I shrugged and, not being quite reaccustomed to low gee, nearly lost my balance and careened toward the corridor wall.
“Careful,” warned Lieza with a touch of concern in her voice.
“Hard to say,” I answered as I straightened. “I have this feeling that they aren’t going to see much besides what they want to see.”
“Oh … that could be difficult.”
That was the understatement of the millennium.
“Here’s where I leave you two.” With a raised hand in half-salute, Lieza took a smaller side tunnel that slanted at an angle of thirty degrees to the right off toward one of the quarters sections. While there were several hundred almost luxurious apartments there, not to mention the thousands of bunks in the lower-level caserns, only a handful had been used in centuries, although all were maintained.
Elanstan and I continued moving along the main corridor toward the control center, past the closed doors that contained who knew what. I’d studied the layouts for quarters and systems, not the plans for the entire station. Finally, I asked.
“Are all those rooms empty?”
“Mostly. There are several dozen storerooms with enough dried and sealed food to feed a fleet for a decade, if you want to call fortified and enriched sawdust dating from five millennia back ‘food.’”
“It’s still nourishing?”
“The ancients were good at preserving just about anything, except taste and themselves.” Elanstan tossed her head and her short niellen hair sprayed away from her face.
Ahead, I could see an area of brighter lights.
“That’s the central hub,” Elanstan pointed toward the increased illumination. “We’re stopping here.” She touched the lockplate for a hatch on the left side of the corridor, and I followed her through the adiamante-armored double locks.
“I thought you’d be here.” Rhetoral rose from the central console as we entered and the inner door hissed shut behind us. “Do you want the board? Or do you want something to eat first?”
“Both. A quick scan of the board, then some food, and then an in-depth immersion.”
“Typical intuit,” laughed Rhetoral, through the net, his amusement enhanced by Elanstan, and even by Lieza, from wherever she was.
“Damned comps,” I complained, even as I eased into the control chair and spread my senses through the local net.
The upper channels and the outer beam guides felt chill, sluggish, but that was to be expected. We couldn’t heat the unused components too quickly, not with decades or more between power-ups.
My mental fingers flipped through the maintenance files. A minimum of another two days before all the systems were close to optimality—except for Delta and Kappa. Even for the online systems, a week or more would be better. I’d suspected as much. We just didn’t use the old systems that much.
Even through the multiple links, I could smell the age of the massive, web-linked, not-quite-in-real-space systems, and I wondered how long before we would again have to rebuild and reconfigure them.
My head swam, and little white spots danced across my mental screens.
“Ecktor!”
I broke the connection and looked up at Elanstan and Rhetoral. “How about some food?”
“It’s about time you had something to eat. You look like a cyb ghost.”
“That good?”
At least they grinned. But I worried. Twelve big adiamante-hulled warships was a lot for an ancient system—even one as well-designed and redundant as this relic of the Rebuilt Hegemony—and we needed every station, one to match each of the Vereal ships. I still wanted to do an in-depth, comp-like analysis, but that needed to wait for bodily maintenance.
“Once there was a complete recycled hydroponic biosphere here,” said Elanstan, “but it would have taken so much effort to get it back in place that we didn’t bother. What we have is pretty limited.”
“Not so limited as starving,” I quipped back as I stood. My eyes watered, and a few more white spots danced across my field of vision.
“I’m not sure,” groused Rhetoral, his blue eyes glum. “Goat cheese as solid as nickel-iron, dried fruits with the consistency of antique synthetic rubber—”
“Please,” I said. I didn’t want to hear his lecture about how the ancients had actually sweetened and flavored synthetic rubber and chewed it. Chewing the same stuff that you put on groundcar tires?
“We’ve got the old mess room operating,” Elanstan said. “The hardest part was defrosting the water supplies.”
She turned right when she left the control center, toward the central hub. I followed. Rhetoral sealed the hatches behind us. Despite the innate shielding provided by the bulk of a nickel-iron asteroid, the Rebuilt Hegemony had also encased the control center, the broadcast and reception nets, and the power and defense systems themselves in a double layer of adiamante—about twice the protection provided by the hulls of the Vereal Union’s fleet. I could feel both Rhetoral’s and Elanstan’s links to the center, and their apprehension.
“Does one of you want to stay on the board?” I finally asked.
“No … so long as we’re both in the hub area,” she answered.
“Not so long as we’ve got the Coordinator with us,” quipped Rhetoral.
“Thank you.”
Fifty meters farther along we reached the circular chamber that represented the center of the station’s main level. Eight corridors angled from that point.
I paused to study the diorama displayed in the arched dome. The holoed reality left me looking up at snow-covered peaks, and firs and pines that moved in the winds under a deep blue sky, as if I were in a deep mountain canyon.
The faint sound of falling water caught my ear, and I turned to study the line of silver that sprang from the dark rock. A hawk of some sort I had not seen—not that many hawks were left on Old Earth—circled a white throne peak plateau.
The heat of the sun beat down on me, and the scent of a river and pines wafted across me.
After a moment, Rhetoral said softly, “Amazing, isn’t it?”
It was amazing, on two counts. First was the technical skill involved in creating such a vivid representation, and second was the ancient arrogance that full-body reality could be duplicated through mere technology.
“Yes, it is amazing.” But I shook my head.
We continued straight through the hub another hundred meters along the corridor, where Elanstan paused and asked, “You haven’t been into the mess here, have you?”
“No,” I admitted. “This part was closed off the times I worked on the net antenna and the power systems.”
She smiled and pressed the lockplate. “You might find this interesting, then.”
Rhetoral smiled back at her, and I caught a shared sense of amusement that passed between them.
Again, after stepping through the locks, I swallowed. The walls of the mess were apparently paneled in polished dark wood, and rich green velvet hangings surrounded the windows that displayed a hillside vista of a city—but no city I had ever seen. Three tables were actually placed within bay windows that seemed to display a continuation of the city view.
Each of the dozen tables was preserved and polished wood, and the chairs were upholstered in the velvet-like fabric. I looked back at the lock, but from within, it appeared as a thick wooden door. My eyes traversed the room, taking in the hundreds of details: the pressed pale green linen tablecloths, the real silver utensils on the single table set for eating—the one in the middle bay window.
After stepping toward the table, I picked up a knife. It was cool, heavy, and felt like real silver. I fingered the cloth. Not cotton or linen, but something smoother, yet still woven.
“How?” I asked.
“Inert pressgas,” said Elanstan. “The physics are complex, but it uses a convection system where the cooling of the gas to close to absolute zero creates heat and circulation … . I can’t say I understand it, but all you have to do is seal the place, and start
the system. Once it’s sealed, it’s good for twenty or thirty millennia.”
My eyes drifted back to the center bay window that displayed the city and the harbor below.
“Sit down,” said Elanstan. “You don’t have to worry. There’s a full-circuit net repeater here. We’ve checked it out.”
At that moment, as I sank into the chair with the velvet-like cushioned armrests, I hadn’t even considered the net repeater. My eyes went back to the window across the table from me, where a huge watership slipped out toward the sea toward a massive cable-supported bridge that crossed the mouth of the bay.
I recognized that ancient scene—pre—collapse Sfrisco—but only because of some holos of the great bridge that had been buried in the locial records. It had been years ago, before I’d even met Morgen, and I’d wondered then at the need for such a massive bridge. The bridge and the city were long gone. Between the faults, the small stars, and the sledges of death, the area’s topography only faintly resembled what it had been.
Then the music began, and, once more, the sounds were something I had not heard before. Oh, we have pianos, and strings, and woodwinds—but no one put them together like that, and few play so well, and not in such unison.
My eyes watered.
“It’s dangerous to experience this,” Elanstan said dryly, seating herself in the chair to my right. “We might actually want to return to the high-tech days of the ancients.”
I’d forgotten she was there, but shields don’t glitter and shimmer, only protect.
“The sustenance doesn’t measure up to the setting,” Rhetoral added, setting two loaves of bread, a large wedge of cheese, and a bowl of mixed dried fruit in the center of the table. He turned back toward the dark wood counter on one side of the room, returning with three crystalline goblets and a pitcher of water and sitting on my left.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” he asked after he sat down.
“I think dangerous is more appropriate,” I said after I cleared my throat. “Luxuries are always dangerous.”
The two exchanged glances.
“Ecktor, these weren’t particularly luxurious. Millions of people could hear that kind of music or purchase furnishings like these,” said Elanstan.
It was my turn to feel patronizing, but I tried not to sound that way. “I meant societal luxuries. What is the total resource bill if everyone, or even millions of people out of billions, can purchase hundreds of small luxuries?”
“Ecktor … this music was laser-printed on a plastic disc ten centimeters across. That’s scarcely a huge resource bill.”
I thought for a minute, but I had to access the net for the calculations, and I could see them both frowning as the silence drew out. “Let’s say … one disc per year for every person on the globe. Before the collapse, there were eight billion people. If we assume that one of those discs weighs 25 grams, one disc per person per year requires two hundred thousand tonnes of plastic. That’s a million tonnes of plastic every five years—just for a little music.” I lifted the synthetic cloth. “How about one of these every two years for a family group—nearly one billion family groups getting a half kilogram of synthetic fabric annually …”
“Ecktor, it wasn’t the luxuries that led to the chaos years and the collapse and flight,” pointed out Elanstan. “It was necessities. Taking your own math—if you give everyone just one set of clothes a year, they would have needed to produce more than four million tonnes of fabric annually.”
“But they didn’t do it that way,” I had to counter. “In NorAm, most people had ten to twenty sets of clothes, and with five percent of the world’s people, NorAm and the IndBloc were using almost eighty percent of the world’s raw materials at the end. That’s the problem with luxuries. That’s why we weight comptime so heavily for goods above midline.”
“Something got lost here,” Rhetoral said dryly. “I’m missing the point.”
I had to think. What had my point been? Then I shrugged. “I can’t think. I need to eat.” I cut off a chunk of cheese and a thick slice of the heavy bread and took a bite of each.
We all ate for a while, and my head cleared somewhat. After several mouthfuls, I filled the impossibly fragile-looking and almost indestructible armaglass goblet and took a long swallow before setting it on the pale green tablecloth.
“ … earth’s last reign and rain …”
Morgen’s words danced in my thoughts, and I tried to fit it all together as I ate another slice of cheese.
“In non-Construct societies, luxuries become necessities,” I announced. “Then they can’t be denied, and the resource requirements override ecosystem balance requirements.”
“Maybe …” mumbled Rhetoral through a mouthful of bread. “Have to think about that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the dark-haired Elanstan. “We have to get the system running, and we can’t produce these any more, and I’ll enjoy them while I can.”
“She has something there,” I said to Rhetoral.
“She usually does.”
I studied the window, where the huge ship had almost disappeared beyond the Sfrisco bridge. The whole setting still left me unsettled, as if it were a window on the past that I found hard to believe had ever existed.
I looked from the routinely exquisite automated workmanship of the goblet to the tasty rich bread and the strong and tangy cheese and then to the silky tablecloth.
We’d opted for solid basics, but I could see the appeal of luxuries. I smiled wryly. Then, the bridge, the city, and the ancient ship all were gone, and had been for millennia. Only a few time-preserved relics remained, and those only because of the Construct.
Morgen had been right.
“ … and though the sun will blaze our tears,
our joys will last the endless years.”
In the end, only what each of us could hold endured, and only while we endured.
X
The cross-connection of the main net conference aboard the Gibson provided the officers with a backdrop of flickering flames and muted red lights.
“Why did you pick the inferno idea?” asked Commander Ideomineo, the executive officer.
“Because hell is preferable to where we are right now,” snapped Commander Gibreal, each word a fiery bullet.
“Toil and trouble …” The words whispered from nowhere.
“Status,” continued Gibreal. “The demis have already billeted a full armed company of marcybs. Their leader watched the billeting, without any reaction of the sort that would be expected if they were fully knowledgeable. Majer Ysslop believes this Coordinator Ecktor is aware of the weapons already landed. Majer Henslom disagrees.”
“Trust Ysslop.” The veiled words appeared from nowhere.
Lightnings rattled the net, and, in his seat, Commander Ideomineo rubbed his battered forehead.
“Subcommander Kemra?” asked Gibreal.
“We can detect no overt buildup or change in global power sources or distribution, with one exception. The demis seem to be making an effort to rebuild their satellite navigation system,” observed Kemra. “They still have two stations that aren’t online.”
“Would it help in a ground war?” asked Gibreal.
“Would it help? Would it help to have a system that could probably drop an HE warhead on the focal point of a laser? Or a hovertank?” Gorum’s sarcasm oozed both heat and the redness of blood across the net.
“It wouldn’t take that long to knock out those beacons,” noted Gibreal.
“Longer than you think, ser,” answered the weapons officer. “Every one of those stations is buried inside an asteroid—a big lump of solid nickel-iron. They probably have retractable backup antenna grids—maybe even use the whole surface as a broadcast web.”
“So … that would make the nav systems an early warning device as well?” mused Gibreal. “Not quite so open and trusting, are they?”
“They are demis.” Kemra’s words were edged in frost, and cold fog drifted across t
he net, hissing as it struck the flames and hot rocks.
“Analysis?” asked Gibreal.
“The demi leader showed a marked physiological reaction to Subcommander Kemra,” announced MYL-ERA.
“It wasn’t significant,” observed the nav. “Certainly not statistically significant.”
“Perhaps not,” reflected Gibreal. “But, according to the construct’s measurements, he was the only one who showed any reaction. Any insight would be better than none.”
“Just blast the place,” snapped Weapons.
“Our mission was also to reclaim any advanced technology possible.” Gibreal’s words held the chill of absolute zero. “It’s hard to reclaim what you’ve destroyed, and I’d just as soon not be the one to make such a report to CybCen.”
“You need a navigator. No one else …” began the subcommander.
“Majer Lyans has almost the same qualifications as you do, Subcommander. And their leader, Coordinator, whatever they call him, isn’t likely to entertain the majer. So you must.” Gibreal’s words slithered across the net with the fanged ominousness and sibilants of the legged snakes of Gates.
“Just because I resemble someone who triggers a reaction?”
“What else do we have to exploit?” Leering image of a naked woman with spread legs.
The flash of power and lightning rumbled the net, and three overrides tripped.
“Imagery was excessive,” announced MYL-ERA over the speakers. “Overrides tripped. Repairs are commencing.”
“Touchy, isn’t she?” rasped Ideomineo in his seldom-used voice to no one in particular.
“Conference ended,” muttered Gibreal. His fingers went to his temples, and his eyes glittered in the privacy of his stateroom.
Subcommander Kemra unclenched her teeth and massaged her forehead, her eyes flickering aft to where she knew the weapons officer lay dazed. “Teach him … teach them all.”
XI
A cold mist drifted out of the north as I hurried down Jung toward the admin building, glad that I had landed at the locial before the weather closed down. I still hated letting the system control the flitter: the sign of the true demi, I supposed, worried about systems controlling people. Of course, cybs didn’t believe in people, and put more faith in systems.
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