The scar-faced man nodded. “You saw the news, Chuck,” he said. “’Snot fair to kill ’em, is it?”
Chuck grunted and turned away, propelled by his friend’s hand toward the door to the room. Massaba said, “We don’t have too many like that up here.”
“I’m surprised you have any,” said Renny.
“Someone has to do the muscle work.”
Frederick looked at Donna Rose. “And he’s afraid the bots would push him aside.”
“We don’t,” said Massaba. “As long as there’s work to do, he’ll stay busy. We’ve never believed in unemployment. We can’t afford to feed deadwood.” He made a face as if to say that, of course, there were exceptions. “It’s only when someone can’t work. An injury, say. If he’s permanently disabled, we send him down again. We’d do the same if anyone refused to work.”
“Then I’d better find something to do,” said Donna Rose. “But not cleaning, not just muscle work. I’ve done that, and we do have brains. You’d be surprised how well we’re taught.”
Walt Massaba showed his teeth in a smile as he shook his head. “You have a while before we get huffy. And we may not. I think we’re going to have to find a way to fit refugees into our world up here.”
“Then tell Chuck,” said Frederick. “Refugees are unemployed, and any unemployed who hate the thought of Earth…”
Renny snorted. “There shouldn’t be any employment problem,” he said. “You’ll need to build new quarters, Q-ships,…”
Massaba suddenly leaned forward, his eyes intent first on the gengineered German shepherd, then on Frederick and Donna Rose. His companions pushed their seats back and moved their hands off the table, nearer perhaps to whatever weapons they had. The room around them hushed as others registered the sudden tension. “What do you know about Q-ships?”
“Is it a secret?” asked Frederick. “Dr. Hannoken told us a little, just enough to justify shipping him”—he nodded toward the dog—”up as a test passenger. He also told us there’s no real need for an animal test; you already have a human volunteer.”
Massaba and the women relaxed. Hands returned to view.
“How does it work?” asked Donna Rose.
Walt Massaba simply shrugged. He did not know or he would not tell, no matter what his boss had already revealed.
Frederick had noticed that communicator grilles seemed to be everywhere. There was one in his quarters. They marked the corridor walls at regular intervals and were mounted by every doorway. In the dining hall, he could see them on both the walls and the ceiling. The idea seemed to be to have at least one always within hearing range of everyone on the Station. Now the nearest chimed and the same voice that had summoned Hannoken said, “Chief Massaba? The Director is ready to see the visitors again now.”
Massaba nodded and looked at the shorter of his companions. “Tobe? Show them the way?”
* * * *
The first thing that struck the eye in Director Alvar Hannoken’s office was the broad picture window in the wall, the view of the distant radio telescope that did not change as the Station rotated, and the steady flood of sunlight that struck the plant in the pot upon the floor. The plant was a severely trimmed kudzu vine, its stub-cut branches covered with rich green leaves and purple blossoms.
“Mirrors,” Hannoken said when he noticed Donna Rose’s stare. “Just like in your room.”
“But it doesn’t…” she said.
“There’s a suntracker outside.” He opened one hand to reveal a small, silvery implement that resembled a short, fat syringe. “Do you remember when I said I’d like to study your genetic structure?” When she nodded, he went on. “I meant it. I’d like a tissue sample, if…”
“Of course.” She took a step in his direction. “What do you need?”
“Anything,” he said, holding up the tool in his hand. “This will punch out a bit of skin and underlying tissue. A few thousand cells. Hardly noticeable.”
Donna Rose held still while he applied the tool to her side. When he was done, she stepped closer to Frederick and asked, “Could I have a suntracker too? I need the light, just like…” She pointed one hand toward the kudzu.
For a long moment, Hannoken’s eyes measured the distance between the bot and Frederick. He was clearly considering whether he had any chance of attracting Donna Rose and as clearly deciding that her own attraction lay elsewhere. When he finally nodded, Frederick let his attention move to the room’s other features. A slab-like desk occupied the side of the room across from the picture window. Its surface bore several slots that suggested the availability of thin screens for computer and com displays. There was also an inset keyboard and a slender stalk, a microphone that indicated the Director’s computer could be activated by voice alone and that it must therefore be a fairly powerful AI system. He wondered just how powerful it was. Could it, for instance, keep track of precisely where everyone was and use the nearest communicator to speak to one person alone?
The room was large enough to express the Director’s status. Its carpet was noticeably thicker than that in the dining hall. However, the walls, as elsewhere, were a patchwork of colored panels set in brushed aluminum. One panel, on the wall to the right of Hannoken’s desk, was entirely obscured by a large flatscreen veedo. A few other panels bore photographs. There was one of a brick and glass building that might have been the research institute at which Hannoken had done his gengineering work. Another showed a puppy that might have been Renny. A third showed a woman’s pale white head sitting on bare dirt. Behind it was a gravestone.
“What is that?” asked Frederick.
Hannoken laughed. “A bomb,” he said. “One of our researchers developed a fungus. You put a spore in someone’s mouth just before you buried them. It sprouted, developed a mass of tendrils—mycelium—all through the brain, and extracted the strongest memory, the last to go, the one that presumably was most basic to the dead person’s personality or identity. Then it shaped itself to match that memory.”
He turned toward the desk. “I still have one of the brochures we made up when we tried to market it. Here.”
The picture on the brochure’s cover was the same as that on the wall, with the addition of a woman, her face a sorrowful duplicate of the one on the ground, gazing at the grave. Across its top was the legend, “Give your loved ones the Last Word!”
“It didn’t work,” said Hannoken. “The ‘Last Word’ was hardly ever what the loved ones expected.”
“But…” He took the brochure from Frederick’s hands and tossed it onto his desk. “I understand you met Walt Massada.”
“You set that up,” said Renny.
A shrug. “I had to. He’s not terribly officious, but he does insist on vetting all new arrivals.”
“He seemed a bit alarmed that we’d heard of the Q-drive,” said Frederick.
“Hmmph. We are trying to keep that quiet, but it can’t last. The test flight is too close, and then…”
The Director sighed. “We’re looking at constant acceleration at one gee, or more. Your trip from Nexus Station would take only an hour or so. We’ll have colonies on Mars, not just research bases, stations among the asteroids and looking down on Saturn’s rings, and the furthest of them only days from Earth. Given more time for acceleration, we should even be able to come near light-speed.”
“And that,” said Frederick. “That will put the stars within reach.”
“We won’t be able to go faster than light,” said Hannoken. He waved one hand to dismiss that shortcoming of the Q-drive. “But close enough so time dilation will make the trip seem short. No lifetimes on the way.”
“Except back home,” said Donna Rose.
Hannoken looked startled, as if he had never dreamed that a bot, an animated plant, could even begin to grasp the complexities of relativ
ity. “That’s right,” he said. “If we were to go very far, there wouldn’t be much point in coming home. We would be long forgotten.”
“You sound like you intend to go along,” said Renny.
“If I’m still here when the time comes. I wouldn’t miss it.”
“If you leave for good, though,” said Donna Rose. “Won’t you need something bigger than a spaceship? Even something bigger than this Station?”
Hannoken nodded and pointed toward one corner of his picture window. “There,” he said. “Athena, magnify.” His office computer system obeyed the order and the window revealed itself as much more than a mere window. A small frame popped into place around a tiny speck, and frame and speck enlarged until the speck was clearly the fat disk of a distant habitat. There was no indication of whether it was Hugin or Munin. “We’ll need something more like that. And in fact we have our eyes on a certain asteroid. We’ve already named it Gypsy. There are over twenty thousand of us here in orbit, and it would hold us all with room to grow. If the Q-drive tests pan out, then we’ll begin to make more solid plans. We’ll have to hollow it out first.”
“That will take a while,” said Frederick.
“We have time.”
Renny growled. “Not as much as you think.”
“Hmmph,” Hannoken snorted. “We haven’t even tried the drive yet, except on drones. Maybe we will use you for the test pilot. We still don’t know it won’t scramble the passengers’ brains or genes or anatomies.” He paused. “Want to see the test ship?”
A little later, Frederick was fighting the urge to vomit while Donna Rose looked at him with an expression he could only take as amusement. She didn’t get spacesick, whether they were free-falling within an enclosed spacecraft or, as they had just done, passing through the low-gee core of a rotating space station, riding a taxi that was little more than a tank of compressed air attached to a plastic bubble, and stepping aboard a spherical satellite station, much smaller than Probe Station itself. “We keep everything that might be hazardous at arm’s length,” Hannoken had explained as he used his caprine legs to propel himself to a suitable vantage point within a cavernous construction bay. He had halted his flight by grabbing a cable with one hand and swinging to a stop.
Donna Rose followed the Director, one arm wrapped around Renny’s middle. A moment later, Frederick won the struggle to control his stomach and joined them.
The cable to which their hands anchored them was one of many that formed a spiderwebby maze that secured a bundle of cylinders in the center of the bay. The half-dozen cylinders on the outside of the bundle were dome-capped tubes about 10 meters long. Projecting from their middle was a somewhat longer cylinder whose bulging tip bore an access hatch and a row of three portholes. Painted beneath the ports was the ship’s name, Quoi.
“Not fuel tanks,” said Arlan Michaels. Director Hannoken had introduced the short, slender man as the head of the project, a physicist and engineer. Now he held to a nearby cable, facing them, holding himself carefully upright to their point of view, while he described the center of his life. Grease streaked his blonde hair and emphasized the strong Asian cast to his features. He shifted his grip on the cable from one hand to the other. “Reaction mass,” he said now. “Powdered moon rock. The Q-drive vaporizes it to make a high-energy plasma. It’s vastly more powerful than anything we’ve ever had before.”
The ship was much smaller than anything designed to claw its way out of a gravity well, even one as shallow as the Moon’s. Yet it was also larger than orbital transfer vehicles like the shuttle that had carried Frederick, Donna Rose, and Renny between Nexus and Probe Stations.
Michaels led them around the ship, pointing at detail after detail of its structure. “If it works the way we hope it will,” he said. “This thing has the reaction mass to go to Mars and back in less than a week. It could even land there, a classic tail-down landing. A bigger model could even land on Earth.”
“The drive’s in the central cylinder?” asked Frederick. They had reached the swollen nose of the spacecraft.
“It takes up most of it,” said Michaels. He pointed at what they could see through the portholes. “That’s why the pilot has so little room.”
Frederick had once visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. There he had seen a Mercury capsule that had carried one of the first men to leave Earth’s atmosphere. The Q-ship gave its pilot very little more room to move about.
“It wouldn’t be too tight for me,” said Renny. His tail was wagging.
“But you’re not going,” said Frederick. “That was just a ruse.”
“Here’s the pilot now,” said Alvar Hannoken. Ricocheting toward them, her hands shifting smoothly from cable to cable as she propelled and steered, was the shuttle pilot who had delivered Frederick and his companions to Probe Station. “Lois McAlois.”
The pilot landed palms down on the nose of her ship. “We’ve met,” she said. Then she slapped the nearest port. “See why I’m keeping my stumps?” she said to Renny. “For a while anyway. It’s the only way I can fit in there halfway comfortably.”
“If it works,” said Michaels. “If it works, we’ll build the bigger model I mentioned.”
“And I’ll let the gengineers at me.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” asked Donna Rose.
Lois simply shrugged. Michaels said, “That’s a chance we take. She takes. But she volunteered.”
“Why?” asked Renny.
She shrugged again. “We needed someone. I’ve got the training. I happened to fit the box. And we all wanted to see this thing work. It will mean so much to everyone.”
Renny chuffed as if he were trying not to bark. “I suppose I could fit in there with you.”
Lois smiled at the big-headed German shepherd and opened her mouth as if to speak, but Michaels beat her to it. “Uh-uh,” he said. “We only need one test pilot.”
“I’ve heard a lot,” said Frederick, “about what this thing will be able to do if it works. But how does it work?”
Michaels’ face showed some relief at the change of subject. “Do you know?” he asked. “That a vacuum can produce particles spontaneously, out of nothing?” Hardly waiting for Frederick’s nod and Donna Rose’s puzzled look, he continued: “They come in matter-antimatter pairs, so there’s no net production of matter, and they usually annihilate each other immediately. This can yield energy, though normally in vanishingly small amounts. What we’ve done… Well, lab work here at the Station turned up a way to ‘stress’ space and make the necessary quantum fluctuations much more likely.”
“Blew the wall out of a lab,” said Lois. “And vaporized the researcher.”
“Fortunately, his work was in the computer,” said Hannoken.
Michaels nodded. “We can get enough energy that way to run the Q-ship. That’s what the Q stands for: quantum fluctuation. Unfortunately, the ‘stress’ alters quantum probabilities in many ways, not just in the drive but in the whole ship, and even for some distance around it. Lois? Would you turn the stressor on? Keep it low.”
He turned in the air of the construction bay until he faced the wall a few meters away. “No blast at all,” he said. “We’re safe.” Frederick noticed a square of dark blue fabric on the wall. On it, as unmoving as if they were glued in place, were six large dice and a lidded bucket. “Velcro,” said Michaels as he swung toward the wall. “Watch.”
With a rapid series of ripping sounds, he peeled the bucket and the dice from the fabric holding patch. He put the dice in the bucket, held the lid in place with one hand, and shook. Then he hurled the dice toward the fabric. When they struck, they froze in place.
“Four threes,” said Frederick. He sounded surprised.
The next three throws produced five fours, three sixes and three ones, and six twos. When Mich
aels had Lois turn off the Q-drive and rejoin them, the throws became more mixed.
“You’re warping probability,” said Donna Rose.
Michaels nodded and tossed her a Velcro-coated die. “Right. And the probability ‘warps’ will be much stronger when the drive is going full blast. They may even be strong enough to affect living matter. To cause cancer, or to cure it. To mutate genes, or…” He shrugged. “Though they don’t seem to hurt mice. On the other hand, the pilot—and eventually passengers—will be exposed for much longer times.”
“On the third hand,” said Lois. “We have great hopes for the warps.”
“Tunneling?” asked Frederick.
Arlan Michaels grinned at him, appreciating the sign of understanding. “We need more control, but yes,” he said. “Subatomic particles can appear, quite suddenly and without moving through the intervening distance, on the other side of a barrier. They have a certain probability of being anywhere, and sometimes they are. Larger objects have such probabilities too, but they are infinitesimal. Useless. We hope to make them larger, and then…”
“The stars,” said Donna Rose. “Faster than light travel.”
“A warp drive,” said Renny.
“Exactly,” said Lois McAlois.
“But we do need control,” said Michaels. “So far, all we can do is warp the probabilities in a general way. That’s enough for generating energy, but it won’t let us pick a destination or a distance. And we wouldn’t want to leap several light years in some random direction. We have to be able to steer.”
Donna Rose looked at the die he had given her. She turned it over in her hands. She reached out and pressed it back onto the fabric that had held it first. “Steering doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “Not if all you want to do is flee, to go elsewhere.”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 77