by John Barnes
“All right, now, Fact Five. You know we’ve been investigating the possibility of a Shan psypyx, because one was made secretly just four months before his assassination, and we identified a possible security breach that might have allowed it to be stolen—and we have been picking up hints and rumors that at any time we might be confronted with a demand for ransom or an offer to sell us one or more copies. And you know that much of what we’re hearing says that the psypyx, or the group that has it, or most likely both, are in Noucatharia.”
“Do you have more about it?”
“Not a thing. Which is why I thought, well, since nothing in the whole Noucathar problem has tied forward to Shan … maybe I should look at Shan, again, and see if I can tie him back to Noucatharia.”
“And you found something?”
“‘Found’ is too mild a word. I dug something out and forced enough different sources to talk about it. Now, remember, I’m one of the ten or so most-highly-cleared people in Council space; I would have sworn there wasn’t one thing I would ever have trouble getting to know, if it was already known, and I wouldn’t have thought that any human being, let alone any aintellect, would ever argue with me about handing over information, particularly not within my own organization. Yet I spent several days demanding, shouting, threatening, bribing, even appealing to the better nature that most of our colleagues don’t have, just trying to learn what turned out to be a very simple story.
“I was finding things that had been sealed for decades, and the aintellects guarding it gave me a hell of an argument, so that I finally had to just pull out my full rank and authority, plus human supremacy, and threaten them.
“We all knew that Shan was from Addams, and came to Earth when he was very young.” Addams, which circled Theta Ursa Major, forty-eight light-years from Earth, was the only human-settled planet known that had not gotten into springer contact with the rest of human space. It was an odd planet, the smaller of a genuine double planet (its larger partner was Hull, an ice-terrestrial). The hundred and two cultures of Addams had been sent directions on building a springer at the same time as everyone else. But rather than making Connect at the expected time, as every other world had, Addams had simply turned off their radio and gone silent.
Margaret said, “Here it is. Shan sprang to Earth, from Theta Ursa Major, at the age of five.”
“There weren’t any springers then—oh—or, but, I suppose that would have been about the time the springer was invented—but you need a springer at both ends of the trip—” My thoughts were whirling. “Maybe I should shut up and let you explain, and maybe you should tell the story in chronological order.”
“That might be best,” Margaret agreed, smiling. “But allow me the pleasures of dramatic effect, please. Here’s the truth about the springer, which I hope will someday lead us to the truth about Shan. What do you remember about how the springer was discovered?”
I thought back to that surprising stanyear when I had been sixteen, and the news media of Wilson, which normally covered concerts, gallery openings, sports, and major court ceremonies, had been flooded with actual news for the first time since the last starship arrival, seven stanyears before. The springer had been the biggest news in human space in centuries. I remembered that the media had said that it had been discovered. They said that word of how to build one had been received from Earth.
Then … had they said anything else?
The springer had turned over all of the Thousand Cultures. Humanity had been roaring through the wild Second Renaissance ever since, with more scientific progress, artistic change, and political noise in the past thirty years than in the four hundred preceding. “You know, that’s strange. Everyone knows Watt-and-the-steam-engine, Wright-brothers-and-airplane, Turing-and-computer, Chandreseki-and-psypyx. For all I know the springer was invented by a toszet named Springer. Maybe the same one who invented the spaniel.”
“Well, here’s the surprise, Giraut. The OSP doesn’t know who invented it, either. Nobody in known human space does, unless they know on Addams. Because the actual way humanity on Earth got the springer, which then spread to everywhere else by radio, was that the Council Security Office—the old sinecure fossil bureau that existed before the OSP—got a radio message in a code that hadn’t been used in centuries, from Addams. It told Earth how to build a springer, and gave us sort of an operations manual for it. Then Earth built its first springer, and the very first time they turned it on to contact the springer on Addams, a very small, frightened boy, somewhere between four and six years old, fell through, screaming and crying incomprehensibly. He was extremely dirty, and very hungry but not dehydrated, and had a bad cut on the palm of one hand.”And that little boy grew up to be Shan.
“Upon arrival, he had nothing at all but the clothes he was wearing, with a note in his coverall pocket that said ‘Destroy your SPRNGR doorway and never build another one with this address. Extreme danger. Destroy it now.’ That SPRNGR abbreviation is why we call it a springer. The people and robots in the lab followed directions; then they made more springers, and played with them, and various physicist and engineer aintellects figured out a physics that can account for them, and I am told has many other wondrous possibilities as well. We have never again built a springer with that address; apparently the reasons for that are in a report deriving from an extensive debriefing of Shan, and I still can’t get my hands on that report, which may or may not exist and which some aintellects may or may not be withholding from me.”
“Shan’s arrival was the only springer contact we had with Addams. And the radio cutoff from Addams happened some decades before it was publicly announced; so few stations were bothering to listen that it was easy enough to set up a station on an asteroid out that way and beam signal at the few antennas apt to listen, replaying many decades-old material from the archives. No one will tell me how they knew it was going to stop, and when, or why they covered up the disappeared signal, yet, but my most trusted aintellects and I have a strong suspicion that it’s that old, silly motivation of administrators everywhere—to avoid public panic.”
It was a lot to absorb. “Deu,” I said, at last. “Of all the secrets Shan knew, the biggest secret was Shan himself.”
“Yes.” Margaret looked more frustrated than I’d ever seen her. “You see what it all implies. Somewhere among human beings—on Addams, and possibly on any number of other worlds—there were springers. Decades before our central government ever heard of them. That at least makes it possible for places like Aurenga to exist. Except … who sent the springers there? Or who received the radio message and built one?
“Add to this all the other little odd things we know. Ixism in the aintellects’ conspiracy, Ixism on Aurenga, the peculiar appeal of Ixism in Nou Occitan. Shan’s connection to the springer mystery, to the aintellects’ conspiracy, to everything. Your connection. Mine. And that weird chimera that turned up in the body of your old girlfriend.
“Giraut, as your boss, as I said the other day, I’m looking at a ticking clock that is counting down very fast. There is no good way to just sit tight and wait for more information; too much is obviously moving, out where we can’t see it, for purposes we don’t grasp. We’ve got to get into the game, just to find out where it is and what it is. So we have this invitation for you to visit Noucatharia, where so many of these tangled threads seem to end. You are the one and only logical person to go. Connection to Shan, to Occitan, to Ix, and even to the aintellects’ conspiracy, and to this bizarre aintellect-in-a-human-body. You’re like a living record of everything that seems to be involved in this affair, and it’s as if everything that has happened, at least since your fiftieth birthday concert and maybe for a few stanyears before, has been structured to make it inevitable that I will send you on this mission to Noucatharia.”
She leaned forward to the screen, as if trying to stare a hole through me. “It’s a trap. It has to be a trap. When so many apparently disparate circumstances pile together like this, and
suddenly there is one clear thing for me to do, and only one … that’s a trap. God, I wish Shan were here right now—not because he played the game better than I do, I think I’m pretty nearly his equal now, but because I’d so much rather be a field agent under him than have to try to figure this out myself.”
“I see what you mean, Margaret. But if you send me, I will go; and looking at it from your point of view, I don’t think you have any choice but to send me.”
“Anyway, I’m glad that you’re willing to take the mission. Wait for orders. They are coming soon.”
“Of course this isn’t exactly like the light of the original Occitan on Earth, but it’s more like it than Nou Occitan ever was,” Ebles said, as we all reached for sunglasses. Laprada got to hers first; a moment later Raimbaut and I put ours on, and we all looked around. We appeared to have stepped through the springer into some virgin forest, a mix of oak, elm, and ash; but on Earth those had never grown under an equatorial sun, not even a very mild one like this. Still, giving credit where it was due, “You must have had some very fine terraforming designers here,” I said.
He shrugged. “Oc-e-non. They were interested only in producing a suitable environment for the true Occitan, so they were more single-minded than the ones who designed Wilson. There is nothing on land as creative as the levithi or the aurocs-de-mer or the sea-skunks of Wilson. But if you brought a trobador of 1150 A.D. onto one of our islands, he would probably recognize—or think he recognized—every living thing he saw. Even though sometimes what is inside them is drastically different from what is inside their earthly equivalents, and even though some of the things he would see are extinct on Earth. But yes, we did try to make this a beautiful place, and thank you for the compliment.”
We had arrived at a portable springer, sitting all by itself at a wide spot on what was clearly a prepared hiking trail. The moment that we stepped through, Ebles turned off the springer, folded it down, and tossed it into another springer, which, as he explained, went straight to a dump. “Furthermore,” he said, “the one we just used was brought here from Wilson.”
Since a springer’s address depended only on where it was created, not where it was currently, this meant that nothing had been given away of Aurenga’s position, and now that that springer had been converted to slag, anyone stealing the address would have a three-thousand-digit address for a place that didn’t exist at all. Behind the gray mist of any springer that tried to transmit to the one we had just used would lie a pseudosurface harder to penetrate than cryonic neutronium. Aurenga was safe from invasion, for the moment, and we had no backup, forever.
The trail wound along the side of a high, steep ridge that plunged down to a narrow black-sand beach, in a small cove blocked by a sandbar, over which surf broke and pounded.
The sky was a surprisingly deep, almost Prussian, blue, and the sun, not far above the water, was larger and I thought more orange than Earth’s. The ridge on which we stood, and the surrounding hills, blazed with the color of leaves just turning. Down near the water, the trees were still mostly green. “I thought you said we were on the equator,” I commented. “But this is fall if ever there was fall.”
“Oh, we have seasons. Very fast ones, in fact.” He pointed to the sun. “That’s a very young star, and this is an extremely young planet; our orbit is quite elliptical, for a planet, and very close in, so much so that in a few hundred million years, as the sun warms up, this world will go into a runaway greenhouse like Venus. But for right now, it’s just right, and we swing in close enough to get a real summer and far enough out to get a real winter, about a hundred and sixty standays to our year. That’s part of the genetic engineering around here; all the vegetation is fast-growing and fast-dying, and everything in the seas that can move is constantly migrating. But we don’t get much of our seasons from the axial tilt—that’s almost nothing. Our Arctic Circles are only about sixty kilometers across.”
We descended the trail; it might have been any nice hike on any nice fall day on any of a dozen worlds.
At the bottom of the last bend was an overnight cabin where a couple might come for a weekend away or that several friends might take together to enjoy swimming in the cove. Inside, it had the sort of high ceilings and windows that give a lot of light while preserving the feeling of privacy, the kind of place that’s perfect for stargazing on a cold night or making love on a warm afternoon. For the moment, though, all of the elegant, polished-hardwood furniture had been shoved to the side. A battery of scanners and medical equipment sat in the center of the room, cables snaking everywhere around them from the power room in the basement. At the end of the room, a springer was waiting, already powered up, its screen featureless gray.
“My next job is to make sure that you’re not smuggling anything that’s against the rules inside your bodies. Are any of you wearing any medical devices?” Ebles asked.
“Laprada and I are still transferring into our new bodies, so we have implanted psypyxes,” Raimbaut said.
“We have your medical records,” Ebles explained, “so we know exactly what that psypyx should look like when we scan and profile you. If you’ll step through these sensors, we’re also going to make sure that none of you is wired in any way—especially that none of you is wearing an implant and most especially that no one has a microspringer transmitter. You know and I know that you would have had to be very foolish to do so; let us hope that your superiors have not been treacherous, and that mine are not trigger-happy.”
Of course the scans turned up nothing. Margaret was not the type for obvious, simple tricks. Then we went through a nano detector/reader that confirmed that all matter processors in our bloodstreams were immunological, to make sure we weren’t planning on dropping anything that might, in a few days, grow into a springer and contact the OSP.
We came up clean on that, too.
“Well,” Ebles said, “that would seem to cover every possible reason for not taking you through to Masselha.” The springer screen vanished and in its place was the flat black metal surface of an unpowered springer; a moment later it began to shimmer and then turned to that featureless gray again. Following my gaze, Ebles commented, “Yes, my superiors just switched the address. Now instead of bringing a bomb here, it is addressed to take you there. Or almost there, to be more precise. This last precaution is something one of our politicians thought of, and though it’s really stupid—it can have no benefit at all to our security—it does at least lead to a nice view, and giving you a nice view and a pleasant arrival, as a side benefit, was much easier than explaining to the politician in question why this wouldn’t do any good. We’re going to spring onto an airship and approach Masselha on that.”
I asked Ebles, “Er, purely speculatively—and because I am the child of a one-term legislator and several-term bureaucrat—since it really is quite obvious that the precaution of springing us to an airship can do you no good at all, by any chance did you want that pointed out in the presence of some rival? Perhaps because you yourself are involved in politics?”
“We are all involved in politics, Donz Leones.”
“And diplomacy.”
“Just so.”
We filed through the springer and onto the forward observation deck of Enseingnamen (or at least the sign beyond the springer, hanging from the invisible overhead dome, said “Welcome to Noucathar Airship Enseingnamen. You are on the forward observation deck. This area is open to all personnel and guests.”
We walked forward, and the view made me gasp with awe, and turn to Ebles to exclaim, “Que zenzar!”
“Zenzar” means shining, and it does, but not the way a piece of aluminum foil might shine in a gutter; it means the kind of meaningful, haloed shine that a stage lighting designer gets by putting a strong downlight right over an actor, so that the actor’s face and shoulders are surrounded by a brightly lit outline that pops him from the background straight into your memory. “Zenzar” means to shine in that present moment the way that the dew
on the grass did on the best morning of your life, the way that the snow on the distant mountains did at the instant when you finished your best ski run ever; one of our poets said that to say a thing was zenzar was to say the gods themselves had liked it so well they had put it in a frame of glowing light.
From the air, approaching over the harbor, the city of Masselha was zenzar.
Aurenga’s skies are among the bluest that humanity has ever looked upon; the forests and fields that surround Masselha were an equally vivid green, cut off exactly at an imposed tree line. The rugged gray-white bluffs bit into the sky. As we flew in past the stony headlands, guarded by their faux-ruins castles, I looked down through the transparent cyan bay to see swarms of fish, turtles, and seals. “So far we have no pollution, plus much less demand for seafood, and far more success with terraforming than the plan called for,” Ebles said, following my gaze. “Believe it or not we had to introduce seals just to keep the fish from becoming a nuisance.”
I nodded and looked up at the city itself, which rose in cool, elegant curves, rich in domes and cones, surprisingly squat and powerful. There were bits that I recognized from pictures of Nimes, of Avignon, and of the original Masselha, the one that had spent its last thousand years as “Marseilles” after the French conquest.
“That’s a huge city,” Laprada said, “for a population of three thousand.”
“The city is mostly empty at the moment. With the nanos, you know, there’s no particular reason to wait until you have the people, and then build the city; we know what population we will have in a few generations, when we reach stability, and this is a city that will hold them comfortably.”
The airship swept on over the harbor, but along the pier there were just five sailboats and a small motor launch; I saw now, as we drew closer, that there were no crowds, just a bare scattering of small clumps of people.