Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  The Atlantis, however, survives its interstellar crossing. Thirty years out from its destination, the crew reassembles and configures its fusion reactors, and deploys the fast flyby probes that will race through the star system, mapping and exploring ahead of their arrival. For the last decades of the voyage, the starship brakes hard, burning its remaining fuel mass at a prodigious rate. The crew studies candidate asteroids with care, finally reaching a consensus on the target to make first landing on. When the year of arrival comes, the Atlantis that enters orbit is barely a shadow of the billion-ton behemoth that set out to cross the gulf. Two thousand bodies and ten times that number of archived souls ride a skeletal payload framework, less than ten thousand tons remaining, as it arrives at the fifty-kilometer carbonaceous rock that will become Atlantis Beacon.

  Everything except danger is in short supply for the next nine standard years.

  The colonists live aboard the half-cannibalized starship, working long shifts on the mining and harvesting teams. Foundries are unpacked; ore goes in, finished components come out, ready to be bolted into the scaffolding of larger forges and factories. The photovoltaic factory comes first, feeding energy into the nascent ecosystem. Then the digesters that will turn sunlight, water, and carbon-rich rock into something that mechanocytes can eat. A year on, the first airtight domes are assembled and covered in rubble to protect them from sunlight and cosmic radiation. The electronics group builds its zone-melting furnaces and lithography line. The propulsion group digs blast pits and begins fabricating high-impulse ion rockets. The survey group polishes their telescopes and begins to catalog rocks. And the banking, human resources, and interstellar communications groups begin to put together the tripod of specialties on which the future success of the colony depends.

  Working around the clock, the communications team assembles its laser transmitter. Meanwhile, the bankers generate their system-level public key and start producing bitcoins, while the HR office identifies the most pressing skills shortages to afflict the new colony. Finally, as soon as the beacon laser is ready, the bankers prepare their prospectus for transmission to the nearest stars, announcing the existence of Atlantis Bank and its ability to issue currency as surety against debts incurred by the colony.

  Nine years on, the first new immigrants beam in to Atlantis Beacon in a stream of massively compressed data packets, ready to fill the vacancies advertised by the Ministry of Human Resources (and the bodies HR have prepared to house the new specialists). Some of them are predictable; structural engineers to build out the city-habs, taikonauts to crew the newly built tugs that will retrieve raw materials from other asteroids, environmental engineers and medics to keep the feedstock cycle stable and fix damage to bodies and minds. But among the first hundred arrivals there are some anomalies, specialties too recondite to find any obvious role in a new colony: scholars of the history of theoretical physics, natural philosophers, electrical engineers with experience of working on particle accelerators.

  The founders of Atlantis colony have hit upon a unique and radical plan for paying off the new colony’s debts: a scheme which has never been tried before, which can only work once and which might not work at all. But if it succeeds, nothing will ever be the same again—anywhere.

  * * *

  “Follow me,” droned the police wasp, hovering in the open hatch of my cell.

  I had been lying on the bunk with my eyes shut, chewing over memories and dispiritedly wondering how long they would hold me here, when the hatch opened abruptly. I stood, hesitantly, as the wasp drifted backward into the corridor beyond. There were other cells, some of them with noisy occupants, and hatches in the floor that led to watery holding pens. I stepped around them, following as directed, until the wasp stopped beside an open door.

  “The inspector will see you now,” it buzzed, then zipped back the way it had come. I ducked as it flew past my head, then looked round the side of the door.

  “Come in, Ms. Alizond.” The office had two occupants: my interrogator, Serjeant Bull; and an ectomorphic person of no obvious gender, equipped with huge, somewhat limpid eyes which were currently half-obscured by goggles. Both wore the yellow-and-red motley uniform of the police service, but the thin person’s outfit was adorned with metallic blue piping. The effect was quite eye-watering. “I am Inspector Schram. Serjeant Bull has been briefing me about you. He tells me that you would very much like to find your sib, Ana Graulle-90. Is that correct?”

  “Er, yes.” I nodded uncertainly. Something about the inspector made me nervous, mistrusting.

  “I am pleased to inform you that we have confirmed your account of your arrival, and you are no longer under arrest. You are free to go. However, you should bear in mind that the disappearance of Ana Graulle-90 is under investigation by this department as a possible kidnapping or murder. Consequently, if you attempt to visit her residence, meet contacts, or examine her possessions, you may be interfering in a police investigation, which is an offense.” The inspector’s face crinkled in something that was not a smile. “Do you understand?”

  “What? But! I can’t— That is, yes, I understand, but . . .”

  The inspector left me dangling for a couple of seconds before continuing: “Of course, there is an alternative to interfering in our investigation. If you were to voluntarily assist us with our inquiries, it is possible that we would be better able to locate your sib. What do you think?”

  I saw at once the trap that the inspector had laid for me: What I didn’t understand was why they were so keen to keep me from looking for Ana on my own. So I decided to play dumb. “That’s an excellent idea! But she’s been missing for over a year. And I’m no detective. Surely, I can’t possibly turn up anything that your officers have missed?”

  “That remains to be seen.” Inspector Schram flashed that not-smile at me again. “You must have some ideas of where to start.”

  “There was an inquiry from a friend of hers—”

  The inspector shook its head. “Sadly, that was us. In case you declined to answer an official inquiry from the police, you see.”

  “Oh.” Crestfallen, I glanced away.

  “There are some items I should like to ask you to identify,” the inspector said. “Your cooperation might assist us in filling in some of the blanks.” It held out a hand, flickering with the glow of an escrow agreement: “Shake, and I’ll draft you as an external consultant on Serjeant Bull’s cold-case investigation. Or don’t, and you’ll never know.”

  I gingerly took the inspector’s hand but withheld my consent glands: “What exactly are the terms and conditions you want me to agree to?”

  “You work for us. Everything you learn belongs to us. You do what we say. What else were you expecting?” The inspector could afford to be informal: Nobody sensible would want to break a work contract with the Royal Constabulary.

  I swallowed. “What about a termination clause?”

  “You can walk whenever you want. Or whenever we’re through with you. Just give verbal notice. Now. Do you want in? Or should I assume that your declarations of concern for your sib are—”

  I shook. Now the inspector’s not-smile broadened.

  “Witnessed,” rumbled the Serjeant.

  And that’s how I was drafted by Medea’s police.

  * * *

  An hour later, I found myself standing in Ana’s abandoned apartment, accompanied by the Serjeant and an odobenoid constable, confronting the chaos of a life interrupted.

  But first, let me describe the layout of Nova Ploetsk, the interfacial port city that floats on and under the surface waters above the sunlit Kingdom of Argos.

  Thirty degrees north of the equator, the Kingdom of Argos is an ill-defined zone of turbid water at the edge of the tropics. It hovers over a mantle hot spot, so its waters are warmed by convection currents from the Deep Below; north of it, the vast continental mats of leviathan grass drift in the sunlit
upper waters. It extends across a diameter of perhaps ten thousand kilometers and occupies the surface waters to a depth of around two hundred meters.

  Nova Ploetsk is one of the largest ports in Argos, a vast lenticular structure the upper surface of which projects just above the surface like a gigantic hydrozoan. Below it, tentacular hydrothermal power tubes dangle below the thermocline and extend their nozzles into the twilight zone, sucking up cold waters from kilometers below to cool the heat exchangers from the solar turbines that power the city. Refinery units in tank farms nestling against the underside of the city filter the deep water for rare isotopes, while around it floats the shipyard, ready to carry the mineral wealth it extracts away to customers elsewhere on Shin-Tethys—and ultimately elsewhere in the solar system. It is, by halves: an ugly industrial port city focused on resource extraction and a fleshpot servicing the needs of the miners and prospectors who roam the vast laminar ranges beneath Argos. Ugly, bustling, brash, noisy . . . and nevertheless the destination to which my sib Ana decided to relocate, in order to pursue her studies.

  “We thought perhaps you might be able to help us make sense of this,” said Serjeant Bull. He had sufficient grace to look apologetic.

  “Well.” I looked around. “I hardly know where to begin!”

  The upper reaches of Nova Ploetsk are air-filled and dry; there is a membrane, some distance below the waterline, below which many of the chambers and avenues are partially flooded for the convenience of the hydromorph population, who had adapted themselves to the life aquatic to a sufficient degree that they had difficulty with land-based locomotion—people like the constable watching us from a moon pool in the center of Ana’s living-room floor. The Serjeant and I traveled most of the way to the condominium where Ana had lived by vaporetto, for there were enough obligate land dwellers in the bigger cities to provide such a transport service with custom—but I digress. Ana’s apartment was one of a block catering to amphibia, with wet-and-dry levels and underwater entrances. From outside, they formed a double row of cylinders perhaps eight meters high and six in diameter, rising from the side of a canal.

  The bottommost level of Ana’s apartment was a comfortably furnished lounge area surrounding the watery vestibule: We had to dive briefly into the undertunnel before we could enter. Luckily, despite my lack of gills, I was perfectly capable of submerging for the three minutes it took for the constable on duty to notice our arrival and open the hatch.

  It was, I am sad to say, excessively spacious and furnished lavishly, in a manner most unbecoming for a scholar. I have communicated with Ana extensively over the years, both in writing and via imago dumps (like Andrea’s missive). She had never struck me as being particularly preoccupied with superficialities or hedonistic indulgence. In fact, my impression of her was one of an austere mind, at her happiest when contemplating a long-forgotten archive of primary research material or when setting out the terms of reference for a years-long research program. But this was not the apartment of a contemplative introvert! From the deep blue cultivated-seagrass carpet to the hand-carved coral furniture and the emotionally responsive lighting, the giant retina screen stretched around the walls, and the horribly expensive cast-iron spiral staircase leading up to the next level, nothing about this apartment hinted at an academic disposition.

  Which might be an unfair and slighting judgment on my part, for the paraphernalia associated with our study of the historiography of accounting practices require no more physical tools than a retina to grid out our spreadsheets and, additionally, a storage and numbers mill that might be no bigger than my little finger; but ferrous furniture on a water world is a high-maintenance headache, and Ana did not strike me as the sort of person to prioritize interior-design aesthetics over practicality.

  “It’s not like her,” I said after approximately six seconds. “Are you sure this was Ana Graulle-90’s apartment?” I knew the question was silly the moment the words left my mouth, but I had to ask.

  “Ana Graulle-90 paid the rent here,” Serjeant Bull explained patiently and, I can’t help thinking, a little condescendingly. “She was routinely tracked entering and leaving—there’s a koban in the crescent upstream of here—and on many days she took the same vaporetto service we arrived by to the National Archives, where she was conducting research into the history of blue smoker strikes in the deep wilds. She paid the bills: electricity, gas, and flotation.”

  “Oh.” I glanced at Constable Walrus, then past him (or her) at a crystal display case full of knickknacks: blown-glass statuettes that glowed with a lambent fire beneath carefully positioned overhead spotlights, a reproduction of an ancient inkstone calligraphy set, a scale model of a starship, a case full of tiny, highly polished metal spoons. At the center of the display nestled a huge bivalve shell lined with nacre, a pearl the size of my thumb cradled in its heart. (A gene-mod abalone, I later discovered, an aquatic animal from Old Earth, heavily modified to survive in the waters of Shin-Tethys, with a little care and attention—some invertebrates had been able to survive in the wild, making this one of the most successful attempts at exporting terrestrial biota to other planets, and the principal reason the Church of the Fragile had bothered dispatching a chapel to this system.) “This isn’t like her at all.” I walked across the grass (which had grown somewhat unkempt in the absence of a manicurist-in-residence) and paused at the foot of the stairs. “May I?”

  Serjeant Bull nodded lugubriously. “Take your time.” A momentary pause. “Our forensic investigators finished recording here a year ago, but try not to damage or move anything unnecessarily.”

  I went upstairs after a couple of false starts—it had been ages since I last essayed a staircase in full gravity, and I kept missing the treads—and thrust my head even deeper into the zone of alienation that my missing sib had cast like a spell across her residence.

  Like the ground floor, the upstairs level was circular. One third of it was given over to sanitary and sleeping arrangements, with a table and an unnecessarily large bed taking pride of place. The rest was bare-floored, empty but for shelves occupying the entire height of the walls. The shelves were occupied by narrow boxes, perhaps five centimeters thick and thirty high; the narrow edges were outermost, scribbled on using a black marker. I pulled one of them out and examined it: It fell open in my hands, revealing that the outer panels concealed numerous internal sheets. I will confess it took me a while to recognize them as books. Books in the original meaning of the word, codices: stacks of flexible thin sheets covered in static impressions of writing—an archaic data-storage technology, heavy and unchanging—physically linked at one edge to provide sequential block-level access.

  In all my years I don’t think I’d ever seen so many physical books in one place. In the depths of prehistory, Fragile scholars relied on them for data, back when humanity was confined to a single planet: But they don’t travel well. They’re stupidly massive, almost impossible to edit or update once they’ve been manufactured (thus making them prone to error and obsolescence), and we got out of the habit of “printing” them even before large numbers of our ancestors first began to explore the original solar system. Just what was Ana (assuming it was she) doing with such a hoard of junk?

  I shook my head and did a quick calculation. Assuming twenty per shelf, ten shelves from floor to ceiling, sixteen stacks . . . there must be thousands here! Over a ton of them! “Ludicrous,” I mumbled to myself. Why were they here? And where had Ana gotten the things from in the first place? While books weren’t entirely preposterous on a planetary surface with a carbon-rich biosphere to supply the raw materials—although I had my doubts about their utility underwater—nobody in their right mind would want them aboard any kind of spacegoing vehicle.

  I turned my eyes to the ceiling. And blinked. The stairs terminated here, and the roof was only just out of arm’s reach above me. But . . . eight meters? I walked back to the stairs. “Excuse me?” I called.

&nb
sp; “Yes?”

  “Is there anything above this level? I mean, another floor?”

  “Another . . . ?” I heard Bull’s heavy tread on the steps. Looking at the book I was holding, I rubbed one of the open sheets—a page. It was covered in columns of heavy, immobile black lettering and numbers. The font was execrably wobbly and uneven, and there were numerous wavering strikethroughs and overprints, almost as if someone had tried to create a parody of a spreadsheet by hand. On impulse, I ran a slightly damp finger down a column of figures. They smeared, like a retina in proximity to a strong magnetic field, and when I rubbed my finger in the opposite direction they smeared even more, into near illegibility. More questions: How had she gotten all these books into this apartment, if they were so easily damaged by water? And again: Why?

  Bull arrived. “What’s that you’ve got?” he asked.

  “A book.” I peered at it, trying to read what I’d found. It looks like . . . yes, there was a lack of cross-references and icons, not to mention keys, but the columns made sense if I squinted at them and assumed they were the raw data content of a double-entry ledger. Minus the macros and active content, of course. “It looks like someone was keeping accounts on, what’s the stuff called, paper.” I glanced up at the ceiling: It appeared to be a seamless expanse, sky blue and glowing with artificial daylight. “Using a pigment, uh, ink, that dissolves in water.” I glanced down at the floor, then over toward the trapdoor beside the stairwell opening. I thought about the living space below it, the moon pool opening onto the vestibule exit, and a tentative hypothesis suggested itself to me. “There’s no way in or out of here that doesn’t go through water, is there?”

  “Give that here.” Bull reached for the book, and I passed it to him; there were plenty more on the shelves.

  “Be careful not to get it wet,” I said. “Did you or any of the other investigators read these?”