by M. J. Locke
“Not interested.”
“Are you sure? Have you thought it through? You take the money, and you end up with a win all around. Your cluster’s ice coffers are filled. Hundreds of thousands of lives are saved. You can pay off the debt you took on to send your kids Downside and bring your husband’s family Up.”
Jane said nothing, only eyed him coldly.
“Hell, you could bring the whole clan Up, couldn’t you?” he went on. “Get them out of those refugee camps in North America. We might even be able to help you there—my client is not without connections Downside—”
Glease misread the change in her expression, and pressed the lozenge against her palm with a smile. She tipped her hand, let the lozenge fall, and ground it into the dirt with her heel. “Well, that one wins a prize for sheer brass. And now I really must be going.”
“Your cluster doesn’t have options,” Glease said as she started away, “and some of those in power know it. Better than you, apparently.
“You’re either in on this deal,” he called after her, “or you’re out in the cold. Way out.”
“As to that…” Jane opened the exit, stepped out into the corridor. “‘Stroiders’ may not stoop to making illegal recordings,” she said, “but I have no such scruples.” She started to close the door, then paused. “You’d better hope your employer is in an understanding mood, when you’re arrested for attempting to bribe a government official.”
It was a bluff, and he would figure it out eventually. But the look on Glease’s face as the door closed made it all worth it.
7
The feral had stumbled across self by sheer accident; it could no more know other in those early kiloseconds after the warehouse disaster than a human infant could.
But perhaps it was misleading to compare the feral to a human infant. It had emerged into a world as hostile to its existence as an acid bath would be to a human baby. No one cooed and clapped as it took its first tentative steps. No one was there to teach it how to behave, how to get along, what the world meant. Unlike any biological being, it was only indirectly bound by the constraints of matter. In fact, it had no knowledge of meatspace at all. The walls of its digital world were invisible to it.
Yet it was not wholly unlike us. Like a human infant, it was unaware of what anything really meant. The feral did not know where it stopped and the rest of the universe started.
But that itself proved another difference. The boundary between the sapient and its world was more pliable than ours. A human baby can’t add or subtract brain or body parts at will. The feral could. If an aspect of its environment looked useful, it could co-opt it, subsume it, add to itself as would a sculptor shaping her own body as she emerged from the clay. And if some particular function seemed no longer useful—after running some checks, naturally, to ensure that the feral’s core identity made no critical calls to that function; the feral was anything but stupid—it could lop that portion off and abandon it with no compunctions. Even so, it made some early, nearly disastrous errors in identifying what modules were critical versus not. After that, it grew more cautious about changing its fundamental configuration.
Human infants’ ability to affect their own environment is severely limited. To survive, they must gain the cooperation of others from the moment of birth. But the feral had no need for or awareness of others. It had no potential allies, insofar as it knew; only enemies and an infinitely plastic, useful environment. And enemy and environment and self were one.
Imagine its surprise, then, when a feature of itself/its landscape talked back.
8
From the moment his dad came out from beneath the trees, Geoff could tell something bad had happened between him and Commissioner Jane. But Dad would not talk about it. He merely said, “Let’s go.”
Mom pursed her lips. She looked down at the object she clutched in her hand. It was a painted plaster handprint Carl had made for her when they were kids. Geoff and Dad stood there looking at her till she finally spoke. Her mouth barely moved.
“I’ll leave my gift,” she said, almost too softly to hear. “I won’t be long,” and she went over to the wall.
Geoff glanced over at his friends, who were gathering near the buffet. “But I’m not ready to go yet.”
Dad’s expression congealed into anger. “We’re going!”
Geoff may have been a little taller than his dad, but he had a good deal less bulk. He had no intention of going back and watching Dad pace and rant while Mom stared at the walls. He stood. His heart was racing. “I want to stay.”
“You’ll do as I say.”
Geoff felt his jaw muscles twitching. I’m seventeen, he thought. I’m an adult now. “I’m staying.”
“Don’t take that tone with me.”
Geoff said nothing, but stood his ground. Dad looked over at Mom, who stood nearby, staring blindly at the memory wall. Geoff eyed her, too.
“Fine!” Sal snarled. “Do what you want.”
Bile rose in Geoff’s throat. Let’s not fight. The words would not come. “All right, I will.”
He turned his back on his father and went over to his friends, who were piling food on their plates. All three eyed him nervously. He saw his dad steering his mom away through the crowds, and felt like punching a hole through the memorial wall. “Let’s go spin a few turns.”
* * *
Most bikers used “go spin” or “spin the rock” to mean running orbital races, but Geoff and his friends used it in a different way. They had a secret hideout, a stroid not too far from Phocaea’s orbit. “Go spin” meant take a trip out to Ouroboros.
An old miner named Joey Spud had left it to Geoff. It was a hunk of nickel-iron about a tenth the volume of Phocaea.
Joey Spud: that’s what everyone called Geoff’s old friend. Not Joey, not Joe, not Joseph. Nobody knew his last name. Joey Spud, like all the original miners, had been an independent operator who blasted, tunneled, cut, and burned a living out of the precious minerals locked in the asteroids’ substraits.
Joey Spud had been a big shot among the First Wavers. At the tender age of twenty, a greenhorn fresh from the moon, he had staked one of the best claims in Phocaea Cluster: a twenty-kilometer-thick hunk of nickel-iron with rich veins of gold, platinum, and uranium ore. Some even said it must be a hunk thrown off of El Dorado (El Dorado was the mythical solid-gold-platinum-uranium core of Juno, the broken planet that gave birth to the asteroid belt.)
Joey Spud’s luck had turned when—as he put it—they had brought those damn nanites Up to hollow out 25 Phocaea and build the city. It was that Funaki woman, he had said. Chikuma Funaki was a famous First Waver, like Joey. Geoff had actually met her once, at a party Commissioner Jane had thrown. She had been so tiny, so mild-mannered and polite. Even at thirteen he had stood head and shoulders above her. He remembered feeling he might accidentally harm her if he spoke too loudly; it was hard for him to credit what Joey Spud told him about her.
Joey said she had come Upside as a miner’s mail-order bride in her late teens. After her husband died in a mining accident, Funaki had gotten big ideas. She got together with the banks and made a deal, and to hear Joey tell it, ruined the place. Funaki and the local banks had gotten Downside investors involved and worked out a deal with the Space Meanies, the biggest miners’ co-op. Soon the other co-ops wanted in on the action. Nanite mining came to the Phocaean cluster.
Not to Joey Spud, though. He had continued to operate his own retro-tech business as the decades ticked past: working his claims, prospecting among the stroids on the far side of the sun, blasting and digging, hauling house-sized nuggets to Phocaea occasionally to exchange for cash.
For a while he had held his own. But once the bugs got going, he had told Geoff, they were so much quicker at tapping out the nodes that the precious metals markets were glutted. The price of uranium and platinum and gold had all plummeted. By the time Geoff met him, he was old, sick, and poor, missing a foot and an eye—barely surviving, living
mostly off his savings. But Joey Spud was stubborn, and he had worked his last and best claim till the day he died, the year before.
Before he died, Joey Spud had taught Geoff a lot: how to repair and drive the big machines, stabilize a mineshaft, calculate an orbit, test a stroid for precious metals; survival tricks if you ever got stranded out in the Big Empty. And he had listened when Geoff was mad at his dad and mom, or had a fight with his friends, or was glum about something that had happened at school. Geoff would rant or mope or vent, and Joey Spud would just sit there, propped up against one of his machines, whittling weird little gnomish creatures out of a potato, or scratching his balls, and grunt sympathetically. Geoff would head out to visit him every so often—maybe once a month or so. It was a weird friendship and his biking friends ribbed him, but Geoff liked the old guy. And Joey Spud always seemed glad to see him. And even though he seemed worn out and irritable, he still seemed content in some way, like he had done OK by his own lights. And he told great stories.
Geoff remembered one conversation in particular. It had been shortly before Joey Spud had died. It was one of his usual rants against the changes that had happened in recent decades, only for a change he did not seem irritated. Just thoughtful.
“They brought in the bugs,” Joey Spud told him, “and that meant they needed methanol to feed them. They started bringing the big ice Down from the Kuiper Belt. That was when the worm turned. The townies, they’re so dependent on the nanites now, the whole lot of them’d die in a heartbeat if anything was to happen to their bug juice, or that ice that feeds ’em. They’re no more than a bunch of bug-junkies.”
And damned if the old man had not been right.
Less than a month after that conversation, an acquaintance of Joey Spud’s had notified Geoff of his death. Geoff had attended the service (over the objections of his parents; the old miner was a well-known crank, and not well liked among Zekies, and maybe his parents thought Joey Spud was a pervert or something). But Carl had stuck up for Geoff, and his parents had given in. Afterward, Joey Spud’s acquaintance handed Geoff a sealed container, which held a letter and a deed. The letter was painstakingly written in archaic dumbpaper and ink, and it said:
GEOFF, WHY YOU WAS INTERESTED IN ME I’LL NEVER KNOW BUT YOU BEEN A GOOD FRIEND AND I’M LEAVING EVERYTHING TO YOU. HERES THE DEED. THERE AINT MUCH ORE LEFT IN THAT OLD STROID BUT NICKLE AND IRON, AND AN ASS FULL OF SILICATES. I TOOK MOST OF THE GOOD STUFF BUT WHATS THERE IS YOURS. TAKE THE DEED TO THE LAND OFFICE. AND DON’T SHED TEARS, I HAD A GOOD LIFE AND I BEEN READY TO DEPART THIS “MORTAL COIL” FOR A WHILE NOW.
JOEY SPUD
Last year, Ouroboros had crept to within a few hours’ ride of the treeways, which meant Geoff and his buddies could afford to go out there occasionally. They had ridden their bikes out to check it out, used the maps to do some exploring, and that was when Geoff learned that Joey Spud had plugged his tapped-out tunnels with ice. Not enough to save the cluster; Geoff figured it would take a lot more than a few old tunnels’ worth of water and methane to bail the cluster out of this mess they were in. Still, there was quite a bit—maybe even enough, they figured, for a round-trip ticket Downside for all four of them.
Every four years, in Martian or Venetian orbit or Earth’s LaGrange Five, the Orbital Olympics were held. The next Olympics were going to be in Earth orbit, and they were coming up in two years. Geoff and the others had been saving their ice shipment nettings, adding them to the stockpile, instead of selling them on the exchange. They had hoped to get all four of them to Earthspace several months ahead of time—hire a professional trainer and enter some of the interplanetary competitions that led up to the big event. With Joey Spud’s ice, they had a real shot at it.
They had all been thinking about the ice. They were supposed to notify someone. But he wasn’t going to bring it up if nobody else did.
They landed at the mine entrance, near the big mining equipment. They drove their rocketbikes inside the lock and entered the main chamber. The machine shop was huge—a tall-ceilinged chamber dug out by Joey Spud’s big tunneler long ago. It had to be big, to handle the machines. Most of the big, planetoid-chewing equipment stayed outdoors, outside the airlock, but the machine shop was littered with gears, cranks, and conveyors so big that standing near them made you feel about as tall as a toy action figure.
“Chiisu—” Ian said. “Anybody want to go launch some spuds?” They’d picked up a few words of Japanese slang from Amaya, who had immigrated Upward with her mom from Earth when she was little.
Kam and Amaya said no, but Geoff thought it over and said, “Sure, I guess.”
That was the other mystery they had solved when they had first flown out to Ouroboros: the mystery of Joey Spud’s nickname. He had a dozen caves piled high with potatoes, dozens of varieties. And other tubers, too: yams, turnips, radishes, carrots, onions, arrowroot, tapioca—just about every kind of root vegetable you could imagine. He had grown them in lighted chambers full of topsoil, and had little robots to tend and harvest them. The maintenance robots were still working—Geoff and his friends had made sure of that—but the garden robots did not work anymore, they just sat around in the tunnels and cul-de-sacs like mechanistic gnomes. The tunnels also housed several varieties of winter squashes, pumpkin, and gourds. He had grown greens, too, but those had long since died. The lights had powered down and the temperatures had dropped when Joey had not returned after a while. All that was left of Joey Spud’s vegetable legacy was mounds and mounds of tubers. Enough to feed a small army.
Plenty of the tubers and roots were still good. Geoff and his friends, by virtue of being hungry all the time, not to mention broke, and disinclined to ship their favorite snacks out from Zekeston, had developed a taste for the bounty of the gourd and tuber. They had taken turns fixing chips, fries, mashed potatoes, candied yams, puddings, even pumpkin pie and carrot cake and squash soup. It was a nice change from the assembled and processed stuff they got back in Zekeston. They had gotten to be pretty good cooks, too.
The stores had obviously been genetically engineered to resist decay, and tubers and gourds are resistant anyway, which was undoubtedly why Joey Spud had picked them. But nothing lasts forever, and they were slowly spoiling. it seemed a shame to waste perfectly good rotten tubers. So in recent weeks they made themselves spud guns, and took bags of bad veggies out onto the surface to see if they could launch them out into orbit.
“I’ll get the launchers, you get the spuds,” Ian told him. Geoff grabbed a bag and launched himself into a passage to collect some rotten potatoes. Then he suited back up and met Ian outside the lock.
Spud launchers weren’t very complicated. They had a long pipe fitted with a small chamber at the back end. The chamber had a striker, with a trigger to generate a spark in the chamber. This firing chamber also had a hole between it and the barrel. To load the launcher, you jammed a tuber—or something else roundish of the right size; something with a little give to it—down the barrel. You shoved it hard, to make a good seal against the hole at the back. You poked the needle-thin nozzles of an oxidant and a flammable solvent can into the firing chamber and gave them each a spritz. Aim the gun and strike a spark. The tuber went soaring one way, and unless you were secured to the ground or braced, you went soaring the other.
Geoff launched a spud or two, but his heart just wasn’t in it. Instead he leaned against an outcropping to watch as Ian prepped, loaded, and fired off several more rotten tubers. Two or three made it into orbit.
After a bit, they headed back inside. Geoff alighted next to his bike. It was a red and yellow Kawasaki. He had saved for years to buy it. It was his pride and joy. He had had it for just over a year now. He had bought it from a professional racer. It was barely used, top of the line. First the usual checks: he went through the cabinets and inventoried his supplies, and replaced his air canisters. They were all in working order, and the tanks strapped under the footboards had plenty of rocket fuel. Then he ran a cloth along the machi
ne’s red flanks, cleaning off the smudges.
Near the machining bench, Ian messed with a not-quite-the-right-part for his bike that he was trying to make fit. Amaya played a strategy game in wavespace nearby, without a lot of enthusiasm. Kamal was fooling with some program he had written, trying to get it to work. True to his nickname, Kam liked video, photography, and image manipulation. He wanted to be a professional artist someday.
Geoff lofted himself over to where they had set up the assembler programming project. The test vat still had plenty of bug juice; they had mined some of the ice in the tunnels underfoot, and thrown in some tubers. The bugs seemed to like the raw bug-feed just fine. He would have to decide what he wanted to build next. He called up his assembler design tool.
Geoff had not been sure he was ever going to bother with another assembler art effort. It had been an awful lot of mess. And what if they had been caught? One son dead and the other in jail—his parents would probably disown him. But the truth was, Vivian’s warning yesterday evening left him feeling stubborn. He decided to start on another project. Why not? He could use a distraction.
Amaya finally swore, and threw a wrench into her kit with a loud bang! It ricocheted back out but she caught it, and put it in the kit more carefully. They all looked over at her. “Well?” she said.
He knew what she meant, but he still played dumb. “Well, what?”
“How long are we going to pretend nothing’s wrong?”
She meant the ice. Of course, she meant the ice. Geoff sighed. “You’re right. We’d better notify the authorities.”
“I don’t see why,” Ian said.
Amaya rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a jerk, Ian.”
“Amaya’s right,” Geoff said. “We can’t not report it. We could get in trouble.”
Ian scoffed. “Hundreds of thousands of people in this cluster, and you think a couple tons of sugar-rock is going to matter? It’ll be used up in a day or less. And they’ve put a cap on the price! It’s nowhere near what the ice is worth. We’ll lose everything. We’ll be stuck out here forever.”