by Tony Daniel
From the Memoirs of Cloudship Lebedev:
We moved further and further out, always adding to our number in a stepwise process. Frequently, pioneers to the outer system would, after a time of hardship, acquire their own ships and, if we thought them suitable, we would ask them to join our consortium. Hardly anyone ever turned us down. It was, relatively speaking, easy money, and a sure passport to LAP status. Eventually, Tacitus and I reached the Oorts — the subject of my doctoral dissertation some three hundred and fifty e-years before. We thought we could go no farther.
We remained there, and others joined us. After several years, a kind of society began to develop among us. For the most part, we eschewed the merci and kept to ourselves, although we are as able to make use of the merci as the next fellow. Mainly, we found that the programming did not speak to our needs and was, generally, not to our taste. As I said, cloudships can be a snobby bunch. And then the males and females among us began to explore the possibility of procreating, as ships. This is what one does out in the Oorts with a great deal of time on one’s hands.
There were, by this time, some grist engineers and quantum physicists among us of what, I do not hesitate to call, genius status. They were called upon to perform the rather odd task of reinventing sex — and in our case, sex as it might be carried out between hurricanes and storm clouds. By the time a ship got to the Oorts, it had formed into a sort of miniature copy of the shape that galaxies and nascent solar systems take. Fortunately for our children, those engineers and physicists were up to the task, and even succeeded in adding a new sort of beauty to the process.
Now I won’t go into the exact specifics of cloudship courting and breeding practices here. Suffice it to say they are complex, but dance-like. Most of us are spirals, and one has to maneuver the tines of oneself within those of another without destroying that other in the process. Over time we discovered that it is better for males to have cyclonal rotations and for females to have anticyclonal, counterclockwise spins. This is entirely arbitrary, but a great improvement over the old days, when sex could be quite dangerous.
THE SCIENCE OF CLOUDSHIPS
The Casimir Effect
The physical effect underlying the operations of cloudships, and founded upon the principle ofquantum fluctuation . This effect, discovered and experimentally proven in the twentieth century, is a result of the fundamental quantum nature of reality, and it works as follows: if two mirrors are placed a short distance apart, and facing one another, they will move, to a small degree,toward one another. This distance is imperceptible to the naked eye, of course, but it does, indeed occur.
Quantum Fluctuation
The physical property that accounts for the “Casimir Effect.” The most familiar concept usually used for demonstrating Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty is that of momentum and position. If you know one, the other becomes unknowable to an extent equal (precisely) to the amount that you know its partner. Another, lesser known, product of uncertainty is the energy and time pairing. Taking this into account mathematically results in the prediction that space — empty space — is actually teeming with a sea of virtual particles, all produced in pair-antipair combinations that are continually being generated and annihilating one another. Empty space can be polarized, and you can “make” a particle out of nothing.
A good way to picture the process is this: think of space as a string on a musical instrument. Now pluck that string. Normal space is a very long string and its “vibration” corresponds to the lowest energy state there can be. Now if you “fret” the string — say, with our two mirrors — you necessarily exclude certain vibrations. The only vibrations that will occur between the mirrors are those whose wavelengths fit exactly into the distance separating the mirrors. This is precisely how a fretted guitar string produces different notes, and how, in a sense, it “contains” all notes.
The Casimir Effect in the Actual Universe
Now you will remember that all elementary particles are not actually particles, but are wave-particle entities which have properties associated with both phenomena. With our mirrors we might “play” an electron upon the nothingness, or, more easily, a photon. But when we “play” one virtual particle, the others are all necessarily excluded. In effect, there are “more” possible particles on the outside of our mirrors than there are between them. There is less pressure, therefore, pressing them out than pressing them in. The mirrors move together. Remember that this hasnothing to do with gases or liquids being between or outside the mirror surfaces. We are speaking of empty space.
Cloudship Propulsion and Weaponry
Cloudships have the ability to produce antimatter at any point on their surface, and to concentrate it for firepower or propulsion. The process is begun by using the Casimir Effect upon tiny mirrors whose size is in the nanometer level. The mirrors are, of course, created and manipulated by the grist.
The Casimir Effect In Cloudships
While you must “put in” energy in the form of setting up the nano-mirrors, so that the law of the conservation of energy is obeyed, the energy that comes out is precise and focused. If you “fret” the vacuum correctly (making use of the property ofquantum fluctuation ) the energy produced can be extracted in the form of a stream of anti-particles, which can then be lased into a beam, or used to produce an annihilation reaction with matter. This operation is at the heart of a cloudship.
All of this is done on a nanometer level by the grist. The mirrors we use are conducting plates of material that is a single molecule thick. The lasers are of a similar dimension. A cloudship can enact this process anywhere on the ship where there is grist. To a cloudship, it feels very much like moving a finger or blinking an eye. If you are watching from space, it appears as if a bolt of raw energy has erupted from the ship’s surface (provided, of course, that that energy interacts with something along its path, and so become visible). A fully-energized cloudship is an awesome sight to behold.
Unless the cloudship is aiming at you.
COMMON TERMS & COMMON KNOWLEDGE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Basis
This is the most common language spoken in the Met and in the outer system. It is a combination of English and free convert information transfer protocols — that is, it is English strained through a thousand year long “information age.” While most people believe they are speaking Basis, there are, in fact, millions of dialects, as well as dialects of all the other human languages, many having only one or two individuals as native speakers. This phenomenon is due to the proliferation of “Broca grist” throughout human space. People have adaptive translation programs embedded in their brains. Because of this, you can utter just about any sound you desire and, if it mentally correlates with an idea, image or other language construct in your own mind, your pellicle can transform it into standard Basis. The pellicle of the person who is listening to you will receive and decode your words. This is normally done without either party noticing the process or giving it any thought — and the practice has been going on for centuries. Someone listening in on the Met who does not possess Broca grist will hear a vast Tower of Babel and wonder how anybody can understand what anyone else is saying. Most people in the cultural elite understand this problem, and attempt to speak a standard Basis not mediated by Broca grist.
E-year
Along with e-month, e-week, e-day, these are time periods based on Earth’s rotation and orbit. The standard measurement of calendar time in the solar system. Local time is also frequently referenced when dealing with local matters.
Greenleaf
AKA “leaves.” The monetary unit of the solar system. The term has its origin in the Greentree religion, which has a strong economic component, and as a reference to the old U.S. dollars of Earth.
Rip
Slang in Met Basis for “highly desirable, pleasing and stylish.”
SOLAR SYSTEM HISTORY
Amanda Breadwinner
First Chief Engineer of the Met. Born in Dublin, in
the old E.U., in 2429, the daughter of American immigrant writers. Construction on the Aldiss, the first space cable, was complete, 2475 C.E. Initial construction began on the Mars-Earth Diaphany.
Breadwinner continued on in her job until her retirement in 2511 C.E., coincidentally the year of Raphael Merced’s birth. She took the position as the director of the newly established Breadwinner Labs within the first Met bolsa to be constructed on the Diaphany, Apiana. It was twenty years later at Breadwinner Labs that a young engineer named Feur Otto Bring, who suffered from incurable Tourette’s Syndrome, would obtain his first internship in nanotech construction techniques. Bring would soon be fired by Breadwinner after questioning her parentage during a laboratory dispute. Bring would then end up at Bradbury University on Mars, where he eventually met Raphael Merced and the grist as we know it today was invented.
Beat Myers
Poet. Best friend to Raphael Merced. Founder of the “Flare Generation” of poets, and editor of the poetry journalFlare , although The November 2646 issue ofFlare was almost wholly devoted to Merced’s seminal paper “The Teleological Constant and its Relation to Instantaneous Information Transfer at a Distance,” accompanied by poems written by Myers. Myer’s best poem is considered to be “Old Left-handed Time.”
Bradbury University
The great center of learning in the Met. It is located on Mars and was founded by Tacitus and Lebedev. This where Raphael Merced did all his important work. Before the war, it had fallen far from its former glory. Its greatest period was the 2500s C.E., when new discoveries and technologies, new systems of thought, and great works of literature came pouring out of Bradbury. These were the years of Merced and Bring, of Ravenswaay’sAtmosphericsaga , and a hundred lesser, but no less worthy, works of skill and genius.
Chen Wocek
Raphael Merced’s mentor at Bradbury University.
Clara Merced
Sister to Raphael Merced. Interplanetary geophysicist who was the first to explain why the solar system planets lie in the same basic orbital plane.
Conjubilation of 2963
When Mars and Earth reach the closest point in their respective orbits, the Mars-Earth Diaphany is bent into a vast U-shape, trailing high above the planetary elliptic. At the closest point between the two sides of the “U,” a temporary bridge is built and a festival is held. This is known as the Conjubilation, and it occurs about every two e-years. The most important Conjubilation in history occurred in 2963 C.E. Many important cultural and scientific movements had their origins in the event, but more importantly, a series of demonstrations broke out against the old Federal Republic. These in turn had their beginnings in the music and art festival called the Merge. From the Merge arose the system of direct “directorate based” democracy that governed the Met until the war. The most important political figure to arise out of the Merge was a LAP going by the singular name of Amés.
Containment Principles
Legal strictures of the late 2300s and early 2400s C.E. that led to the Information Consortiums of the 2400s C.E., and to the genesis of the ECHO Alliance. They still have repercussions today, being the precedent for the reproduction and expiration constraints put on free converts in the Met.
ECHO Alliance
Former government on Earth during 2400s C.E. — a consortium of transnational information brokers. Growth and commerce, though sluggish, were generally steady. For the arts and sciences, however, it was an era of stagnation and malaise. In the arts, the 2400s C.E. are known as the Ironic Age.
Exiles’ Journey
The Exiles’ Journeyis a compendium of essays, thoughts, and sayings by the artists and scientists who ran afoul of the Mercurian Endowment government in the 2590s C.E., and whose malfunctioning prison ship accidentally fell into the sun. Contains Beat Myers’s classic poem “Old Left-Handed Time” and Raphael Merced’s aphoristic “The Merced Synthetics.” Both men were on the doomed ship, as was Merced’s sister, Clara.
Feuer Otto Bring
Nanotech engineer, co-inventor of the grist. Victim of incurable Tourette’s Syndrome. Fired by Met chief engineer Amanda Breadwinner after an outburst. Long-time collaborator with Raphael Merced. His daughter, Katya, was a famous spaceship pilot.
Fifty Worlds to Sunday
A written exchange between Raphael Merced and poet Beat Myers which attempted to codify an aesthetic theory.
FUSE
The Icelandic acronym for a terrorist group on Mars dedicated to the radical enforcement of free convert rights. Destroyed by Roger Sherman’s command on Mars when he was a captain in the Federal Army, even though he believed in many of their tenets. Sherman’s company was known as the Fever Blisters by FUSE members.
Hubble-Penrose Platform
Ancient space station circa 2300-2400s in Earth orbit.
Mars Terraforming Experiments
Disastrous attempt during the early 2700s C.E. to make the Martian surface inhabitable by un-adapted human beings. Grist ecological feedback problems doomed the project.
Mouseflowers
An early attempt to make bean plants “warm-blooded” to an extent using mouse genes implanted by nanotechnological means. See Psyche Toomsuba’s comprehensiveArtificial Speciation and the Genesis of Mammaliform Brachiation in the Legume Family , or Peter Ober’sMouseflowers , which is intended for a more general audience.
Project Alsace-Loraine
A military adaptation of the “Mouseflowers” experiment that produced infectious military nano that did not obey the usual grist “harm not human life” overrides, since it was designed to reengineer exactly the human genome. Suppressed, the PAL virus was eventually rediscovered by Tacitus and used against DIED forces on the Neptunian moon Nereid.
Raphael Merced
In 2511 C.E., on a Monday in April, as Martians reckon the months, the first scientist was born who was not an Earthling, and who belongs in the pantheon of such figures as Newton, Einstein and Galileo. Raphael Merced laid the foundation for linking Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with quantum mechanics, and as such is considered the father of quantum gravity theory as well as the first theorist to offer a precise mathematics of time as a property of the universe. His work with quantum gravity on an experimental basis also revealed the now familiar quantum information leap which has since taken his name, the Merced Effect. As if this weren’t enough, Merced made major contributions to nanotechnological engineering, inventing — with Feur Otto Bring — the Josephson-Feynman grist which now permeates all of our lives. Merced can truly be considered the defining scientific presence of our time, in much the way Albert Einstein defined the science of the five hundred years that preceded Merced, and Newton before Einstein.
Vas After Sunset
The Vas After Sunsetis a guide to the seedier side of the Vas portion of the Met, with several essays on the underground history of the Met. Written by Leo Sherman.
West Point
Located on Earth, the ancient and principal training facility for the Army of the Republic — in use until the army was forced out of the Met and the Department of Immunity took over its functions when the Met changed over from republican to direct democracy shortly after the Conjubilation of 2963.
SOLAR SYSTEM CULTURE
Abacus
The Abacus is the main accounting algorithm for Teleman Milt on Mercury.
Army of the Republic
AKA the Federal Army. The former armed forces of the Met, relegated by Amés to policing the outer system before the war.
Asap Gymnasium
Claude Schlencker’s school on Mercury.
Berkhultz
A piano-making company.
Clinical Party
Local moralistic political party on Neptune’s moon Triton.
Convert and Free Convert Iteration Section
Division of the Department of Immunity which sets rules for convert copying and transfer.
Department of Immunity
The vast adminstrative and enforce
ment bureaucracy of the Met. Answers directly to Director Amés. The Department of Immunity Enforcement Division, or DIED, is the collective name for the Met armed forces and the internal police force.
Eighth Chakra
Local group of “Neo-Flare” poets on Neptune’s moon Triton.
Enigma Box
Interlocking grist puzzle that Sint Graytor likes to play with.
First Constitutional Congress of the Cloudships of the Outer System
April 2, 3013 (e-standard) C.E. Adopted the Metaplanetary Constitution of the Solarian Republic.
Flare School
Group of poets who published in Beat Myers’s journal during the 2600s C.E.
Friends of Tod
This is the “religion” that sprang up around the gnostic time tower named Tod. It has a following of computer programmers, designers, engineers, and poets and artists of various ilk —nerds , as Aubry Graytor says. It is similar to the old “Church of the Subgenius” on ancient Earth — that is, a belief system undercut with irony at every turn (or, as the Friends would have it, it is meta-commentary on human belief in general.) Friends of Tod are normally pacifists. Along with the escaped “protocol vermin” of the Carbuncle, they formed the partisan resistance in the Met during the war. The leaders of the Friends of Tod are Otis and Game.
Free Integrationists
Whig-like political party that supports full free convert rights in the solar system, and believes that all intelligent systems are persons. Strongest in the outer system.
Greentree Way
AKAthe Way . The major religion of the Met. Zen-Lutheranism, with a strong “shamanic” component as well. The main teaching center is on the Mars-Earth Diaphany in Seminary Barrel. Priests complete their initiation by “Walking on the Moon” — that is, copying their original personality into another body and stepping with their original body into a special valley of Earth’s Moon and “dying” in the vacuum. The major tenet of the Way is that there is a living Tree that somehow both represents and embodies the spiritual and genetic imprint of humanity upon the universe.