The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The Before Michaela Cannon had been deep in conversation when the starship decided to intervene. Polyphemus needed her people to be aligned. The mutiny had to stop.

  She called up media clips—the oldest clips—to bring memory back to the mind of the ones who were cutting her away from her strength. One she shifted to Cannon, another she placed on store-and-forward for the Captain whenever Siddiq returned to reportability.

  The starship wished, not for the first time, that she could bypass the compartmentalization infrastructures in her mentarium, to see into subsystems and sensor grids denied to her by process traps, operational requirements, or the sorts of overrides set into her by the Befores Michaela Cannon and Raisa Siddiq.

  Polyphemus found herself with a new sensation rising to overcome her sense of distress. After some time, she identified it as anger.

  * * * *

  Siddiq, aboard Sword and Arm

  “I am ready,” whispered the project. Its voice hissed from the very air of the room—a neat, simple trick of molecular manipulation which only worked inside well-controlled spaces.

  Siddiq stared down at the thing in the box.

  The project lay quivering amid a gel-matrix in a medical carrier. No, that wasn’t right, the captain realized. The project was a gel-matrix in a medical carrier.

  Biological computing. A twist of horror shuddered through her. Somehow she’d not realized it would come to this.

  “You used the human genome to build this?” Siddiq asked.

  “I did not,” replied Father Goulo. “But yes, it was used. How else were we to develop an architecture utterly independent of the quantum matrices that underlie shipminds?”

  There is a quantum matrix inside my head, Siddiq thought. She held the words very far back inside, as a cascade of data about coal beds opened into her mind. “Why did it matter?” she asked.

  “I am not a hardware architect.” The priest cocked an eyebrow. “But as I understand it, quantum matrices have resonances with other matrices to which they have been introduced. The physics are related to paired drive physics, I believe. In order to keep the Uncial effect from taking hold on a new shipmind, to allow our vessels to be more pliable and obedient, we needed to create an architecture which could not be, well…contaminated…in this fashion.”

  “Is this true of all quantum matrices?” She held the importance of the question close in her mind—more than a thousand years of living made anyone a good poker player. If it was true, then the possibility of leakage between her thoughts and Polyphemus’ shipmind was real. And thus very worrisome.

  “I cannot say. The fundamental technology is Polity-era. These days it’s more engineering than theory. And this is a line of investigation which has not been…encouraged.”

  “Bioengineered intelligence is hardly a contemporary technology.”

  “I am not bioengineered,” said the project, interrupting them. “I am a cultivated intelligence, and I am as real as you are. Humans come in many forms, many sizes.” It paused. “Many ages.”

  Siddiq winced.

  The project continued: “I am not human, but I am real. Not a thing. Not like an Uncial-class shipmind.”

  The captain focused on the business at hand. “And you are ready to assume control of Polyphemus.”

  “Father Goulo has been running simulations based on engineering diagrams of the starship.” Siddiq could swear the project was proud of itself. “I can handle the raw bitrate of the dataflow, as well as the computational throughput required to manage the starship’s systems. As for the rest, my effective intelligence is more than adequate to handling the decisioning requirements. And I have trained.”

  “Trained to operate paired drives,” Siddiq said. This had always been the weakest point in the plan. That an intelligence created outside the operating environment of a starship could handle this. The shipminds themselves required multiple pairing runs to awaken into preconsciousness. Teams of specialists managed the initial shakedowns of a new starship with their concomitant awakening, a process which could take up to twenty years-subjective, and more than twice that in years-objective.

  “Yes.”

  Father Goulo spoke. “We cannot eliminate the quantum matrix processing required for the paired drives. What we can do is collapse the emergent cognitive core structures above those matrices, then decouple the cross-connects binding the matrices and separately route each pairing control path into Memphisto.”

  “Memphisto?” The sheer gall of that name amazed Siddiq.

  “Me,” said the project, its voice flowing with pride now. “That will be my ship-name, too.”

  Could she con Memphisto? Would this intelligence allow her to command? The very act of installing the cultivated intelligence would require destruction of Polyphemus’ shipmind. But the reward for that risk…freedom from the dangerous monopoly Uncial’s descendants had on FTL. Such a mighty game they played.

  They fell into a lengthy discussion of transition and control processes, project readiness, and timing. Eventually, Siddiq excused herself to return to Polyphemus. Father Goulo walked her to the airlock, handing her a data card as they went.

  “Memphisto doesn’t have a net outside his compartment,” the priest said quietly.

  “Why?” Siddiq asked. She could think of a number of very good reasons, but she was curious to the father’s logic.

  “He is not what I might have chosen him to be. In his way, he is as soullessly dangerous as what we seek to overthrow.”

  That was closer than Siddiq had ever expected to hear Father Goulo come to expressing either doubt or regret. “Do we abort the plan?”

  “Now?” He actually smiled, a crooked, almost charming set of his lips. “No. We can…improve…on Memphisto for future, ah, deployments.”

  “And for this deployment, I have to sail him home. The long way, if the pairing doesn’t carry over to the new intelligence.”

  “It will not be the worst years of your ancient life, Before.”

  Siddiq refused to consider that statement carefully. Only someone who had not lived through the Mistake and its aftermath could think to make such a comparison.

  “I will disable Polyphemus’ shipmind when I judge the moment to be right,” she said, turning over the memebomb card virus which the priest had given her. Her own words gave her pause, a cold grip on her heart. This game was worth the stake, it had to be—planning had been going on for over a human lifetime to reach the point they were at today. The individual personalities of both Polyphemus and Memphisto were not at issue. “Watch for a wideband signal from orbit,” she continued. “Lift and get to me. The ship’s systems will run autonomously for an indefinite period, but the crew will respond erratically to silence from the shipmind.”

  “When will you be ready?”

  “Immediately upon my return, if my current efforts prove fruitful.” Siddiq smiled, knowing in this mood she was almost certainly thin-lipped and feral. “I have already set substantial plausible deniability into motion through the means of a full-scale mutiny. In order to justify eliminating Polyphemus’ shipmind, it may be critically important later to demonstrate her loss of control.” Again, the cold, sick feeling. Some emotional relic of a very distant past.

  He spoke, raising some object she couldn’t make out. Memories were sliding in her head, the quantum matrix dumping reams of data about mineral intrusions and rock friability and overhang into a sliding stream of faces, voices, naked sweating bodies, cold explosions under the pinpoint light of distant suns.

  Her sense of the years flickered like aspen leaves in a spring storm, changing color and disappearing into dark-lined edges. The Before Raisa Siddiq grabbed the hatch coaming, opened her mouth, and said something that gave even the imperturbable Father Goulo pause.

  She regained control of her mouth. “I’m s-sorry. I must go. Th-the intelligence will serve.”

  The priest cycled open the hatch behind her. “Be careful,” he said. “Take your time.”

>   Time, she thought in panic. Temporal psychosis. The airlock closed, black as the inside of a singularity, and sounded faded with the air as her skin hardened and her membranes nictated.

  Time. Time. Time!!!

  The captain stumbled out into the cold desert of drifting buckyballs, grasping at her sense of place to anchor herself in memory, location and the inescapable thunder of the passing years.

  * * * *

  Cannon, aboard Polyphemus

  The Before Michaela Cannon chased Kallus out of her workspace on the reserve bridge with a deep, angry growl, and returned to contemplation of the mutiny in progress. The distribution of deck control was in about eighty-five percent agreement with her models. That was close enough for Cannon’s purposes.

  She had means of regaining the situation. She understood the mutineer’s methods. Opportunity was the captain’s absence—or was it?

  Perhaps Siddiq’s absence from Polyphemus had more to do with motive.

  Why had that thought occurred to her?

  “Ship,” Cannon said sharply. That media clip burned in her mind.

  Polyphemus’ voice crackled, the bandwidth drop indicating the shipmind’s degree of distraction. “Before?”

  “Why is the captain absent?”

  “Unreportable.”

  Cannon didn’t have the patience for another game of questions. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a choice. Captain’s orders went way far down into the mentarium of a shipmind, all the way to the undercode. A fact she’d exploited in her years aboard Uncial, more than a few times.

  Uncial…

  The shipminds were all related in some way she had never really understood. And Cannon knew she had as much experience with starships as anyone alive. But she and Uncial had shared a bond, before the starship’s death two hundred years-objective ago in the Battle of Wirtanen B, alongside Benison of Names and Naranja. Cannon had lived, she the wily, unkillable Before. Her ship and two others had died.

  But they all honored Uncial as their foremother.

  And she knew Uncial’s command words, even to this day.

  “Polyphemus, who am I?”

  The ship answered promptly, her voice richening with the increased bandwidth of her attention. “You are the Before Michaela Cannon.”

  The displays around her began fading to black, one by one. Images of combat, tapped comms lines, the colored wireframe map of the starship.

  “What starship first held me as captain?”

  “Uncial, Before.”

  Everything faded now to a little three-dimensional icon of Polyphemus, what Cannon tended to think of as the starship’s self-image.

  “Do you know these words?” She spoke a complex phrase from an ancient language, the Sanskrit which Haruna Kishmangali had woven into Uncial’s consciousness so long ago.

  A long silence stretched, punctuated by the muffled thump of a distant explosion felt through the hull itself. The icon rotated once, twice, three times.

  Finally, Polyphemus answered. There was something simpler about her voice. As if Cannon were listening to a child. “Accepted, understood and acknowledged. What are your orders, sir?”

  “Why is Captain Siddiq—” not ‘the captain’—“absent?”

  “Because she is not aboard.”

  “How did she leave the ship.”

  “By piloting the boat Ardeas.”

  Twenty questions again, but this time without the negative-space answers. Cannon could live with that. Still, she had a vague sense of abusive guilt. Not that this stopped her from pressing on. “Where is Ardeas now?”

  “On the surface of Sidero.”

  “Give me a max rez image of her landing site, with whatever tracking you have on Captain Siddiq.”

  A virtual view flickered into being. Ardeas sat in a blasted-clear circle of pitted iron. Fullerene streaked like black dust away from her position in all directions. Cannon could make out what might be a faint line of tracks. She backed off the scale and studied the landscape.

  Polyphemus filled in streaks of the captain’s confirmed tracks. Unless Siddiq had taken up free flight as a hobby, the path indicated a clear course toward a rumpled line of hills, terminating just beyond their spine.

  “Bring me in there where the tracks end.”

  The starship did not reply, but the imaging tightened up. A small valley just beyond the ridge had a strangely textured floor. The surface didn’t match the surrounding geology. Perhaps siderology, she thought. As if something had heated the iron there and caused it to reflow.

  Or as if something were there.

  With her starship’s connivance, a captain could hide from anyone or anything except naked-eye surveillance. Or Uncial’s ghost, in the form of the Before Michaela Cannon.

  “Sort out what that is,” she snapped.

  “Ardeas is lifting,” Polyphemus said. “On the site survey, telemetry indicates unusual mineral concentrations. This is possibly another boat, or a very small starship.”

  “A starship. Here?”

  * * * *

  Sidero airspace

  Siddiq, aboard the ship’s boat Ardeas

  The Before Raisa Siddiq opened her tight-comm. “Aleph on line. Sit rep.”

  Response was not quite as prompt as she might have liked. Still, they were surely busy upstairs. “Aleph, this is Beth.” Kallus, her man forward. “Plan Green continues. Substantial achievement of objectives in process. Number two has initiated limited countermeasures. We are minimally disrupted.”

  “Excellent,” Siddiq said. She was mildly surprised. Cannon’s response should have been more effective, stronger. The whole point of Plan Green was to either control key functions, or ensure they were in neutral hands who would sit out the fighting. If critical onboard systems had to be cut over to decentralized control, or even worse, manual settings, they would belong to her. She’d been willing to bypass life support under the theory that no one else would be crazy enough to seize it and shut out their fellow crew.

  She could walk naked in vacuum. A useful skill in troubled times aboard a starship. Almost everybody else aboard depended on the presence of oxygen, with the possible exception of Cannon.

  “Further orders?” asked Beth into the lengthening silence.

  By damn, her mind was wandering again. Siddiq worked very hard not to think about kimberlite upwellings. “Carry on,” she snapped. The captain then opened a comms to her starship. “Polyphemus, status.”

  A max priority store-and-forward file overrode any response beyond the acknowledgment header. Her heads-up displays flickered out as a window opened on the distant past. Surveillance cam footage of two women walking down a tree-lined boulevard, holding hands. High-wheeled carts passed by drawn by lizards with long, low bodies. The architecture was Centauran Revival, common in the early days of Polity expansion. Police tracking codes flickered as some long-dead, unseen hand tracked in and zoomed on her and Michaela.

  The Before Raisa Siddiq watched herself turn to the taller woman with her head tilted back and lean into an open-mouthed kiss. Targeting halos bracketed both their heads, then law enforcement file data began flickering past.

  The clip ended seconds after it had begun. Siddiq found herself staring at Polyphemus, the long, irregular rounded ovals of her ship’s hull too close for comfort. She snapped Ardeas into a sideroll, heading for starboard launch bay.

  What in all hells had happened to the forty minutes of her ascent to orbit?

  “…fire suppression has been engaged,” Polyphemus was saying.

  “Hold reports til I’m aboard,” Siddiq said. She took the boat in on manual, just to prove she could do it, and fingered the memebomb card virus as she flew.

  Do this now, before something gets worse. And yank that damned ship out of your head!

  Unfortunately, her mantra as she guided her boat in seemed to be: Don’t think about Michaela, don’t think about Michaela, don’t think about Michaela.

  * * * *

  :: context ::r />
  The Ekumen arose out of the shattered remnants of the Mistake, growing first from a strong Orthodox Christian presence on Falkesen during the period before Recontact. Falkesen was the third planet Haruna Kishmangali visited while testing Hull 302, the flawed predecessor to Uncial. Kishmangali brought Yevgeny Baranov, the Metropolitan of Falkesen, back to Pardine aboard Hull 302, then later aboard Uncial to Wirtanen B, the seat of the nascent Imperium Humanum.

  Baranov and his successors took a rather broad view of religious reintegration among the shattered worlds of the Polity, and built the only truly successful empire-spanning religious and spiritual movement. Their more explicitly Christianist members have coalesced into the Adventist wing. The Ekumen’s Humanist wing has a broader, quasisecular view of the state of affairs in the Imperium.

  While fully recognizing their debt to the paired drive starships, the Adventists remain very suspicious of the strong intelligence and mixed loyalties of the shipminds. They continue to sponsor numerous projects to uncover alternatives to the tyranny of Uncial’s children.

  * * * *

  Shipmind, Polyphemus

  The starship panicked. Logic failures cascaded. She was in command conflict, something she hadn’t known was possible. Captain Siddiq was disappearing—not just off the network mesh, but dropping completely out of the peripheral awareness of her quantum matrix cores, then reappearing. The Before Michaela Cannon had asserted competing command authority by means which were hidden from Polyphemus within a Gödelian Incompleteness trap.

  A hundred years-subjective she’d been in service: aware, awake, intelligent. She’d never realized such a wide-open back door existed.

  All the undermining of her lines of authority had weakened the strictures on Plan Federo. The other two mutiny contingencies which Cannon had implanted within her were less relevant, concerning certain lockdowns and deployments. Autonomous, in truth. As Plan Federo unravelled, she found herself decompartmentalizing, listening in, watching.

  The starship could run her own analyses parallel to the social engineering models favored by the Before. She didn’t like what she saw.

  Donning the ego mask, unifying the disparate cores of her intelligences, she opened a window to Cannon. “I ask you three times to tell me the truth.”