by John Barnes
“These last few weeks—while I was getting ready for this concert and everything else-why did everyone assume that I was going to be morbid?” I asked Paxa, as we primped next to each other in the mirror. “I think I’m actually doing rather well. Everyone else is making more fuss about my turning fifty than I am.”
She slipped her hand behind my neck and kissed the particular spot on my throat that always melts me. Her reflection gazed into my eyes from the bathroom mirror. “Because, dearest,” she whispered, “we know you.”
If the colonization of the terraformable planets nearest to Earth had been for resources or lebensraum, anyone would have to say it was a dismal failure.
There were no resources worth pursuing. Prior to the springer, it had made equal economic sense-none at all-to ship diamonds or cornflakes between the stars. The energy costs of molecular-level synthesis—or even of transmutation of elements if need be—were lower than the costs of accelerating the same mass to half-c for ballistic starflight, and at one-half-c maximum practical velocity, the cost of every voyage was doubled or tripled by compound interest en route.
Nor was it a matter of room for people. One brief century of colonization had put human beings into permanent residence in open-air, dry-land spaces on twenty-six worlds. Eight, almost entirely habitable like Roosevelt, Addams, or Dunant, each housed around a hundred cultures. A few had just small slivers of habitable land like Wilson (mostly water), Nansen (mostly frozen), or Briand (mostly toxic), and had one or two cultures. The majority were worlds of one pleasant continent, or a few nice big islands, like Söderblom, where Hedonia shared an Australia-sized continent with Thetanshaven, Bremen-Beyondthe-Stars, Texaustralia, and Freiporto; twelve more cultures clustered on an Africa-sized continent in the opposite hemisphere.
In all, every schoolchild learned to recite, the new land beyond the stars totaled only about fourteen times the comfortably habitable area of the Earth. With Earth’s population stable (and reduced by more than a third just a century before), there was neither need for a place for surplus people, nor enough land to put any very great numbers onto anyway, and in any case the colony ships took only ninety-six adults and a million frozen embryos.
If space for people had been the issue, it would have been cheaper and easier to accelerate the terraformation of Mars and Venus and build many more closed habitats in the Sol system.
Almost, it had been a pure whim, or the hedging of a bet. In the colonization century, just before the Inward Turn, diversity had seemed more dangerous than monotony, but there was room enough for both as long as diversity could be kept safely far away. The Thousand Cultures existed because our ancestors thought there should be different kinds of people—far away. The reason for the new worlds had been, then, what the purpose of the OSP was now: controlled diversity, with emphasis more on control than on diversity.
Diversity didn’t always work out. I have seen firsthand more of the places that humanity lives than almost anyone else, and I know that however diverse the 1228 cultures planted on those twenty-six worlds were, in the fourteen Earth’s-worths of surface occupied by humanity, every conference room has nonstain beige carpets, heavy-but-cheap furniture, and nothing to look at. Even if the walls are covered with great art, or if there is spectacular scenery out the windows on all sides, there is something about the atmosphere of a conference room that pulls your focus into that little space between the bodies at the table, and usually afterward you remember nothing except the screen of your own computer and the sleepy faces of the people across from you.
Margaret walked in and began without preface or greeting, still Caledon after all these years. “That note left in Giraut’s hand has been authenticated several different ways as extraterritorial—the materials it was made of don’t match anything known in human space but do match scraps in our collection of extraterritorial materials. The human DNA traces on it are consistent with the Lost Legion. Handwriting influence maps suggest that whoever wrote it was taught to write by two of the identified members of the Lost Legion; probably it was a child copying text, as Giraut speculated, so that we wouldn‘t have any other sample on hand. This is actually more interesting than the fact that someone from a possibly hostile power was able to walk right through Paxa’s security, despite all the care she lavishes upon it, physically touch the man you were all protecting, and get away without being seen.”
“The man himself,” I said, “did not detect the event, and you know perfectly well that I sometimes leap out of bed in the middle of the night grabbing for a weapon, because of a noise most other people would sleep through. If you put your attention on finding incompetence or negligence, you will waste your time; there is indeed something fascinating about the penetration with such apparent ease of so much security, but the thing that makes it fascinating is that security was superb, and unusually on alert besides. How they did it is something we need to know; but you won’t find that by assuming our security simply failed or was neglected.”
Margaret sat and looked at me quietly, a trick she was good at. She knew that if I were not sure of myself, I might start backing down or hedging in the face of that stare.
Everyone else looked out windows at suburban Manila and the distant harbor and no doubt wished for the millionth time that the boss’s boss was not the boss’s ex-wife.
Ever the master of retreating from ground she could not hold, and of the hooking attack that doesn’t hit where it looks like it’s going, Margaret said, crisply, “Your protest on behalf of your team is noted. Let’s discuss the new evidence about the Lost Legion.”
It was about the most embarrassing possible topic for me, and she knew it. While she went over the forensics on the note, I tried to listen, but I kept mentally returning to the most humiliating single part of the “extraterritorial problem.”
Until the invention of the springer, the roughly forty-tosixty-light-year limit of human settlement had been enforced by the limits of technology. A single colony ship could travel around that far, taking a century or a little more, before too many of its ninety-six adults in suspended animation died in the tank, leaving too few adult survivors to move into the robotbuilt city waiting at the other end, and to decant and raise the first generation of “natives” from the ship’s bank of a million frozen embryos. Beyond that fuzzy around-fifty-light-year line, the paucity of adults in the crucial first generation on the new world drastically lowered the probability of transmitting the culture accurately (meaning, as it had been designed on Earth), and cultures planted on the same planet were forced to interact more than had been intended, and no one would raise the enormous funds required to launch a ship without some reasonable assurance that the culture would eventually be planted.
In the centuries following the Inward Turn, technology had been systematically held in place, so that fifty-light-year-or-so limit had become a de facto cornerstone of policy for centuries.
No colony ships had gone farther than the 102 (of 109 attempted) cultures barely planted on Addams, circling Theta Ursa Major, and the even-more-marginal two cultures on Briand, circling Metallah, each just over sixty light-years away. Addams and Briand had been reached by pushing every margin, and only attempted because there was no remaining standard culture space (650,000 square kilometers of reasonably contiguous, walk-around-without-special-equipment land) anywhere closer.
Ninety years after the colonization era began, the last ships left Earth for Addams; 134 stanyears later, when the determined aintellects brought Susan Constant IV into orbit around Addams with ten surviving adults and most of its embryos dead, the colonization era ended, apparently for all time.
For the next 450 stanyears, then, until the springer, humanity was confined to an irregular, three-lobed blob of space that would all fit into a hundred-light-year-diameter sphere, with Earth somewhat off center of the intersection of the three lobes. The human bubble was only about twenty parts in a billion of the volume of the galaxy, but we were the masters of our bubble,
with no compelling reason or cheap means to go beyond it.
The springer had changed everything. Historians intended no hyperbole in saying it was the biggest innovation since fire or the pointed stick. If there was a springer anywhere you wanted to go, you could cross many light-years in a single step; just the night before I had made a precautionary emergency-room call of fourteen light-years, and Paxa and I had walked from our hotel room, with its view of Epsilon Indi setting, to this conference room in Manila on Earth.
Within human space, you could go anywhere by radioing directions and waiting for the people on the other end to receive the message and build a springer; once they did, everywhere was as close as the next room (assuming you could afford the astonishing amount of energy required).
Beyond human space, you first had to send a springer there on a rocket—but a springship was a radically different rocket from the huge, half-light-speed behemoths, stacked with suspended animation tanks and equipped like hospitals, that had planted the first colonies.
A rocket always gets the most acceleration from the very last drop of fuel in the tank, because the engine pushes with constant force, but the mass of fuel you’re pushing decreases as the fuel is expelled. But on a springship, every drop is the very last; you need not even send a reaction chamber, just a nozzle with a springer at the back, through which you spring a jet from as big a stationary chamber as you like.
Send out a robot springship the size of a large desk, boosting at a hundred g because it has no fuel tanks, just springers delivering light-speed protons from back home right into the nozzle. Do that for one week and you are close enough to lightspeed for every practical purpose. Control it via laserlink through a microspringer; no signal strength problem and no speed-oflight lag, no matter how far it goes. Keep aiming your springship for the next nearest F, G, or K star.
As it passes each star, scan the habitable zone for any Earth-sized world with free O2 in the atmosphere. If no, on to the next star.
If yes, the springship flips over to ride its jet down into the solar system for a closer look. If things still look good from closer up, descend all the way into orbit around the planet. If it’s still good from orbit, descend on a nice cool jet of roomtemperature nitrogen, so as not to disturb anything, set the springship down on a reasonably stable, solid patch of dirt, open an exterior microspringer on the springship’s surface, and dump a couple of tons of nanos onto the face of the new world. Over a few weeks, the nanos strip materials out of the surrounding land to grow an enclosed habitat suitable for humans, with a full-sized springer inside, and another door opens onto the frontier.
As soon as you have a springable base on an alien world, with enough redundant springer capacity to ensure you won’t lose it, the springship takes off again.
Theoretically the Council of Humanity’s probes-and only theirs—were to catalog every habitable and terraformable planet for fifty light-years beyond the outer surface of human space, and a procedure would be established for applying to establish new colonies.
That survey process was now about half-complete-except that across roughly a quarter of the northern celestial hemisphere, wherever Council springships had found particularly promising solar systems, when they had descended for a closer look, they had suffered an “abrupt functional stoppage/ disconnect”—“AFSD” was a standard abbreviation. It was widely said, in security circles, that AFSD stood for “Actually Fucking Shot Down.”
We knew who shot them down. While the Council had dithered for a quarter of a century before the first study-to-doa-study had been authorized, the nearest and best habitable worlds had been illegally settled.
Launching a springship was so cheap that a largish corporation, political party, foundation, religious congregation, or criminal syndicate could probably launch a few every stanyear. Fuel cost was another matter, if you paid it, but there were a lot of places you could steal about 120 grams of antimatter per stanyear, enough for the civilian power requirements of three to ten cultures, to be sure, but one clandestine VNP could be making three or four kilograms per stanyear and springing it to scores of probes, and VNPs built themselves; all you needed was a clean copy of the nanoware and a corrupted aintellect to tinker it into operation without calling the cops.
So while the Council of Humanity dithered, other parts of humanity had settled in several star systems in the direction of Ursa Major, Leo, and Bootes, well beyond the official surface of settlement. The OSP knew of a political entity called Union, comprised of at least nineteen “extraterritorials”—illegal colonies. We had a few dozen Union-made artifacts captured here and there, some photos and vus, and an ongoing project to infiltrate the smugglers (we had not found any yet, but where there is a border, there are smugglers).
And I was being cautiously approached by the extraterritorial most perfectly suited to embarrassing me: the Lost Legion.
The Lost Legion had begun as an Occitan special unit, like other monoculture special units within the CSPs (the Thorburger Pioneers, Chaka Zulu Scouts, Égalité Rainbow Rangers, and so on). But the Leghio Occitan had been disbanded after the Utilitopia Massacre during the Council intervention in the Caledon Revolution.
I had been in Utilitopia when it happened, on my very first diplomatic mission. The very building where Occitan troops had killed forty-three civilians, most of them prostrate and screaming for mercy, had been my main base of operations.
Some of the Occitan Legion, rather than accept how embarrassing their behavior had been, or trying to atone, had somehow found the resources to establish an outlaw community, somewhere beyond the official settlement line, and that colony—we reserved the term “culture” for authorized cultures—was a member of Union. We had a name for their capital city—Masselha, for their settlement—Noucatharia, and for their planet—Aurenga, but no idea which of many possible suns might be theirs, and until we had a springer in their system, no way to easily find or touch them.
“Giraut?”
“Sorry, Margaret, my mind was wandering.”
“We could tell. Does anyone have any thoughts?”
“The most interesting thing is that it’s so melodramatic,” Paxa observed. “As if—”
“Any other thoughts?” Margaret asked, cutting Paxa off.
“You just got one,” I said. “Possibly a good one.”
Margaret glared at me. “If you had been listening, you would know this is the fourth time that Paxa has brought this up, and while we all agree with her, none of us, including Paxa, has been able to make any progress beyond the observation. And I think that if Paxa had actually had anything new to say, she would have begun with it.”
Very long silence. Finally Paxa said, “Will you two please let it go? Giraut, she’s right, I was repeating myself. Margaret, that was still rude.”
“Was it? I’m sorry.” Margaret has a knack for apologies that drip poison. “Till we know what it’s about, everything depends on where and when they contact Giraut. Does anyone here propose changing the basic plan?”
No one did.
“Then Giraut will go forward with recording sessions for the new material in Noupeitau, and the rest of you will hang around on the expense accounts until something happens. Paxa, would you like additional resources or changes of procedure?”
“Surely she can just send a memo,” I said, before Paxa walked into whatever trap Margaret was setting. I kept my tone cold. “As long as we all agree that I ought to stay alive, I think we can trust everyone’s competence.”
Margaret was very quiet for the space, perhaps, of three breaths, gazing at me with the same annoyed but respectful expression I’d have seen if I’d just unexpectedly taken her bishop and put her in check.
“Does everyone know about the DNA workups?” Laprada asked, brightly, as if she were suggesting charades at a dull party.
Margaret started as if Laprada had suddenly begun to eat imaginary bugs. Laprada chattered on happily. “I’m sure not everyone has heard. We got the detail
ed lab work back. DNA of the two corpses is a clear match for three Occitan families known to have members in Noucatharia. They were young, as always—about ages sixteen and fourteen—and riddled with carcinomas.”
Raimbaut leapt in. “Actually if you were profiling whoever is trying to kill Giraut, it’s teenagers with Occitan ancestry, whole-body cancer, and brain bombs.”
Dad said, “Of course it’s easy to overlook something unsurprising; they’re exactly like all their predecessors.”
Margaret folded her hands and sat back, in a gesture that reminded me very much of Shan. “Excellent. You were right, we did need to cover that. Any other information we should have covered and haveri t?”
“Just a thought,” Paxa said. “Was there the same mystery as before about who the parents were?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Margaret said. “But as usual, the aintellects point out that there’s only about an eighty percent chance of being able to identify either parent, even with our list of likely Noucathars and the recorded DNA for so many of them.”
“And these were the fifth and sixth ones we couldn’t get a fix on—with an eighty percent chance that we should? What are the chances of not getting one single match, on an eighty percent chance, across six tries?”
Margaret whistled, an annoying thing she did when surprised, and said, “Aintellect, answer that question.”
Her personal aintellect, always quietly listening, said, “Sixty-four chances in one million.”
We all sat and stared for a moment, thinking about the implications. The Utilitopia Massacre had been only twenty-eight stanyears ago. And the Noucathars—a small part of the Occitan Legion and their entendendoras—had not begun to disappear until their rehabilitation sentences were completed, about three and a half years afterward, so they had not arrived at the illegal colony, even if they were able to do it by a concealed springer somewhere, any longer than 24.5 stanyears ago. We were confident that we had identified about ninety percent of the people who had slipped away to join the illegal colony, and all six teenaged assassins showed every sign of being their relatives—but no exact matches, none, for an ancestor.