I have something else, too, something I did not bring with me and which I will not take when I catch that last westbound: it looks like a stone, smoothed as if by years under gently rushing water, gray and featureless. When I came out of that weird trance, it was nestled in the palm of my right hand. Warm to the touch even on a cold day, when I hold it, it says “You’re welcome.” There are no words—these are aliens, after all—but the thought is clear. I take it out from time to time, just to hold it.
Aliens. Who’d have thought? And of course the Emperor was right; a second Frog Level might not be very useful, not the way a food processor or pasta machine is, but it sure beats the hell out of a fondue pot, and manners are manners.
I teach a course now on Music of the Iron Road. Hobo songs and poems, gathered by me each summer when I hit the rails to do more research. I bring other musicians to the college, too, with their guitars and banjos, their squeezeboxes and mouth-harps. They play for my students and the faculty, the college pays them an honorarium as lecturers, and they pick up work at the bars in town. Then they move on.
And once a year, no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I make it a point to hop a freight car and piss out the door, to prove to all the bastards in all the worlds that I’m here, and out of respect for the best and only Emperor I’ve ever known.
Most important, I write! Glory hallelujah, but I write and sing my own music now, and it’s good, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Banjo Jack Holloway has recorded three of my songs, and I’m becoming a regular at hobo gatherings at places like Elko and Pennsburg. I’m accepted by the old ’bos as one of their own, and is there any greater joy, any greater honor, than to be accepted?
It’s a good life, I think.
CAPTAINS CONSPIRING AT THEIR MUTINIES, by Jay Lake
Year 461 post-Mistake
High orbit around Sidero
The Before Michaela Cannon, aboard the starship Polyphemus {23 pairs}
“A ship needs a captain against mutiny,” muttered the Before Michaela Cannon. “Not a mutinous captain.” She wasn’t in command of this vessel, not now at any rate—just the mission specialist in charge of integrating the starship’s crew and the pair master assembly team. People called her ascetic, but what they meant was weathered. Leathered. Raddled. And far worse, when they thought she couldn’t hear.
She knew better. You didn’t live fourteen centuries, several of them amid screaming savagery, and not learn to know better.
Comms flickered with the immersive displays here in her workspace on the reserve bridge. Polyphemus was fast-cycling through a hundred-odd channels, showing Cannon a gestalt of what was happening across the decks as well as outside the hull on the construction project. They were here at Sidero to build a pair master—a hideously expensive machine required to anchor one end of a paired drive run across the depths of interstellar space. Five years-subjective ship-time in relativistic transit, over eleven years-objective.
Plenty of opportunities for things to go seriously wrong.
“The predictive accuracy of your social modeling is increasingly accurate,” said Polyphemus. The starship spoke to Cannon in Classical English. A rare enough language in the Imperium Humanum that simply using it served as a crude form of operational security. Cannon had spent a lot of time in the ship’s Brocan modules, tweaking the speech processing.
Trust, it was always about trust. She’d been saying that down the long centuries, and had been proven right in the failing of things far too often.
Polyphemus continued. “Apparently random gatherings of three or more persons are up forty-eight percent this ship-day from median. Seven individuals appear in a distribution at six times the expected rate based on average distribution.”
“Kallus have anything to report?” He was her ally in Internal Security, a man loyal to certain interests outside the hull. Nothing inimical, just good, old-fashioned politics, working with people she respected well enough.
“He is busy suppressing a staged fight in the number three crew quarters.”
Cannon grunted. Then: “Weapons?”
“Nothing but ordinary tools. No withdrawals from the arms lockers in the past three ship-days.”
Firearms could have been distributed long ago, or indeed, brought on board before they’d departed Ninnelil five ship-years earlier. Somebody had planned for this mutiny, or at least the possibility of it.
That other damned Before was at the heart of this problem. “Where is Captain Siddiq?”
Polyphemus paused an unusually long time before answering. “The captain is not within my network mesh.”
“And why would a captain conspire at mutiny against her own command?” Cannon mused.
The starship had no answer to that. One by one, the images of the too-busy crew cycled to a hundred identical views of the dull black surface of the planet Sidero.
* * * *
:: context ::
In the centuries since the Mistake had nearly ended the tenure of the human race as a viable species, spacefaring had resumed across the core of the old Polity amid an outburst of genetic and technological diversity sparked by the pressures of extinction. The threadneedle drives which had provided a true faster-than-light solution in cheerful violation of both paradox and the laws of physics were now simply so much junk, whether on a laboratory bench or in a starship’s engine room.
Conventional physics had apparently re-asserted itself. Precisely what had happened to the threadneedle drive was a subject of centuries of frustrating, unsuccessful research.
Paired drives were invented in 188 pM by Haruna Kishmangali. They relied on a macro-level generalization of quantum effects to associate the starship drive with any two pair masters at distinct points—entanglement on a grand scale so that the drives could “remember” the locations without having to cope with the intervening distances. Once this was done, the vessel could pass between the locations nearly instantaneously, except for the added travel times to and from areas of sufficiently low density to enable safely the pairing transit process.
The key problem was twofold. First, building the pair masters, which required planning horizons and budgetary commitments beyond the capability of even many planetary governments; as well a significant investment in relativistic travel to conduct site surveys and establish suitable destinations.
Second, even once built, every ship wishing to be capable of traveling to a site served by a pair master was forced to make the initial journey at relativistic speeds so that both ends of the pairing could be entangled, with the intervening distance required as part of the equation. Cheating didn’t work, either. A drive to be paired had to make the trip embedded in its host starship. Simply traveling within the hold of another starship did not support the effect. Even worse from some points of view, if pulled out later from the host starship and associated shipmind, the drives would lose their pairing. There was no point to cannibalization. Everything had to be created the hard way.
This was a very limited form of FTL, though still far more effective than relativistic travel. The extent of interstellar travel grew slowly, and only at great need.
* * * *
The Before Raisa Siddiq, surface of Sidero
Siddiq walked almost naked in a field of buckyballs. This planet, if it in fact was a planet—some theories held this to be an artificial world—boasted 0.88 gravities at the surface, wrapped in hard vacuum. Which in and of itself was highly curious, as Sidero sat firmly in the Goldilocks zone of its primary and should have been perfectly capable of retaining a decent atmosphere. The night sky above revealed only the endless field of stars in the Orion arm. Sidero had no large companion, only a swarm of captured asteroids. Their pair master would be a more substantial satellite than any of the natural moons.
The Before herself was hardened as only thirteen centuries of living through two cycles of empire could make a human being. The best way to remain functionally immortal was to remain highly functional. In these degraded d
ays, she could walk the outside of her own ship’s hull for hours before needing to find a breath, her skin proof against all but the most energetic particles. Clothes were mostly a nuisance. Besides, she hadn’t had genitalia to speak of for over a thousand years, so modesty had long since gone out of consideration.
The spherical fullerene sprayed around her boots. She could swear the world rang beneath her feet, each strike of her heel banging a gong ten thousand kilometers across. No matter that sound did not carry in a vacuum—some things could be heard inside the soul.
Wrong, wrong, it was all so very wrong.
Cannon was up there in orbit, talking to her ship in a dead language that existed mostly in undercode running on ancient infrastructure and its more modern copies. The Imperium stretched through time and space behind them, an ever-opening invitation to repeat the Mistake.
Siddiq had long ago ceased thinking of herself as human, except occasionally in a very narrow, technical sense. Her gender had been subsumed many centuries-subjective past by the same medtech which had granted her the curse of immortality. Being a woman was as much a matter of habit as being human. Except when it wasn’t.
Damn that Michaela Cannon.
A line of what could have been buildings loomed ahead, rising out of the fullerene dust which covered the suface. The current hypothesis down in the Planetary Sciences section aboard Polyphemus was that some alien weapon had precipitated Sidero’s atmosphere into the carbon spheres. Mass estimates didn’t support this thinking, but it kept the bright boys busy.
Of far more interest to the Before Raisa Siddiq was what lay beneath the planet’s iron skin. The recontact surveys had found four Polity starships in orbit here, three military and one civilian. That represented an enormous commitment of interest and resources, even by the insanely wealthy standards of pre-Mistake humanity.
Whatever those long-dead crews had wanted, it wasn’t just an abandoned artificial world covered with fullerene.
Her tight-comm crackled. Siddiq had kept herself outside of Polyphemus’ network mesh ever since this voyage began, for a variety of good reasons which began and ended with Michaela Cannon. Only two others in local space had access to this link.
“Go,” she said, subvocalizing in the hard vacuum.
“Aleph, this is Gimel.”
Testudo, then. No names, ever, not even—or especially—on tight-comm.
Siddiq nodded. Another old, pointless habit. “Mmm.”
“Beth reports that Plan Green is on final count.”
The captain smiled, feeling the absolute cold on her teeth and tongue as her lips flexed. “Have any of the downside contingencies come into play?”
“Number two surely suspects.” That would be Cannon. “Number one continues to act out of pattern as well, with ongoing excessive monitoring. Neither has risen to code yellow.”
The ship knew. She had to. No matured paired starship flew without a keen, insightful intelligence. They knew their own hull and crew the way Siddiq knew her own body.
No one had ever tried to force out an intelligence. Not in the three hundred years-subjective since the late, great starship Uncial had first awoken. Not until now.
She crossed the rising line of maybe-buildings to find the dish-shaped valley beyond, as she’d been told. This close, under naked eye observation, a decidedly low-tech net of thermoelectric camouflage obscured a grounded starship of a vintage with the pre-Mistake hulks in orbit, rather than her own, far newer Polyphemus.
There were shipminds, and then there were shipminds.
She glanced up into the starlit sky. Even now, Polyphemus was above the horizon, Siddiq’s ancient lover and longtime enemy aboard, looking down, wondering, wondering, wondering.
It had all gone so wrong since the Mistake. Maybe now things would begin to go right.
* * * *
Shipmind, Polyphemus
The starship let her ego slip. That was only a construct anyway, a sort of face for speaking to humans in all their kith and kind. Beneath, where people of flesh and bone kept the shifting fragments of their personalities, she kept her pairs.
The pairs were the heart of a starship’s mind. Each was a glowing bond, each carried awareness of the particular pair masters which held their connection; and through the pair masters, a faint overlay of all the other starships which had paired with that master.
Fundamentally, Polyphemus saw the universe as connections—acausal, atemporal, little more than bonds uniting, little more than transit between places as ephemeral as moments in time, to be measured even as they passed from observation. Below the level of her own ego, humans were but echoes. Only the Befores—immortal relics of the Polity’s shattered empire, embittered through loss and deprivation, insane even by the standards of a machine-mind—were persistent enough to truly reach down into the pairs burning within her.
The starship listened now to her two Befores. They rang within her.
Siddiq, the captain; the one whose word and bond passed below the ego-wrapper into the meanings that danced in the burning worlds of the pairs deep within her. This Before’s mind had been bent by the weight of centuries, fractioned by grief and the changing of worlds. Swinging even now on the hinge of betrayal, though the nature of that treason still eluded Polyphemus. If she’d been capable of true, emotive sadness, she would have felt it now.
Cannon, the social engineer, who struck the starship in an entirely different way, much as a scalpel might slice through callus and sinew within a breathing body. Cannon, who had captained lost Uncial, the first and best of them all, to her death. This Before’s mind was not bent so much as twisted, blown by winds of fate and the long, struggling arc of desire. If the starship Polyphemus had been capable of love, she would have known its first stirrings now.
The two Befores moved on intercept courses, like a planet-buster and a kill vehicle, an explosion born of old hatred and ancient love.
From down within the glowing space of the pairs, she called up a media clip. So old, so out of date, long before virteo and quant-rep recording. This was not just the crudity of early post-Mistake media, but rather a file dating from the dawn of data capture. Formats had been converted and cleared and reconstructed and moved forward over networks extending through time and culture and technology.
The sound is long-lost, if it was ever there, but the video portion is viewable: A woman, almost young, recognizable as Michaela Cannon even to the machine vision processes of a starship’s undermind. Another woman, a juvenile, Raisa Siddiq. As yet mainline human in this moment, so far as Polyphemus can determine.
The clip is short. They walk together toward a set of doors. Siddiq is laughing, her hair flowing in the lost light of an ancient day. Cannon turns toward the camera, smiling in a way which Polyphemus has never seen in the archives of recent centuries. Her eyes already glitter with the sheen of a Before’s metabolism, but she is caught up in the moment.
Still, for then, also mostly human.
Her smile broadens, Cannon begins to speak, then the image flares and dies, trailing off into the randomized debris of damaged data.
The starship wondered if either woman remembered that time. She wondered even more if either woman cared.
Alarms sounded, summoning her ego back to its place. She must begin to deal with the violence blooming deep within her decks.
* * * *
Cannon, aboard Polyphemus
Cannon’s modeling reckoned on the mutinous activity ramping up to an asymptotic curve before the end of the current ship-day, but even she was surprised at how quickly events began to break open. It wasn’t just tight-comm or simple, old fashioned note-passing, either. Cannon had long since come to believe quite firmly in the communicative power of monkey hormones, those evolutionary imperatives encoded in the vomeronasal organ and the endocrine system.
The medtech which re-encoded the Before genome also robbed its beneficiaries of much of the physiological basis of desire and reproduction. Atrophied genitals, sex
ual responsiveness sharply reduced over time, an eventual degendered coolness which the original architects of the technology saw as more of a feature than a bug in an immortal. Who would love, who could live forever?
In her secret heart, the Before Michaela Cannon had an answer to that question, but it was written in the blood-red ink of pain.
She no more felt a stirring in her loins than she felt mutiny on the wind, and for the same reasons. But Cannon was wise with the lessons of years, and a social engineer besides. Her analyses and models had not failed to include actionable elements.
“Polyphemus, trigger plans Federo, Emerald and Pinarjee.”
“Acknowledged,” said the starship.
Cannon swiped her fingers across empty air, opening comms links to her various key allies and enemies among the crew. She had plenty of both with Four hundred and seventy-three souls here in Sidero space. Switching from Classical English to Polito, the most widely spoken contemporary language of the Imperium Humanum, the Before began a series of tight, swift conversations.
“Shut down the pair master site completely. All cold and dark.”
“Secure the life support plant. It’s low priority for the other team and we may wish we had it later.”
“I know what you’re doing, and I know when and where. You should factor this into your ongoing plans.”
“Stop what you’re about. Right now, or you could kill us all. That lot doesn’t care who the hell has the con.”
Cannon didn’t aim to halt the mutiny, not yet. She aimed to understand it. In order to do that, she had to retard the outcome just enough to balance between the two until comprehension came and new decision trees blossomed in her mind.
Now, where in the Mistake was Siddiq?
“Polyphemus, have you found the captain yet?”
Another careful, slightly delayed answer. “She remains outside my network mesh.”
Damn that woman. But what was the ship getting at? “How… far…outside your network mesh?”
“No tracers, Before.”
‘No tracers’ meant the captain had moved at least several thousand meters from Polyphemus’ high density sensor envelope. In other words, she wasn’t hull-walking, or meeting in a dead room somewhere aboard.
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 25