by Tony Daniel
Merced turned his attention from scientific study proper to aesthetics. His correspondence with Myers grew more intense as he sought to somehow systematize a theory of beauty. In the meantime, Myers was running into trouble with the authorities on Mercury. These were the years of the Endowment government there, with its official goal of creating a renaissance. At first, thousands of artists of various sorts had flocked to the planet, convinced that a new utopia was at hand. But the Endowment Committee was quickly taken over by an elite class who formed the so-called Dowager Way and, far from encouraging other artists, the Committee began a series of pogroms that led to Myers’s imprisonment, on grounds that his work was ugly, irrelevant, and a corrupting influence on higher expression.
Merced, now in his eighties (and, remember, this was in the days before grist regeneration of the human body had been perfected) journeyed to Mercury and staged a protest. He was shortly joined by his sister, Clara, who was ninety at the time. Using grist specially designed by researchers at Feur Otto Bring’s factory on Mars, Clara and Raphael Merced picked out a suitable spot near the Mercurian North Pole and created, in a matter of hours, what has been described as the biggest middle finger in the known universe. The structure was as long as Earth’s Grand Canyon, and as wide as Earth’s Italian peninsula. Seen from space, there was no doubt what it represented.
This gigantic “fuck you” symbol was engineered to self-destruct within a year as the other “fingers” of the enormous hand spread out to form an open palm, and then dissolved into the underlying, still-preserved terrain. Merced, however, saw no reason to mention to the Endowment authorities the fact that the symbol would eventually disappear. The Endowment government was enraged. Merced was immediately arrested, along with Clara. Two months later, the Merceds, Myers, and twenty-seven other Mercurian contributors toFlare were given a trial and found guilty of gross aesthetic injustices against humankind. They were placed on a small spacecraft and set on an orbit around the sun, officially cut off from all communication with the rest of the human race. Since the Endowment could only enforce its sentence on Mercury, it set the orbit of the exile craft to be within the confines of Mercury’s own orbit about the sun.
But Merced’s body was now wholly interpenetrated by grist and, unknown to the Mercurian authorities, he was able to communicate with Bring back on Mars. A rescue mission was arranged.
Before the rescue ship could arrive, however, the exile craft experienced a malfunction, probably caused by the degenerated state of Endowment engineering skills. Within minutes, the exile craft began to plunge into the sun. The occupants tried several fixes, but nothing worked. With about an hour to go, they resigned themselves to their fate. They found that, with a limited maneuvering capability still remaining, they would be able to choose where in the sun they would fall.
“We’re going in at a sunspot near the north pole,” Merced said to the rescue ship’s captain, Feur Otto Bring’s daughter, Katya. “We’re doing this because we think it might be cooler.”
Over the next hour, the occupants of the exile ship kept up a running commentary with Katya Bring. The record of this communication is known as theExiles’ Journey . It has long been available on the merci. In it, Myers recites several spontaneous poems, including his “Old Left-handed Time,” which has become one of the classics of human literature. Clara Merced makes a moving good-bye to her children and grandchildren. Several of the other poets and artists on board left important records of various sorts.
Raphael Merced was, himself, quiet for the first fifteen minutes. After that, he made a series of aphoristic comments which some have taken to be poems, and other have taken to be seeds for future scientific research. These are now known as the “Merced Synthetics.” The final comment Merced made, as the exile ship was burning around him, had to do with his own quantum gravitational theory.
“I have been thinking,” said Merced, “that I was a bit mistaken about time. Don’t have the opportunity to go into the details just now, but I might suggest that somebody one of these days have a look at that big F in my equation. It might be possible to rearrange things in the past more to our liking. As a matter of fact, I do believe that I’ve seen signs that somebody is already doing that. I only hope to God that whoever is doing so has discovered the human equivalent of that unique property of my little gravitons. Whoever you are, up there in the future, for goodness sake, make sure you use a bit ofjudgment .”
And with those words, Raphael Merced plunged into the sun and was lost.
Sixteen
“Quite a sight, eh Ted?” Roger Sherman said, but only to himself.
Sherman reeled in the two-hundred-nineteen-thousand-mile-long cable that had stretched, just hours ago, from the moon Triton down into the Blue Eye of Neptune. He wasn’t really reeling it in, of course, but steadily deinstantiating it, simultaneously pulling it down and disassembling it on a molecular level. The buckyball components were broken down to elements and stable compounds, and stored in a room no bigger than a house. The cable, while several hundred thousand miles long, had the diameter of a straight pin.
Far above, the weather-station packet came into view, white against the dark blue nitrogen sky. The weather station, at the tail end of Sherman’s cable, had entered Triton’s gravity well several minutes ago and deployed its parasail when the air became thick enough. Now Sherman was guiding it in like a big kite. In another half hour, he had it down and secure.
Sherman was not normally in charge of bringing in the weather probe, but he did it on occasion—and, at the moment, all of his troops were on full defensive alert.
Besides, he enjoyed the solitude that reeling in the weather station provided. It seemed that all of his time for the last few weeks had been spent in frantic preparations. He needed time to think.
With practiced ease, Sherman shifted his attention into virtual and examined the data in the macro station. One by one his collection algorithms, all free-convert recruits, reported in with a crisp regularity.
“Surface winds at two hundred forty-two knots, Colonel,” said Corporal Anometer.
“Noted,” Sherman replied, and shunted the information to Major Theory, his free-convert personal adjutant. He treated all the virtual entities with strict formality, as he would any group of soldiers.
The stars were out, as they always were, and the sun was hardly brighter than the moon on Earth. Triton was thirty times farther from the sun than was Earth. What dominated the sky at the moment was Neptune itself, setting in the west. Of all the moons in the solar system, Triton was the only major one to orbit its planet in a retrograde direction. Neptune rotated on its axis in the other direction, so that its waxing and waning in the sky was directly contrary to that of Earth’s moon. Most people on Triton didn’t notice the weird way Neptune’s phases changed in comparison with other planets when seen from their moons, but such things were part of Sherman’s job. The thin rings of the planet were barely visible at this angle as twinkling lines that seemed to rise directly out of Miranda Canyon. The Army weather station, and the settlement of Miranda, were perched on the canyon’s edge. New Miranda, a century old now, had been pioneered by refugees from the failure of the biocity on Uranus’s moon, Miranda.
Uranus’s Miranda had an enormous canyon that was more than twelve miles deep—as deep as the deepest oceans on Earth. Triton’s Miranda namesake was more like a shallow gully in comparison.
But New Miranda was a far bigger town than the habitat on Miranda had ever been. Uranus had remained, over the decades, a rather backward planetary system. The Neptune area, in comparison, was positively thriving these days. This was due to the difference in the planet that Triton circled. Uranus was a cold world, with a dead core. Neptune, on the other hand, was hotter than hell at the bottom of its atmosphere. Like Jupiter, Neptune was a failed sun, and there was still a residue of fission taking place down there in the great rift valleys that bisected the core’s surface. It was this spontaneous fission and the general
radioactivity of the core that powered the storm that swept the atmosphere, particularly the Blue Eye that hovered over the equator, never blinking. And within that Blue Eye, the New Miranda settlers had placed the Mill.
The Mill was just that, an enormous windmill consisting of two blades that turned with the swirl of the storm. The Mill, from blade tip to blade tip, was as long as the diameter of planet Earth. It was built on the same physical principles as the Met. In the center of the mill, operating in a manner not dissimilar to that of ancient hydroelectric turbines on Earth, was a generator that beamed a steady supply of microwave energy to a geosynchronous satellite stationed above it. And from that satellite, it was fed to Triton.
Neptune set, and Sherman prepared himself to review his brigade, such as it was. The Third Sky and Light was a motley assortment of outer-system malcontents, hometown rejects, and Met outcasts. When he’d taken the post ten years before, discipline had been nonexistent, regulations were routinely disregarded to the point of genuine danger to the troops themselves, and morale was lower than he’d ever seen among any group of men and women. Since then, things had improved to some extent.
They call me the Old Crow, Sherman thought. It was difficult to imagine that this was a term of affection.
All in all, Sherman had about seven hundred soldiers under him on Triton, with a reserve unit of another seven hundred attached. Their main assignment was to protect and preserve the Mill. The Mill itself was not a Corps of Engineers project, but Sherman had had a vital role in getting the thing up and running. In fact, Sherman hated the idea of a Corps of Engineers. He hated all specialty divisions. In the Third Sky and Light, all traditional arrangements stopped at the company. Sherman maintained group loyalty and morale by developing a mentor chain, with each soldier immediately responsible for two recruits as soon as he himself was fully trained.
Sherman had come up with the idea of the mentor chain while serving as a captain on Mars. Before Amés and his Department of Immunity had driven the old Met Army to the outer system, the Federal had played an important role in fighting terrorism and keeping incipient tribalism and nationalism to a mild blaze. He’d been a captain for nearly sixty years and had watched three terrorist groups form under his nose, all from splinter groups from the ’63 Conjubilation. Sherman, himself, had Free Integrationist leanings, but no one had a right to use violence and killing to bring about their particular brand of politics.
Nevertheless, one of the groups, calling itself FUSE (the acronym meant something likeMars for Martians in Norwegian) had staged a series of remarkably successful grist-based attacks on Met-wide companies with headquarters on Mars. The Army had one miserable failure after another in trying to stop them. Finally, Sherman had been assigned the task. He’d immediately seen that the problem was coordinating intelligence information with guard and attack functions and, after an embarrassing meltdown of the Werther Travel Complex in Marineris Valley, he had broken up all his platoons and rearranged them ad hoc with the idea that each soldier must also be a fully trained intelligence specialist. FUSE was notoriously riddled with information leaks (they had a site on the merci, for Christ’s sake), and in short order Sherman’s D Company had shut FUSE down by anticipating their every move and being there before them. After that success, Sherman was promoted and transferred to West Point to study organizational theory and to teach two classes a week to the plebes. It was a fine way to reward him and, at the same time, avoid implementing any of the changes he had worked out.
This evening, Captain Quench would brief him on Company A, and Sherman would select a “primary” to look in on. He pulled on his dress jacket, made a final check on the weather station, and instructed Major Monitor to take command. Monitor, an old convert who was nearing three centuries of service, gave his customary two point clicks in the indigo spectrum of the room’s lighting as acknowledgment. It was old school, from before converts could speak with pleasant voices. With the weather station taken care of, Sherman opened the door and stepped into Triton’s nitrogen night.
Sherman, along with most of the long-term residents of Triton, was nitrogen-adapted. An Earthman looking at him would notice a peculiar mottle to his skin. It was the molecular equivalent of long underwear and a pressure suit. After over seven centuries of trying, humanity had finally seen the idiocy (and the danger) of attempting to terraform the various heavenly bodies in the solar system. It was much more cost-effective to “Trita-form” a man than to try to make the little moon into Earth. Being Triton-adapted made for an extremely tough human being. Only the completely space-adapted were more resilient. A great many of Sherman’s soldiers were space-adapted. They came from even farther out.
Sherman walked from the weather station to staff HQ along a worn path in the pebbly ground. Most of this region around Miranda Canyon was a combination of rock and frozen methane slush. The ground had a mushy consistency, like the sides of a volcano covered with snow back on Earth. Even in the thin atmosphere, each of Sherman’s footsteps produced an audible crunch.
The Triton temperature could get down to thirty-eight degrees Kelvin, which was –390 Fahrenheit. This was another reason New Miranda was growing. You could put a simple substance in the shade here, and it would become a superconductor. At the average temperatures and pressure on Triton, the nitrogen atmosphere hovered around its solid-gas-liquid triple point, and occasionally conditions would be right for the formation of the famous nitrogen rains. Triton was easily the coldest inhabited place in the solar system. Even Pluto, built on different geology, was warmer by a little.
Staff HQ had an airlock, since not all of Sherman’s soldiers were adapted to Triton’s rigors, and even those who were functioned better in an e-mix of gases.
The grist opened one portal and closed the other briskly as Sherman stepped through. Captain Quench was waiting at the situations table, engrossed in some problem on the knit. He noted Sherman’s arrival, took a moment to disengage, then stood up and saluted. Sherman nodded, and Quench quickly finished up what he was doing. Quench had been one of Sherman’s best pupils at the Point, and Sherman liked to watch him at his work. Quench was efficient in a kind of intuitive way that was different from Sherman’s thoroughness. He was ambitious, and a natural leader. He had also, once, been a woman, and, he claimed, would be one again when he got promoted. Quench had a theory that women were better lieutenants, men better captains, and women better majors. He hadn’t ventured any speculation, at least in Sherman’s presence, as to the best makeup of the higher ranks.
All of Sherman’s other officers were doing on-site supervision, and the room was empty except for Quench and Theory, who was now ensconced in the grist of the situation table.
“We’ve almost completed laying the Mill minefield, sir,” Quench reported. “Another two e-days, and stage one will be over. That relay is surrounded by a nest of hornets.”
“Very good,” Sherman replied. “Who have you got doing it?”
“Two units, one of them under Peoples, and the other is Ki’s calibration primary.”
“All right, Captain. Let’s have a look at that calibration unit.” Sherman walked to the grist-rich table and put his hands upon it, instructing his pellicle to make a physical link for both quantum and e-m transmission.
“Follow me, sir,” said Quench, and both men attuned themselves to the knit and entered full virtuality. Instantly, Sherman found himself (that is, an iconic representation of himself as an oak leaf cluster) floating in space next to Quench’s iconic captain’s bars. They were actually inhabiting the grist of the command pod that followed Lieutenant Ki around as she went about her tasks. The pod notified Ki that she was being observed, and she reported in.
“I’ve got the outer-periphery nukes ready to go,” she told them. “What’s taking time is working with the sentient units nearer to the relay satellite to tailor their bursts so that the satellite won’t be damaged.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Sherman said. She showed Sherman th
e array she’d worked out, with the smarter explosives nearer to the center.
“Lieutenant, I want you to change those interior layouts,” Sherman said.
“Sir?”
“We haven’t got time to deploy and calibrate an entire core of sentients. I want you to layer them like an onion.”
“An onion, sir?”
“It’s a vegetable, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir. It’s a vegetable.”
“I want several layers of sentients spaced apart. Then set them to teaching the intervening layers, one mine at a time.”
“But that will take much longer than calibration, Colonel.”
“But not longer than deployment. We need this minefield up and runningyesterday .”
To Sherman’s pleasure, Ki did not ask him what the reason was for the hurry. She merely replied, “Yes sir.”
“I want to have every crucial place or process in this system at least minimally protected inforty-eight hours .”
“Forty-eighthours ?” said Quench. “Sir.”
“There are Met ships crossing the asteroid belt,” Sherman replied, “closing on Ganymede for ‘taxation enforcement.’ In case you have forgotten, the Interlocking Directorate doesn’t like us, and they are not going to let us alone.”
“Yes, sir,” Quench answered brightly. “They sure as hell are not going to let us alone, sir.”
“So you think we’re going to war, Colonel?” Ki asked.
“I think we already are at war,” Sherman replied. “We just don’t know it yet.”
Seventeen
from
Quatermain’s Guide
The Advantages of the Strong Force
A Guide to and History of the Met
by Leo Y. Sherman