just as prosperous—and like us, a lot of bored, aimless people who’d never really found any purpose. But then they realised that they could fill that hole by inventing a grievance, and taking sides, and refusing to be swayed no matter what. Maybe you think we’re immune to that kind of thing, but I don’t.”
“I don’t think we’re immune,” Anna said, glad now that Chloe hadn’t joined her at the party. “I just don’t think the problem is contagious. And you’re the one who’s just offered a diagnosis. If forewarned is forearmed, how can more information about Vesta be a bad thing?”
“You’re not after information. You’re not going to be writing any thesis on the Vestan war.”
“Really. So what am I after? You tell me.”
Chloe was silent for a while, as if weighing up the cost of an honest response. “I think you’re looking for a new family,” she said. “Sasha’s gone, and you’re bored with me. So you want to find a new way to belong.”
7
“We should target the water supply,” Laurent suggested. “Nothing too strong—just a mild enterotoxin.”
“‘Mild’?” Mireille made the word sound contemptible. “Why bother? No one would even notice.”
“I think they’d notice a day or two of vomiting and diarrhoea,” Laurent replied. “I meant ‘mild’ as opposed to wild-type cholera.”
Camille was appalled. “What about children? What about ill people? Even if you don’t kill someone by mistake, the risk is unacceptable.”
“They need to know exactly what we’re capable of,” Mireille said coldly. “They need to know that no one’s going to be able to relax and get on with their lives.”
“But what are we trying to say?” Camille demanded. “Next time, we’ll increase the potency and do real harm?” She had no intention of meekly accepting the vote, but she hadn’t lost all sense of proportion. “If I believed that someone was threatening mass murder, I’d vote to lock them all up myself. We might as well march straight into prison.”
Olivier said, “We need to show that we can make life uncomfortable, that’s all. We want to be an irritant that pricks people’s conscience—not an existential threat that will make them want to wipe us out.”
Camille agreed with this assessment, but it was difficult to think of even a minor act of sabotage that couldn’t be extrapolated into a horror show. Every Vestan had been instilled from an early age with an appropriate fear of their unmitigated environment—and anyone who messed with the integrity of the systems that kept the cold and the vacuum at bay could expect no mercy.
Laurent stretched his arms, then jumped up lightly to press his palms against the ceiling. They’d been sitting in Olivier’s apartment for nearly three hours, doing nothing but talking, but Camille felt more weary than she did after ten hours at work. She’d hoped that the gathering would jolt them all out of their post-ballot malaise, but so far it had only intensified her sense of helplessness.
Laurent said, “What if we just turned the water bright red? We could use some harmless food dye that’s been tested to the nth degree, so there’s no risk of an adverse reaction.”
Mireille groaned, but Camille laughed appreciatively. “I like it! On one level, it’s just a light-hearted prank, so anyone who overreacts will look foolish. But for the time it takes to pass through the system, no one will be thinking about anything else. You want to drink our blood? Go ahead: this is what it looks like.”
“The message sounds right,” Olivier concurred. “But what about the logistics? How do we get our hands on that much dye? And how can we get it into the water without it being filtered out—or triggering a purge of a few million litres because it looks like the purifiers failed?”
“How do they assess the water?” Laurent wondered. “Do they just test for things they’re expecting?”
Camille was already looking it up. “They run specific assays for a few hundred compounds that can be present in Cererian ice, but they also do chromatography and mass spectrometry. If a new peak shows up, that’s going to set alarm bells ringing…but we might still be able to steer a path through the blind spots.” There was no such thing in analytic chemistry as a machine that told you every last constituent of a sample, without making a single assumption about the contents.
Mireille said, “You’re talking about turning the water red. Do you really think noticing that is going to come down to mass spectrometry?”
“Hmm.” Camille was fairly sure that there’d be no human eyes on the water; who’d pay to do a job like that? But a simple optical check of turbidity would still go off the scale in the presence of a visible dye.
“Is there some way we could delay the colour change?” Olivier asked. “Maybe use a precursor that only gets turned into a dye further downstream?”
“Turned into it by what?” Mireille pressed him.
“I don’t know. Some kind of slow-acting catalyst?”
“This is starting to sound unfeasible,” Camille conceded. “Large amounts of anything, bright red or otherwise, are going to be hard to make, hard to deliver, and hard to get past all the tests.” Laurent’s first idea had been more practical in one respect: a toxin relied on biological activity rather than any bulk physical property, using the body’s sensitivity to amplify its effect.
Mireille said, “We should knock a few ice blocks out of orbit.”
Laurent laughed. “You have a few spare rockets lying around, do you?”
“No,” Mireille replied, “but it wouldn’t be that hard to hack the attitude control jets. If you can turn a block far enough out of alignment, the next collision will throw it off-course. Sivadiers designed every component that makes the trading loop work, so let’s see how people like living without it.”
“We’d get by on recycling, wouldn’t we?” Olivier brought up an overlay. “Oh. Not for long. Still…”
Camille was alarmed that he was even considering it. “I think a drought would be going too far,” she said firmly.
Mireille lost patience. “All right, Goldilocks, what’s your perfect solution?”
Camille reached desperately for a snappy reply. “Biological, like Laurent suggested…but smarter, safer, more precise. Biological, but benign.”
Mireille scowled. “What
does that even mean?”
For several long seconds, Camille could think of nothing more to say.
And then she had it.
“Let me check your suit.” Gustave motioned to Camille to approach him.
She made her way warily across the workshop floor. The boots read her gait and timed their changes of adhesion almost as well as her own shoes, but her extra mass and bulk still made the process feel less secure than usual. “You don’t think it’s smart enough to check itself?” The suit was almost forty years old. They’d bought it on the grey market, and painted it jet black.
“It is unless it isn’t, in which case it might not notice that it isn’t.” Gustave was old enough to have had first-hand experience with the model. “Stretch out your arms.”
Camille did as he’d asked, and he bent over and placed an ear beside the right elbow joint. She wasn’t sure whether to be amused or alarmed. “That’s why I’m at more than ambient pressure? So you can listen for leaks?”
“Sssh.” He finished the checks and straightened up.
“What happens if I get a puncture out there?”
“If it’s from something small and slow, the fabric will repair itself.”
“And if it’s not small and slow?”
“The frictional heat will start a flash-fire. In a fraction of a second you’ll be charcoal.” Gustave smiled. “Much nicer than a slow asphyxiation.”
“Absolutely.”
Camille had walked on the surface just four times before, as a child. The first excursion had been thrilling, and the next two exciting enough, but on the fourth occasion, all the preparations and safety checks hadn’t seemed worth it for a view she could get more clearly from an overlay. She’d never been afraid, though: she’d taken it for granted that her mother and her teachers wouldn’t expose her to any real danger. Gustave was probably more qualified to keep her safe than any of the tour guides to whom she’d entrusted her life before. But the mere fact that she was acting clandestinely made her anxious out of all proportion to any reasonable assessment of the risk.