by Nancy Kress
“All of the freedom fighters on Horton Island! We just got word from New Yosemite!”
Horton Island—the labor camp on New California that Berman had mentioned before. “Dead? A Landry air attack?” But how had a Landry warship got itself—and its beam weapons—through the Polyglot-New California gate and then close enough to the planet to fire?
“No!” Berman shouted, all his previous poise dissolved in rage. “A plague! They died of a disease, and you can’t tell me it was natural! Sloan Peregoy murdered them!”
“How do you know they’re dead?”
“How do you think? We have intel going back and forth through the gates, you idiot! We surveilled the island by drone. You people—”
Martinez put into his voice all the authority he had. This intense young fanatic commanded a lot of people, and if word got to New California that Berman believed Sloan had killed his prisoners on Horton Island, Berman would gain a million more followers. Berman was dangerous.
“Listen to me. It wasn’t Sloan Peregoy. It was the Landrys.”
“I don’t believe that!”
“It’s the truth, Berman. I’m going to tell you what’s going on, all of it. Just listen before you decide.” Carefully, Martinez went through the entire story, from finding the Dagny Taggart and the Falcon through to the destruction of the biolab on Prometheus. He left out only three pieces of intel: his ships’ lack of radiation weapons, Caitlin Landry’s presence on the Skyhawk, and her last revelation about the genemod pathogen.
As Berman listened, his anger turned from volcano to glacier. “Why should I believe you? I don’t believe you. How could Landrys have gotten a bioweapon onto Horton Island? New California is too well defended.”
“Yes, it is. I don’t know how the Landrys did it. But I’m sending you a data packet with pictures of the bodies on Galaxy. You can see that they’re dead. You can see the horrible way they died. If you have images from Horton Island, you can see if they match.”
“You might have killed those Landry spacers, testing a Peregoy bioweapon on their ships before you used it on us at Horton Island.”
“And how could I get the bioweapon aboard Landry ships?”
“How did the Landrys get it onto Horton Island?”
They were at an impasse. Martinez, playing for time, said, “Look at the holoimages. Listen to the last recording by the captain of the Galaxy. The data should reach you any moment.”
It did. Martinez saw Berman turn to another screen somewhere in his command room, out of Martinez’s line of sight. Berman’s profile faced Martinez, a curve of bearded cheek and one eye. Enough to see the eye narrow, brow crinkle, lips part in shock. Berman glanced at his wrister, up at the unseen screen, back to his wrister.
He said, “Martinez, the images from Horton Island don’t look like that. No pus-filled things on the face, no purple swelling—not at all like that.”
Martinez waited, hoping.
Finally Berman said, “It’s a different bioweapon entirely.”
• • •
“No,” Caitlin Landry said, awkwardly holding the tablet close to her face to study the images, “that’s not the same disease.”
“What is it?” Martinez demanded.
“I don’t know. Do you have any information about it? Anything at all?”
“No. And the doctors on New Utah don’t recognize it, either.” Berman had said as much, just before Martinez’s difficulty persuading him to stay in contact, to wait for just five minutes while Martinez researched something.
The “research” was proving futile.
She said, “If New Utah doctors don’t recognize the disease, then I’m certainly not going to. I’m not a physician, Captain.”
He demanded, “Is your sister weaponizing two pathogens? Is that possible?”
“Possible but unlikely. Where are these…these deaths occurring?”
“Is there anything else you can tell me from these images?”
“No.” She looked up at him, without fear. “Are the dead people your citizens? I’m sorry.”
He let out a blistering oath and left.
Berman had not broken contact, although now there were three or four people filling the screen behind him, all whispering and pulling at him, all with faces contorted by rage. None of Martinez’s bridge crew looked at him directly.
He said, “Berman, I don’t know where this disease came from, but I don’t believe it’s from Director Peregoy. He would know that letting a weaponized pathogen loose anywhere on New California would be incredibly stupid. It could spread to—”
Berman said, “That’s not what Dr. Belinski thinks.”
One of the people in the background stepped forward, a middle-aged man with bright red hair. He said, “I know Horton Island. If this pathogen can only be transmitted person-to-person, and if no one goes to that isolated island, the disease can be contained.”
Berman aid, “Contained enough to kill only Movement prisoners. Sloan Peregoy did this, Martinez.”
“I know you believe that, but I do not. I believe it was the Landrys. But since we can’t prove it either way, Berman, let’s stick to facts. Landry ships are on their way from Polyglot via the Prometheus gate, carrying biowarfare to New Utah. My sources say it’s possible to deliver pathogens inside canisters that can be aimed at a planet from pretty far away, burn up partially in the atmosphere, explode over land, and release viruses, at least some of which might survive. Are you—”
“Stop,” Berman said, and turned away, consulting with the others. When he turned back, his face had gone gray. “Go on.”
Martinez pushed his point. “Are you confident that you can shoot down every single meteor, day and night, indefinitely?” Of course he wasn’t.
Berman said nothing.
Martinez continued, “Here is what we can do. I’m staying at New Utah to stop the Landrys from taking Peregoy property, but I need to resupply. I can send a deweaponized scout through the gate to New Yosemite and it will send back a cargo ship with—”
“No cargo ships. Nothing that big.”
“All right, then, a class 6A vessel.” They would have to pack it to the ceilings with food. “You’re convinced this is a Peregoy pathogen, so I’ll send orders to New Yosemite Command that nothing else is to come through the gate to New Utah except that one class 6A vessel. You don’t let anything from anywhere land—not even your own scouts or more of your rebels. You don’t know what they’re unwittingly carrying. If anything tries to land anyway, shoot it down. Even your own.”
A boy behind Berman cried, “He’s just trying to get us to turn on each other!”
Martinez ignored him. “If I learn from New Yosemite anything about either bioweapon, I’ll tell you. New Yosemite already knows that you’ve seized New Utah—you told me as much. So you won’t be risking anything. Agreed?”
“Except being infected by Landrys and/or Peregoys. Some choice.”
Martinez kept his face blank. Berman’s choice would come later, if Martinez could exploit what Caitlin Landry had told him. If.
Berman said, “All right, Martinez. One scout, with one class 6A vessel to return.”
Instantly an angry clamor broke out behind Berman. People shoved forward, waving their arms and shouting at each other.
Civilians.
• • •
So this was how the war was going to be fought. Not with beam weapons, not with guns, not with defined targets. With microbes causing the indiscriminate mass murder of civilian populations. With the same terrible and stupid tactics that had killed civilization on Terra.
Nobody learned anything.
“Gate approaching, sir,” said the scout pilot.
“Proceed through gate.”
“Proceeding through gate.”
The old familiar shimmer, and then the scout was through. Martinez had not told Berman that he himself was going to New Yosemite, nor that he was bringing Caitlin Landry with him. Nor the second reason for this “su
pply run.” During his absence, DiCaria was acting captain, Vondenberg acting fleet commander.
Martinez gazed at the planet below, not as close a match to old Earth as was New California, but close enough. Blue seas, white clouds, a single large land mass plus islands flung like green crillberries onto the ocean. His wife Amy was buried here; she’d died in a flier accident while he’d been stationed with New Yosemite planetary defense.
A sudden image of Amy flashed into his mind, but not accompanied by any pain. It was so long ago, and they’d been married such a short time. But, he realized unpleasantly and for the first time, Amy resembled Caitlin Landry.
She sat behind him in the scout, motionless and, for once, asking no questions. He’d already told her why he needed her here.
On the New Yosemite side of the gate, he said, “Request encrypted personal contact with Vice Admiral Mueller, Planetary Defense.”
The scout pilot aid, “Yes, sir.”
Martinez and Sean Mueller had been at Military Academy together. Mueller was unconventional and honest, which was why Martinez trusted him. Mueller would tell him whatever he knew about events on New California, not only with the war but with Sloan Peregoy, with the so-called Movement, with any large-scale outbreaks of disease. Mueller would also aid him with the tissue samples of what Caitlin Landry called Joravirus randi. New Yosemite, like New California, had a military hospital in orbit to service sick or injured spacers. Martinez needed it, immediately.
Mueller might also have additional information about the pathogen on Horton Island. Or not, if Scott Berman had indeed obtained this information through some Movement channel and the deaths weren’t generally known even on New California, let alone on New Yosemite.
Most important, Mueller would understand why Martinez’s mission had to be kept unofficial. Or, if he didn’t understand, he would still respect Martinez’s judgment.
What Mueller probably couldn’t tell him was something that Martinez desperately wanted to know. Mueller read history, but not literature, especially literature almost three thousand years old. He probably hadn’t ever heard of the House of Atreus and its familial struggles for power, its utter ruthlessness, its murderous offspring.
Even the daughters.
49
* * *
DEEP SPACE
Nothing in the universe is static.
Rachel stared at a wallscreen on the bridge of the Kezia Landry. The screen displayed data confirming her failure. Hallie Dunn, the tech who’d operated the expensive, newly installed equipment, said, “Try again, ma’am?”
“No. Not here. Mr. Mahjoub, continue on course with all possible speed.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the pilot said.
Tara said, “I don’t understand! What did you do? What just happened?”
Weariness took Rachel all at once, like a perigean tide. She’d been awake most of the night running and rerunning equations, and she was too old for this. Saving civilization should be the province of younger people.
“Gran? What just happened!”
“Tara, come to my cabin while I rest for a bit. Hallie, you rest, too. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“Yes. ma’am.”
In her luxurious cabin—Annelise’s master’s cabin—Rachel stretched out on the bed and pulled the fur coverlet to her chin. She felt cold. She needed to sleep.
“Gran?”
No sleep until she’d satisfied Tara, who paced around tiny cabin—luxury on a personal spacecraft didn’t include much room—like a caged Polyglot lion. Rachel envied the girl her energy, if not its source. Philip Anderson shone in her eyes, pulsed in her pacing.
The beginnings of romances, even one-sided romances, were all the same: flutters in the belly, light in the eyes, hope in the heart. It was the endings that differed. But never before had a romantic ending been as different as this one.
“Tara, are you—”
“No, Gran, I’m fine. The meds work. I’m just…curious.”
A world-smashing understatement. Rachel accepted it, because what choice did she have? And Tara was no longer unbalanced, if you defined “balanced” as giving up the belief that she and Philip Anderson could be together.
By any definition other than that, of course, this entire expedition was unbalanced.
“Nothing in the universe stays the same,” Rachel began. This had all been explained to Tara before, but it was difficult to know how much the girl retained. Tara had never been the brightest of the granddaughters. That had been Caitlin.
Before heartache over Caity could consume her, Rachel plunged back into her explanation. “At the quantum level, the universe is made up of fields, and those fields all exist sort of on top of each other. In each other. They interact and change constantly. I believe—” unlike anyone else in the Eight Worlds “—that Philip has put himself into a field nobody had yet discovered, the field of consciousness. There are theories that it must exist, because of the way that observation can create change in other fields. There are even theories that it is the substrate of reality.”
“I know all that,” Tara said impatiently, although Rachel had no idea what “knowing” consisted of when you couldn’t follow the math. And didn’t even want to. Tara’s “knowing” was mostly desire. She wanted Philip to somehow still exist, so in her mind he did.
Was the rest of humanity really that different?
“If Philip did somehow get himself injected into the field of consciousness—” and how in the name of all deceased gods could that have happened? “—then it was—”
“He did,” Tara said, “because he closed the gates! And then opened them again to let through only ships without radiation weapons! To stop the war!”
“That’s what we hope, dear heart.”
“What else could have done it?”
Out of the mouths of babes. Rachel was staking everything on that very question. But she didn’t feel up to explaining Occam’s Razor to Tara. Gods, she was tired. How could she make this as brief and intelligible as possible? Only with gross oversimplification.
“Philip is a field, or in a field—there isn’t any difference, really. We’re trying to get his attention. We can’t enter the field of consciousness directly, since we have no idea how Philip did so. But all fields interact. Their interaction is what produces both space and time. No, Tara, don’t ask—I really can’t explain that to you without the math. We’re trying to get Philip’s attention by sending a signal through a quantum field we do understand and can manipulate a little. The same field that drives starship engines outside of gates. It involves manipulating particles that—”
“But Philip isn’t getting the signal,” Tara said, going straight to what she cared about.
“Isn’t perceiving it, whatever ‘perceiving’ means to him now—Tara, I’ve told you, over and over. He isn’t Philip anymore.”
“But you don’t know what he is.”
“No. It’s unimaginable to us. And either he isn’t ‘perceiving’ my signal or doesn’t understand it or doesn’t choose to do anything about it or is no longer the sort of…of entity that can choose anything, or—”
“But you said you sort of expected he wouldn’t get the signal here. In deep space.”
“I knew it was a possibility. A strong possibility. All fields change.”
“So he died again.” Tara stopped pacing and loomed over the bed. Her eyes glinted with tears.
Rachel held onto patience. “He isn’t dead because he wasn’t alive. Isn’t alive. Isn’t even ‘he.’ Tara, I need to sleep.”
“But you’ll try again.”
Right now, Rachel would have tried anything to get Tara out of the cabin, including grand-filicide, or whatever the word would be. She said, “I’ll try again, closer to a gate. If a field decays, it can be preserved longer by concentrating it. Sort of.”
Not true, but how to explain to Tara the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy, and open versus closed systems?
“And,” s
he added for good measure, “I’ll boost the signal. It sustains interference over distance, you know. It would be different if we could have brought radiation-beam weapons, but then we couldn’t have gotten through the Polyglot gale…I mean, gate…”
“You know what, Gran? You should sleep now. You look a little tired.”
Tara crept out, closing the cabin door and turning off the light.
• • •
Days later, the Kezia Landry reached the Polyglot-Prometheus gate. Rachel had made one more signal attempt during the flight from Polyglot to the gate. Nothing had happened. Now she tried again, on the Polyglot side of the gate. Tara hadn’t been told when the signal would be sent; Rachel didn’t want her on the bridge. It wasn’t yet “dawn” on the ship.
“Go,” she said to Hallie.
The tech activated the signal. Rachel had thought hard about this signal—what might get the attention of an unimaginable entity “inhabiting” a field for which physics had theoretical equations but no messenger particle, no integration with either relativity or the standard model, no experiments? Philip was the only experiment, and it had not been verified or replicated. It wasn’t even “Philip” anymore.
But whatever it was that had closed the gates, it had once been human, an intense, handsome young man on a quasi-mystical quest. And that posthuman entity had altered the gates to forbid the passage of ships equipped with weapons of mass destruction. That argued not only consciousness but also some sort of caring what happened to the humanity that the young man had transcended. Rachel was staking everything on that.
Which didn’t answer the question about what sort of signal to send to Philip-that-had-been. How did you contact a god, a meta-capital-letter Observer who could collapse wave functions in quantum-gravitational fields?
She’d rejected prime numbers; the Observer might notice them, but they conveyed no urgency. The same with a Fibonacci sequence or a numerical constant. She considered Morse code, that ancient Terran method of signaling disaster. But Morse code wasn’t used on Philip’s native Polyglot.
In the end, she’d settled on disturbing the quantum flux by using the Kezia Landry’s drive. Philip, she’d discovered from library research, had done some marine research as part of his graduate work in biology. When all else failed, oceangoing ships on Polyglot signaled distress by another ancient Terran method: a high intensity white light flashing at regular intervals from fifty to seventy times per minute. Rachel used the ship’s drive and the equipment she’d had installed to create regular bursts of brief-lived subatomic particles at the rate of sixty a minute. Would the Observer recognize that? Rachel had no answers.