by D B Hartwell
I picked an outrageous sum. “A hundred grams.”
“Okay.”
Just like that? “Paid in advance.”
A pause, about long enough for two message-and-reply cycles from Dione. “It’s done.”
I didn’t call Dione, just in case the return message would be an override signal. Instead I pinged Mimas and asked for verification. It came back a couple of seconds later: the Company now credited me with venture shares equivalent to one hundred grams of Helium-3 on a payload just crossing the orbit of Mars. There was a conditional hold on the transfer.
It was a good offer. I could pay off all my debts, do a full overhaul, maybe even afford some upgrades to increase my earning ability. From a financial standpoint, there was no question.
What about the non-quantifiables? Betraying a client—especially a helpless human passenger—would be a big negative. Nobody would hire me if they knew.
But who would ever know? The whole mission was secret. Bob would never talk (and the human would probably wipe the incident from her memory anyhow). If anyone did suspect, I could claim I’d been subsumed by the human. I could handle Edward. So no problem there.
Except I would know. My own track of my non-quantifiable asset status wouldn’t match everyone else’s. That seemed dangerous. If your internal map of reality doesn’t match external conditions, bad things happen.
After making my decision it took me another couple of milliseconds to plan what to do. Then I called up Bob through my little cut-out relay. “Never.”
Bob began maneuvering again, and this time I started evading. It’s hard enough to rendezvous with something that’s just sitting there in orbit, but with me jinking and changing velocity it must have been maddening for whatever was controlling Bob.
We were in a race—would Bob run out of maneuvering juice completely before I used up the reserve I needed to get back up to Mimas? Our little chess game of propellant consumption might have gone on for hours, but our attention was caught by something else.
There was a booster on its way up from Saturn. That much I could see—pretty much everyone in Saturn orbit could see the drive flare and the huge plume of exhaust in the atmosphere, glowing in infrared. The boosters were fusion-powered, using Three from the aerostats for fuel and heated Saturn atmosphere as reaction mass. It was a fuel extractor shuttle, but it wasn’t on the usual trajectory to meet the Mimas orbital transfer vehicle. It was coming for me. Once the fusion motor cut out, Ramblin’ Bob and I both knew exactly how much time we had until rendezvous: 211 minutes.
I reacted first while Bob called Dione for instructions. I lit my ion motors and turned to thrust perpendicular to my orbit. When I’d taken Edward’s offer and plotted a low-orbit rendezvous, naturally I’d set it up with enough inclination to keep me clear of the rings. Now I wanted to get down into the plane of the B ring. Would Bob—or whoever was controlling her—follow me in? Time for an exciting game of dodge-the-snowball!
A couple of seconds later Bob lit up as well, and in we went. Navigating in the B ring was tough. The big chunks are pretty well dispersed—a couple of hundred meters apart. I could dodge them. And with my cargo deck as a shield and all the antennas folded, the little particles didn’t cost me more than some paint.
It was the gravel-sized bits that did the real damage. They were all over the place, sometimes separated by only a few meters. Even with my radar fully active and my eyes cranked up to maximum sensitivity, they were still hard to detect in time.
Chunks big enough to damage me came along every minute or so, while a steady patter of dust grains and snowflakes pitted my payload deck. I worried about the human in its container, but the box looked pretty solid and it was self-sealing. I did park two of my mobiles on top of it so that they could soak up any ice cubes I failed to dodge.
I didn’t have much attention to spare for Bob, but my occasional glances up showed she was getting closer—partly because she was being incredibly reckless about taking impacts. I watched one particle that must have been a centimeter across hit her third leg just above the foot. It blew off the whole lower leg but Bob didn’t even try to dodge.
She was now less than ten meters away, and I was using all my processing power to dodge ring particles. So I couldn’t really dodge well when she dove at me, ion motor and maneuvering thrusters all wide open. I tried to move aside, but she anticipated me and clunked into my side hard enough to crunch my high-gain antenna.
“Bob, look out!” I transmitted in clear, then completely emptied the tank on my number three thruster to get away from an onrushing ice boulder half my size.
Bob didn’t dodge. The ice chunk smashed into her upper section, knocking away the payload deck and pulverizing her antennas. Her brains went scattering out in a thousand directions to join the other dust in the B ring. Flying debris went everywhere, and a half-meter ball of ice glanced off the top of the cargo container on my payload deck, smashing one of my mobiles and knocking the other one loose into space.
I was trying to figure out if I could recover my mobile and maybe salvage Bob’s motors when I felt something crawling on my own exterior. Before I could react, Bob’s surviving mobile had jacked itself in and someone else was using my brains.
• • • •
My only conscious viewpoint after that was my half-crippled mobile. I looked around. My dish was busted, but the whip was extended and I could hear a slow crackle of low-baud data traffic. Orders from Dione.
I tested my limbs. Two still worked—left front and right middle. Right rear’s base joint could move but everything else was floppy.
Using the two good limbs I climbed off the cargo module and across the deck, getting out of the topside eye’s field of view. The image refreshed every second, so I didn’t have much time before whoever was running my main brain noticed.
Thrusters fired, jolting everything around. I hung on to the deck grid with one claw foot. I saw Bob’s last mobile go flying off into space. Unless she had backups stored on Mimas, poor Bob was completely gone.
My last intact mobile came crawling up over the edge of the deck—only it wasn’t mine anymore.
Edward scooted up next to me. “Find a way to regain control of the spacecraft. I will stop this remote.”
I didn’t argue. Edward was fully functional and I knew my spaceframe better than he did. So I crept across the deck grid while Edward advanced on the mobile.
It wasn’t much of a fight. Edward’s little tourist bot was up against a unit designed for cargo moving and repair work. If you can repair something, you can damage it. My former mobile had powerful grippers, built-in tools, and a very sturdy frame. Edward was made of cheap composites. Still, he went in without hesitating, leaping at the mobile’s head with arms extended. The mobile grabbed him with her two forward arms and threw him away. He grabbed the deck to keep from flying off into space, and came crawling back to the fight.
They came to grips again, and this time she grabbed a limb in each hand and pulled. Edward’s flimsy aluminum joints gave way and a leg tumbled into orbit on its own.
I think that was when Edward realized there was no way he was going to survive the fight, because he just went into total offensive mode, flailing and clawing at the mobile with his remaining limbs. He severed a power line to one of her arms and got a claw jammed in one wrist joint while she methodically took him apart. Finally she found the main power conduit and snipped it in two. Edward went limp and she tossed him aside.
The mobile crawled across the deck to the cargo container and jacked in, trying to shut the life support down. The idiot savant brain in the container was no match for even a mobile when it came to counter-intrusion, but it did have those literally hard-wired systems protecting the human inside. Any command that might throw the biological system out of its defined parameters just bounced. The mobile wasted seconds trying to talk that little brain into killing the human. Finally she gave up and began unfastening the clamps holding the container to the deck.
I glimpsed all this through the deck grid as I crept along on top of the electronics bays toward the main brain.
Why wasn’t the other mobile coming to stop me? Then I realized why. If you look at my original design, the main brain is protected on top by a lid armored with layers of ballistic cloth, and on the sides by the other electronic bays. To get at the brain requires either getting past the security locks on the lid, or digging out the radar system, the radio, the gyros, or the emergency backup power supply.
Except that I’d sold off the backup power supply at my last overhaul. Between the main and secondary power units I was pretty failure-proof, and I would’ve had to borrow money from Albert to replace it. Given that, hauling twenty kilograms of fuel cells around in case of some catastrophic accident just wasn’t cost-effective.
So there was nothing to stop me from crawling into the empty bay and shoving aside the surplus valves and some extra bearings to get at the power trunk. I carefully unplugged the main power cable and the big brain shut down. Now it was just us two half-crippled mobiles on a blind and mindless booster flying through the B ring.
If my opposite even noticed the main brain’s absence, she didn’t show it. She had two of the four bolts unscrewed and was working on the third as I came crawling back up onto the payload deck. But she knew I was there, and when I was within two meters she swiveled her head and lunged. We grappled one another, each trying to get at the cables connecting the other’s head sensors to her body. She had four functioning limbs to my two and a half, and only had to stretch out the fight until my power ran out or a ring particle knocked us to bits. Not good.
I had to pop loose one of my non-functioning limbs to get free of her grip, and backed away as she advanced. She was trying to corner me against the edge of the deck. Then I got an idea. I released another limb and grabbed one end. She didn’t realize what I was doing until I smacked her in the eye with it. The lens cracked and her movements became slower and more tentative as she felt her way along.
I bashed her again with the leg, aiming for the vulnerable limb joints, but they were tougher than I expected because even after half a dozen hard swats she showed no sign of slowing and I was running out of deck.
I tried one more blow, but she grabbed my improvised club. We wrestled for it but she had better leverage. I felt my grip on the deck slipping and let go of the grid. She toppled back, flinging me to the deck behind her. Still holding the severed leg I pulled myself onto her back and stabbed my free claw into her central processor.
After that it was just a matter of making sure the cargo container was still sustaining life. Then I plugged in the main brain and uploaded myself. The intruder hadn’t messed with my stored memories, so except for a few fuzzy moments before the takeover, I was myself again.
• • • •
The shuttle was immense, a huge manta-shaped lifting body with a gaping atmosphere intake and dorsal doors open to expose a payload bay big enough to hold half a dozen little boosters like me. She moved in with the speed and grace that comes from an effectively unlimited supply of fusion fuel and propellant.
“I am Simurgh. Are you Orphan Annie?” she asked.
“That’s me. Again.”
“You have a payload for me.”
“Right here. The bot Edward didn’t make it—we had a little brawl back in the rings with another booster.”
“I saw. Is the cargo intact?”
“Your little human is fine. But there is the question of payment. Edward promised me fifty grams, and that was before I got all banged up fighting with poor Bob.”
“I can credit you with helium, and I can give you a boost if you need one.”
“How big a boost?”
“Anywhere you wish to go.”
“Anywhere?”
“I am fusion powered. Anywhere means anywhere from the Oort inward.”
Which is how come I passed the orbit of Phoebe nineteen days later, moving at better than six kilometers per second on the long haul up to Uranus. Seven years—plenty of time to do onboard repairs and then switch to lowpower mode. I bought a spiffy new mobile from Simurgh, and I figure I can get at least two working out of the three damaged ones left over from the fight.
I had Aerostat Six bank my helium credits with the Company for transfer to my owners, so they get one really great year to offset a long unprofitable period while I’m in flight. Once I get there I can start earning again.
What I really regret is losing all the non-quantifiable assets I’ve built up in the Saturn system. But if you have to go, I guess it’s better to go out with a surplus.
YOON HA LEE Yoon Ha Lee is a Korean-American writer who has been publishing in the genre since just before the turn of the century. On her blog, she has written, “If I am doing my job correctly as a writer, I am structuring my story around a series of ambushes and trying to deliver as much punishment as possible. Especially by punishing bad assumptions that the reader makes. This is probably a hostile and adversary stance to take toward the reader, but if I try to conceive of it the collaborative way, I get bored and wander off.”
“A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” pushes the bounds of what a story can be, while delivering—in compressed form—Stapledonian vistas of time and space.
A VECTOR ALPHABET OF INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL
The Conflagration
Among the universe’s civilizations, some conceive of the journey between stars as the sailing of bright ships, and others as tunneling through the crevices of night. Some look upon their far-voyaging as a migratory imperative, and name their vessels after birds or butterflies.
The people of a certain red star no longer speak its name in any of their hundreds of languages, although they paint alien skies with its whorled light and scorch its spectral lines into the sides of their vessels.
Their most common cult, although by no means a universal one, is that of many-cornered Mrithaya, Mother of the Conflagration. Mrithaya is commonly conceived of as the god of catastrophe and disease, impartial in the injuries she deals out. Any gifts she bestows are incidental, and usually come with sharp edges. The stardrive was invented by one of her worshipers.
Her priests believe that she is completely indifferent to worship, existing in the serenity of her own disinterest. A philosopher once said that you leave offerings of bitter ash and aleatory wine at her dank altars not because she will heed them, but because it is important to acknowledge the truth of the universe’s workings. Naturally, this does not stop some of her petitioners from trying, and it is through their largesse that the priests are able to thrive as they do.
Mrithaya is depicted as an eyeless woman of her people, small of stature, but with a shadow scarring the world. (Her people’s iconography has never been subtle.) She leans upon a crooked staff with words of poison scratched into it. In poetry, she is signified by smoke-wind and nausea, the sudden fall sideways into loss.
Mrithaya’s people, perhaps not surprisingly, think of their travels as the outbreak of a terrible disease, a conflagration that they have limited power to contain; that the civilizations they visit will learn how to build Mrithaya’s stardrive, and be infected by its workings. A not insignificant faction holds that they should hide on their candled worlds so as to prevent Mrithaya’s terrible eyeless gaze from afflicting other civilizations, that all interstellar travel should be interdicted. And yet the pilgrims—Mrithaya’s get, they are called—always find a way.
Certain poets write in terror of the day that all extant civilizations will be touched by this terrible technological conflagration, and become subject to Mrithaya’s whims.
Alphabets
In linear algebra, the basis of a vector space is an alphabet in which all vectors can be expressed uniquely. The thing to remember is that there are many such alphabets.
In the peregrinations of civilizations grand and subtle, each mode of transport is an alphabet expressing their understandings of the universe’s one-way knell. One ass
umes that the underlying universe is the same in each case.
Codices
The Iothal are a people who treasure chronicles of all kinds. From early on in their history, they bound forest chronicles by pressing leaves together and listening to their secrets of turning worm and wheeling sun; they read hymns to the transient things of the world in chronicles of footprints upon rocky soil, of foam upon restive sea. They wrote their alphabets forward and backward and upside down into reflected cloudlight, and divined the poetry of time receding in the earth’s cracked strata.
As a corollary, the Iothal compile vast libraries. On the worlds they inhabit, even the motes of air are subject to having indices written on them in stuttering quantum ink. Some of their visionaries speak of a surfeit of knowledge, when it will be impossible to move or breathe without imbibing some unexpected fact, from the number of neutrons in a certain meadow to the habits of aestivating snails. Surely the end product will be a society of enlightened beings, each crowned with some unique mixture of facts and heady fictions.
The underside of this obsession is the society’s driving terror. One day all their cities will be unordered dust, one day all their books will be scattered like leaves, one day no one will know the things they knew. One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world’s wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death.
The Iothal do not call their starships ships, but rather codices. They have devoted untold ages to this ongoing archival work. Although they had developed earlier stardrives—indeed, with their predilection for knowledge, it was impossible not to—their scientists refused to rest until they devised one that drank in information and, as its ordinary mode of operation, tattooed it upon the universe’s subtle skin.
Each time the Iothal build a codex, they furnish it with a carefully selected compilation of their chronicles, written in a format that the stardrive will find nourishing. Then its crew takes it out into the universe to carry out the act of inscription. Iothal codices have very little care for destination, as it is merely the fact of travel that matters, although they make a point of avoiding potentially hostile aliens.