Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “What do you see?” said Katie. “You can tell me.”

  And without a word Prisoner Zero stood up and shuffled to the door, shackles dragging and wires still trailing from his skull, the tiny EEG box scuttling through the dust behind him like some exotic household pet.

  CHAPTER 19

  Darkness, CTzu 1/Year 0

  A circle may begin at any point. For the 2023 worlds the circle began and ended at Year Zero, in many ways a completely arbitrary choice.

  From one and a half million miles away the darkness looked like a slowly turning shoal of shadows with odd and ersatz quasar tendencies. Most astronomers regarded this as a misreading of old data; those who didn’t varied in their interpretations as to what the object might be.

  One view was that the dark shoal was actually an asteroid belt wrapped stranglehold tight around an unimportant, type II yellow star, one with an energy output of roughly Earth strength.

  No one thought the system valuable enough to visit.

  Each of the 2023 sections of shell cast a vast area of darkness that swept across the emptiness of space, followed by a narrow fan of sunlight. This was, of course, an entirely humanocentric interpretation of the energy data.

  Most of those who later wrote about the arrival of the first Chuang Tzu did so from the comfort of one of the 2023 worlds, and as few ever moved beyond that comfort or felt the need to examine their lives from outside, many now regarded existence beyond the worlds as myth and the arrival of the SZ Loyal Prince as an improving, morally enlightening fairy story.

  Had the sun-circling sphere been solid instead of made up of 2023 potentially locking but currently unlocked sections, the area created would have made a single continent over 650 million times the entire area of the Earth. As it was, each of the 2023 sections had nearly three hundred thousand times more living space than the world from which the crew of the SZ Loyal Prince originally came.

  Zaq knew all this, of course, because the great, glorious and correct knew what the butterflies knew and the butterflies knew what the Library showed them.

  From one side of the unfinished shell to the other was 298.2 million kilometres, which was actually fractional in a galaxy that contained several hundred billion stars and stretched a hundred thousand light-years from rim to rim. All the same, many chose to regard the distance from one side to the other of the 2023 worlds as beyond imagining.

  It simplified life.

  Once the area around the sun had been occupied by planets. Three, maybe four solid bodies filling what became the emptiness between the 2023 fragments of shell and its star, with another five, mostly gas giants, slung out along the same plane beyond where the shell now hung.

  The inner planets would have been iron rich, because this is the nature of inner planets of their age; while the outer planets would have been mainly hydrogen, with helium, water vapour and methane. Now all were gone and only the 2023 worlds remained.

  So it was believed by those who held that the sun was natural.

  Those who held that the sun was as manufactured as the worlds which surrounded it refused to accept the existence of the missing planets. In answer to the question, “From where did the matter to make the worlds come?” they asked another, “How could the breaking of nine planets possibly produce sufficient matter to create 2023 worlds?”

  Such argument came later and had no relevance to the crippled Chinese freighter that limped out of an asteroid storm and settled near the underside of a slab of flat black glass a million kilometres thick. Loyal Prince to the Heavenly Ruler of the Celestial Kingdom of Great Peace was originally a single-engined, ShenZhou-class battle-cruiser, retrofitted as a refugee ship. She’d been drifting for fifteen generations Earth time.

  For much of this period SZ Loyal Prince had been broadcasting a distress signal. Throughout the first five hundred years the signal had been in Mandarin, changing to standard English for the century following this. And then, when Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei finally brought herself to accept that her distress call would never be answered, she changed it back to Mandarin.

  It was a matter of pride.

  Her navigator, Lieutenant Chuang Tzu, was really called something else. He was one of those single sons, the little emperors, spoilt beyond belief but also bowed down under the expectation of his maternal grandparents, who had adopted him after his parents died.

  Between the spoiling, the expectation and the impossibility of appreciating one sufficiently or meeting the demands of the other, the boy had fallen into a world of dreams, hence his nickname.

  He was also one of the few crew members awake when the Loyal Prince fell into position beneath the edge of a glass slab so enormous that the entire Chinese Republic would have made but a splash on its surface.

  “Take us in,” the Colonel Commissar ordered.

  From far off the line of sunlight between one impossibly vast slab of glass and the next looked knife-blade thin as the SZ Loyal Prince rose steadily towards it. And it was only when her navigator rechecked the distances that Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei realized the gap was actually wider than the distance from her own planet to its moon, easily large enough for an entire fleet of cruisers.

  “Steady as she goes…” The Colonel Commissar watched Lieutenant Chuang Tzu smile at her order and pretended not to notice. The boy was useless but very pretty. Besides, being useless was hardly a handicap for the post of yuhangyuan aboard the Loyal Prince.

  The ship more or less steered itself.

  Once into the gap, the edges of the vast glass slabs seemed claustrophobically close, even though all readings indicated that the nearest was still a hundred thousand kilometres away.

  “Shit,” said Lieutenant Chuang Tzu.

  The Colonel Commissar had to agree.

  Besides the Colonel and her navigator there was only one other member of the crew still awake when the SZ Loyal Prince slipped between two worlds and found itself within an almost oppressive shell of matter. This last was Dr. Yuan, who died too soon after this to be properly remembered.

  There were, of course, other members of the crew. Although whether they were sleeping or dead was open to interpretation. The Colonel Commissar’s view was that they were sleeping. Her navigator, who despite his Chuang Tzu nickname was less of a dreamer than the Colonel Commissar imagined, was of the firm opinion that they were dead. He based this on the fact that some of them had begun to smell.

  “Distance?”

  “One hundred thousand, Madame.”

  She’d meant the distance until they reached the upper edge of the vast glass slab, but the Colonel Commissar didn’t bother to correct the boy. She was asking questions for the sake of it.

  A tall woman with broad shoulders, Colonel Lan Kuei hated her given name, which meant little orchard, and walked with a stoop unless in uniform, when she’d throw out her substantial chest and stride down the half-lit corridors.

  She was in command of a dying ship with her effective crew reduced to one. A rip had opened the double hull of the Loyal Prince and their oxygen was leaching away through gates which were designed to be airtight. It was only a matter of time before the atmosphere became too thin to breathe and in deciding to enter the broken puzzle of the sun-circling sphere the Colonel was choosing a place for her ship to die.

  Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei wasn’t sure that her navigator understood that. They’d lost the last of their gravity on the approach, when the acceleration of their ship slowed and the floor of the SZ Loyal Prince’s crew quarters slid through a quarter turn to drop parallel to the keel rather than remain aligned with the engine.

  The intention, of which the Beijing University of Astronautics had been very proud, was to replace the pseudo gravity of acceleration with resource-draining G-loops, positioned beneath the cabin floor and to be used on the last stages of the trip only.

  Unfortunately the G-loops had never been fitted, largely because no one could get them to work, and by the time their inventor had confessed his error a
nd suffered a punishment fit for the crime, the living quarters had been constructed to swing through a quarter turn once the ship’s speed fell below a preset level, whether this made sense or not.

  “The Doctor is dying.”

  Lan Kuei stared at the one remaining male crew member: That was how she thought of the boy, as her last remaining male crew member. There were regulations regarding the situation they were in but she’d already broken them. Standing orders stated that in the case of this kind of emergency the SZ Loyal Prince was to be put in stasis and the working crew must join the others in hibernation.

  This would have been fine if most of her crew had not already been “sleeping” and her cargo deck stacked with frozen ’fugees who took what little power the generators still produced. Sometime soon, Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei would have to decide whether or not to turn off that power. Unless, of course, she did nothing and then time would take the decision for her.

  “What do you want me to do?” The boy stood waiting for orders Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei no longer felt qualified to give.

  She and Lieutenant Chuang Tzu had been lovers briefly and she’d found the boy surprisingly gentle. Lan Kuei wasn’t used to her lovers being gentle. Usually men took one look at her huge breasts and buried themselves in fistfuls of flesh, twisting and kneading her skin.

  The navigator had been different. Approaching each time as if it was the first and he’d never seen a woman naked before. All the same, fucking him had been a mistake. Something she’d never have done if the others hadn’t already been dead.

  “How close?”

  For a moment Navigator Chuang Tzu thought his Colonel Commissar meant how close was the SZ Loyal Prince to the wall outside but then he realized that she was talking about the Doctor. “Minutes,” he said, looking at a readout. “It may already be too late.”

  “Freeze her,” Lan Kuei said.

  “I’m not sure I know how.”

  The Colonel Commissar stifled a sigh. “Skip the preparation,” she said. “Go straight to the freezing…That’s an order,” she added.

  Chuang Tzu nodded gratefully. It was Lan Kuei’s way of relieving him of responsibility for potentially killing someone he admired. Lan Kuei liked the Doctor too, in her way. Although their backgrounds were very different, Lan Kuei’s as poor as Dr. Yuan’s had been rich.

  When Yuan volunteered for the mission her father had offered his newly graduated daughter her own house in Xicheng, one of the most fashionable districts of Beijing, if she withdrew her application. Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei’s mother had asked how much of her bounty Lan Kuei intended to give the family and then nodded grudgingly when her daughter replied that she would give it all.

  Lieutenant Commissar, Major Commissar and finally Colonel Commissar. Every time an officer refused to wake from cold sleep Lan Kuei found herself promoted. Now she could call herself Commissar General if she so wanted, but Lan Kuei didn’t. She was bored with gluing new patches to her shoulder, particularly now there was only the boy to notice her new rank.

  The freezing pods were three decks below the bridge and the Doctor was in her cabin on the deck above, which either meant Navigator Chuang had to manhandle an unconscious woman through eighteen hatches and along two kilometres of narrow corridor or else he could cheat.

  Chuang Tzu decided to do it the quick way. Sometime during the first hundred years a bored engineer had thought ahead to life aboard the SZ Loyal Prince in zero gravity and decided to weld handles to all the walls in what he considered strategic positions.

  These changes made so little impact on the fifty members of Engineer Li’s shift that most of them never noticed; and the Commissar General only became involved twenty-three years later when Engineer Li woke for his next shift and decided to reprogram the spiders to repaint every wall a different colour.

  He might even have got away with this if only his programming skills hadn’t been so sloppy that the spiders ended up overpainting every surface, including all hazard signs and internal windows.

  On file was Li’s defence, still attached to his execution order. This stated that since up and down were abstract concepts in zero gee, the best way to adapt the human mind to cope with weightlessness was to paint each wall a different colour. So that instead of thinking up, down, left and right, the mind chose between red surface, green surface, blue and yellow.

  Whatever, it worked.

  Grabbing a wall handle, Lieutenant Chuang Tzu flipped open a ceramic grill and slid into an air vent, kicking off like a swimmer from the side of a pool. He handled himself well in zero gee, his racing turn against a far wall coming close to aerial ballet. Suicidal ballet, but ballet all the same.

  Away from his Colonel Commissar, Chuang Tzu was different; more awake, less dreamy. Somehow just more competent. He had the Doctor on a length of monofilament behind him, her arms bound to her sides and her legs lashed together at the ankles so she wouldn’t snag on her way through the shafts.

  All went well, despite the speed at which Chuang raced along the air vent. And though he slowed into the final turn, his kick off was more flamboyant than ever and his exit through the vent so fast that he had to use his own body to cushion the Doctor’s impact against a wall.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what…madame?” Chuang added the honorific as an afterthought. Conditioning overriding his desire to vomit.

  “You gasped.”

  “I’m sorry. It was nothing.” His comms link was open, something he should have realized and dealt with. Summoning the setting with the touch of his fingers, Chuang Tzu chose a level where the comms link registered as functioning but carried almost no signal.

  There were a dozen red pods hungry and waiting. One for the Doctor, another for him, one for the Commissar Colonel and nine ever-empty pods for those vaporized while trying to repair the boosters. Tapping the nearest, Chuang watched it open, waiting while the semiAI ran a self test.

  “Functioning,” the pod announced as a glass square lit red. “Preparing for Koebe process.” Slots opened on the inside of the pod to reveal simple claws; attached to those claws were clear tubes already filled with oily liquid. “Please enter phenotype.”

  “What?”

  “Enter phenotype.”

  “Human,” Chuang Tzu said. The animals were long since dead.

  The glass square turned orange. “Enter seven-digit genotype,” demanded the pod.

  “Shit.” Chuang Tzu ripped open the front of the Doctor’s blue uniform, looking for dog tags. “I don’t know it,” he said. “It’s not for me.”

  “Enter seven-digit genotype.”

  “You’ll have to do without,” Chuang Tzu told the machine.

  The ceramic blade the Lieutenant produced from his pocket was strictly illegal. As compact and functional as befitted someone who’d grown up on a farm, but still illegal. Slicing the monofilament which bound Dr. Yuan’s hands, he spun her round and sliced between her ankles.

  “Prepare to receive the body,” he said.

  On the side of the pod the orange square reverted to red as the semiAI reset itself. “Functioning,” the pod announced. “Preparing for Koebe process. Please enter phenotype.”

  “Stupid fucking—” Chuang began but stopped himself. “Promote me,” he said loudly, simultaneously reopening his comms channel.

  “What?”

  “Promote me,” Navigator Chuang said fiercely, “while there’s still time to save the Doctor.”

  Two decks above, Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei sighed. Sleeping with junior officers always produced these kinds of problems. “Madame,” she said firmly. “You address me as madame.”

  “Promote me, madame.” Chuang Tzu tried to put anger in his voice but it came out as petulance. He never had been any good at standing up to authority. “The pod won’t—”

  “Major,” Lan Kuei said, “as of now.”

  Chuang Tzu dimmed his comms channel without signing out, a tiny act of rebellion, and turned to the
pod.

  “This is Major Commissar Chuang Tzu…Prepare to take a body,” he told it. The semiAI would have to cope without a DNA reference for the flesh it was about to receive. Dr. Yuan was dying, the status light on her suit already down to a slow flicker.

  The pod did as it was told.

  In an ideal world, the pod would have had time to read Dr. Yuan’s genotype, pre-plan fixes for any physical imperfections and replace all of the Doctor’s blood with a mix of cryoprotectants, mainly glycerols. Only the SZ Loyal Prince was anything but an ideal world and Major Commissar Chuang Tzu wasn’t sure he even knew what a genotype actually was.

  On the breast of Dr. Yuan’s uniform below a patch which showed cogs and ears of wheat framing a small rocket ship, a button alarm had started beeping.

  “Chuang…”

  “I know,” he said.

  Gripping his knife, the newly promoted navigator began to cut open Dr. Yuan’s regulation tunic, trying not to notice one nipple becoming bare as he did so. The Doctor was impossibly beautiful, everyone agreed on that; at least they did back when there was an everyone to agree on anything.

  “How’s it going?” The voice in Chuang Tzu’s ear was worried.

  “Slowly,” he admitted.

  “Work faster,” said Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei and was gone.

  With the Doctor’s tunic half open, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu gave up not looking and hacked at the cloth until he reached the waistband. This cut, he peeled the tunic from Dr. Yuan’s torso and turned his attention to her trousers. There was a buckle, something elegant and strictly not regulation. Chuang Tzu cut this away without even noticing, keeping his hand between the dying woman’s abdomen and the point of his blade, hesitating only when one knuckle brushed body hair.

  All of this he did in zero gravity with one foot hooked under a wall handle and a thousand minor muscle adjustments every second to keep him steady. Beijing had chosen only swimmers for their deep-space missions and the navigator had swum every day as a child.