Paxa walked in wearing the outfit we always called “Fetishist's Dream.” How could anyone walk at all in shoes like that, let alone as gracefully as she did? And the very little red leather of the rest of the costume clung to her deliciously. “Happy Birthday,” she said. “I see you're already dressed for the occasion, but let's not start on the bed."
It took me a moment to realize that she meant I was naked. “Um, uh—"
By then she had seen the body, and started to ask “Were there any more—” when eight CSPs, and their sergeant, came through the springer so perfectly according to the manual that they looked like a recruiting poster, pointing weapons in all directions, their intelligent goggles doubtless identifying me and Paxa as friendlies.
And saw:
One corpse, head squashy, face partially cooked.
One petite blonde gamine, facial features of an angel, dressed like a Freiporto streetwalker without the subtlety.
One naked man, sopping wet, with gray shoulder-length hair, holding a coverlet and a still-extended neuroducer epée, looking a little as if I had taken up nude bullfighting in my hotel room.
The sergeant said, “Seniormost Field Agent Giraut Leones, you requested assistance?"
“I did,” I said. “We need to be moved to secure quarters, the enemy dead there needs to be recovered for OSP study, and we need to keep this room secure—another attack could arrive through that springer at any time. And I need pants, but I can take care of that part myself."
The sergeant delivered his orders as swiftly and flatly as an auctioneer, and before his last toneless “thank you", four CSPs were in position to cover the springer, and three were bagging the body. I pulled on trousers, shirt, and sandals, and Paxa put on a robe. Our robots would take care of clothes and baggage.
“We're ready to go,” I said. That didn't seem like quite enough. “Uh, all this started out as a birthday celebration.” I don't always say the smartest things when I'm drained after a concert, or after a fight. “I just turned fifty."
“I guess everyone celebrates their own way,” the sergeant said. “Me, when I turned thirty, I climbed a mountain with two buddies, and we got drunk and watched the sun come up."
* * *
I refrained from throwing a tantrum like a cranky two-year-old. They moved us to the bridal suite of another hotel. Since you can't block an address on a springer, they just clamped another springer over ours to automatically forward any would-be assassin into an armored holding cell in an OSP space station. Normally the Council uses setups like that to guard antimatter weapons and the dedicated processors of ultra-high security aintellects, so I felt very special on my birthday.
“Well,” Paxa said, “I would like a quick shower."
She took her shower with the door open, and while she did, I enjoyed watching her standing in the cascading hot water in the middle of the bathing pool. She was slim, pale blonde, and athletic, with long smooth legs and everything taut and firm, the fantasy object of three-quarters of the straight men in human space, and though I had a distinct fetish for heavy, soft bodies like Margaret's, I had the same training by decades of advertising as any other male in human space. I liked Paxa's body because it would be difficult for a straight male not to, because I enjoyed the envy of other men, and because it was Paxa's, and the last of those reasons would have been enough to make me overlook fangs and scales.
She stretched and luxuriated in the warm spray, and turned the shower off. I walked in to the bathroom, lifted her, and carried her to the bed.
“The bed's going to be a mess."
“Set it to dry and change while I'm bathing.” I kissed her to close off further conversation.
When we were both reasonably happy, I said, “Room aintellect, start my tub, get the settings from my chamberlain."
“Yes, sir."
“If you weren't such a romantic you'd have started your tub before carrying me to the bed and ravishing me."
“If I were the type to do that, I wouldn't be much of a ravisher,” I pointed out. “And is ravishing something you can do to the willing?"
“I hope so, because while you're re-bathing, I'll be dressing to be re-ravished. Anything you're really dying for, or surprise you?"
“I love surprises and I hate dying."
“That's extremely portentous to say on your fiftieth birthday, and portentous is within a short walk of morbid."
“It's not my fiftieth birthday anymore,” I pointed out. “It's past midnight. So if we're both tired—"
“Tostemz tropa joy, ilh'st ilh lei prim de con,” she quoted. “At least ‘always more joy’ is the first law of my con. We can rest when we're dead."
I settled into the tub. Behind me I could hear rustle and fussing. Hedons treat clothing like cuisine—most of the time plain old cooking will do, but when it's time to show off, it's time to show off. They also think sex is both the purpose of life and a trivial minor pleasure, and that stress of any kind is pure evil. So they dress to be comfortable, beautiful, or sexy, they have sex like it's the best thing in the world but entirely for fun, and they try to live in a state of deep relaxation.
I often think that among all the Thousand Cultures, only the Hedons chose to go sane.
Epsilon Indi, the local sun, was already flooding the skylights, when Paxa and I finally curled into a spoon to sleep.
I rubbed my face on her soft, damp hair, breathing her scent. “These last few weeks, getting ready for my birthday concert, why did everyone assume that I was going to be morbid?"
She turned her head to kiss my cheek. “Because, dearest,” she whispered, “we know you."
If the colonization of the terraformable planets nearest to Earth had been for resources or lebensraum, anyone would have to say it was a dismal failure.
There were no resources worth pursuing. Prior to the springer, it had made equal economic sense—none at all—to ship diamonds or corn flakes between the stars. The energy costs of molecular-level synthesis—or even of transmutation of elements if need be—were lower than the costs of accelerating the same mass to half-c for ballistic starflight, and at one-half-c maximum practical velocity, the cost of every voyage was doubled or tripled by compound interest en route.
Nor was it a matter of room for people. One brief century of colonization had put human beings into permanent residence in open-air, dry-land spaces on twenty-six worlds. Eight, almost entirely habitable like Roosevelt, Addams, or Dunant, each housed around a hundred cultures. A few had just small slivers of habitable land like Wilson (mostly water), Nansen (mostly frozen), or Briand (mostly toxic), and had one or two cultures. The majority were worlds of one pleasant continent, or a few nice big islands, like Söderblom, where Hedonia shared an Australia-sized continent with Thetanshaven, Bremen-Beyond-the-Stars, Texaustralia, and Freiporto, and twelve more cultures clustered on an Africa-sized continent in the opposite hemisphere.
In all, every schoolchild learned to recite, the new land beyond the stars totaled only about fourteen times the comfortably habitable area of the Earth. With Earth's population stable (and reduced by more than a third just a century before), there was neither need for a place for surplus people, nor enough land to put any very great numbers onto anyway, and in any case the colony ships took only ninety-six adults and a million frozen embryos.
If space for people had been the issue, it would have been cheaper and easier to accelerate the terraformation of Mars and Venus and build many more closed habitats in the Sol system.
Almost, it had been a pure whim, or the hedging of a bet. In the colonization century, just before the Inward Turn, diversity had seemed more dangerous than monotony, but there was room enough for both as long as diversity could be kept safely far away. The Thousand Cultures existed because our ancestors thought there should be different kinds of people—far away. The reason for the new worlds had been, then, what the purpose of the OSP was now: controlled diversity, with emphasis more on control than on diversity.
Diversity didn't always work out. I have seen first hand more of the places that humanity lives than almost anyone else, and I know that however diverse the 1,228 cultures planted on those twenty-six worlds were, in the fourteen Earth's-worths of surface occupied by humanity, every conference room has non-stain beige carpets, heavy-but-cheap furniture, and nothing to look at except the screen of your own computer and the sleepy faces of the people across from you. And OSP agents spend at least as much time in conference rooms as they do out in the Thousand Cultures.
Margaret, ever the utter Caledon, walked in and began without preface or greeting. “That note left in Giraut's hand was made of materials which match scraps in our collection of extraterritorial materials. The human DNA traces on it are consistent with the Lost Legion."
It was the most personally embarrassing part of the “extraterritorial problem” for me, so I tried to listen but my mind kept wandering to the annoying way I had become so attractive to those over-romantic idiots.
Until the invention of the springer, the roughly forty-to-sixty light-year limit of human settlement had been enforced by the limits of technology. A single colony ship could travel around that far, taking a century or a little more, before too many of its ninety-six adults in suspended animation died in the tank, leaving too few adult survivors to move into the robot-built city waiting at the other end, and to decant and raise the first generation of “natives” from the ship's bank of a million frozen embryos.
In the centuries following the Inward Turn, technology had been systematically held in place, so that fifty-light-year-or-so limit had become a de facto cornerstone of policy for centuries.
No colony ships had gone farther than the 102 (of 109 attempted) cultures barely planted on Addams, circling Theta Ursae Majoris, and the even more marginal two cultures on Briand, circling Metallah, each just over sixty light-years away. Addams and Briand had been reached by pushing every margin, and only attempted because there was no remaining standard culture space (650,000 square kilometers of reasonably contiguous, walk-around-without-special-equipment land) anywhere closer.
Ninety years after the colonization era began, the last ships left Earth for Addams; 134 stanyears later, when the determined aintellects brought Susan Constant IV into orbit around Addams with ten surviving adults and most of its embryos dead, the colonization era ended, apparently for all time.
For the next 450 stanyears, then, until the springer, humanity was confined to an irregular, three-lobed blob of space that would all fit into a hundred-light-year diameter sphere, with Earth somewhat off-center of the intersection of the three lobes. The human bubble was only about twenty parts in a billion of the volume of the galaxy, but we were the masters of our bubble, with no compelling reason or cheap means to go beyond it.
The springer had changed everything. Historians intended no hyperbole in saying it was the biggest innovation since fire or the pointed stick. If there was a springer anywhere you wanted to go, you could cross many light-years in a single step; just the night before I had made a precautionary emergency-room call of fourteen light-years, and Paxa and I had walked from our hotel room, with its view of Epsilon Indi setting, to this conference room in Manila on Earth.
Within human space, you could go anywhere by radioing directions and waiting for the people on the other end to receive the message and build a springer; once they did, everywhere was as close as the next room (assuming you could afford the astonishing amount of energy required).
Beyond human space, you first had to send a springer there on a rocket—but a springship was a radically different rocket from the huge, half-light-speed behemoths, stacked with suspended animation tanks and equipped like hospitals, that had planted the first colonies.
A rocket always gets the most acceleration from the very last drop of fuel in the tank, because the engine pushes with constant force, but the mass of fuel you're pushing decreases as the fuel is expelled. But on a springship, every drop is the very last; you need not even send a reaction chamber, just a nozzle with a springer at the back, through which you spring a jet from as big a stationary chamber as you like.
Send out a robot springship the size of a large desk, boosting at a hundred g because it has no fuel tanks, just springers delivering light-speed protons from back home right into the nozzle. Do that for one week and you are close enough to lightspeed for every practical purpose. Control it via laserlink through a microspringer; no signal strength problem and no speed-of-light lag, no matter how far it goes. Keep aiming your springship for the next nearest F, G, or K star.
As it passes each star, scan the habitable zone for any Earth-sized world with free O2 in the atmosphere. If no, on to the next star.
If yes, the springship flips over to ride its jet down into the solar system for a closer look. If things still look good from closer up, descend all the way into orbit around the planet. If it's still good from orbit, descend on a nice cool jet of room-temperature nitrogen, so as not to disturb anything, set the springship down on a reasonably stable, solid patch of dirt, open an exterior microspringer on the springship's surface, and dump a couple of tons of nanos onto the face of the new world. Over a few weeks, the nanos strip materials out of the surrounding land to grow an enclosed habitat suitable for humans, with a full-sized springer inside, and another door opens onto the frontier.
As soon as you have a springable base on an alien world, with enough redundant springer capacity to ensure you won't lose it, the springship takes off again.
Theoretically the Council of Humanity's probes—and only theirs—were to catalog every habitable and terraformable planet for fifty light years beyond human space, and a procedure would be established for applying to establish new colonies.
That survey process was now about half complete—except that across roughly a quarter of the northern celestial hemisphere, wherever Council springships had found particularly promising solar systems, when they had descended for a closer look, they had suffered an “abrupt functional stoppage/disconnect"—"AFSD” was a standard abbreviation. It was widely said, in security circles, that AFSD stood for “Actually Fucking Shot Down."
We knew who shot them down. While the Council had dithered for a quarter of a century before the first study-to-do-a-study had been authorized, the nearest and best habitable worlds had been illegally settled.
Launching a springship was so cheap that a largish corporation, political party, foundation, religious congregation, or criminal syndicate could probably launch a few every stanyear. Fuel cost was another matter, if you paid it, but there were a lot of places you could steal about 120 grams of antimatter per stanyear, enough for the civilian power requirements of three to ten cultures, to be sure, but one clandestine VNP could be making three or four kilograms per stanyear and springing it to scores of probes, and VNPs built themselves; all you needed was a clean copy of the nanoware and a corrupted aintellect to tinker it into operation without calling the cops.
So while the Council of Humanity dithered, other parts of humanity had settled in several star systems in the direction of Ursa Major, Leo, and Boötes, well beyond the official surface of settlement. The OSP knew of a political entity called Union, comprised of at least nineteen “extraterritorials"—illegal colonies. We had a few dozen Union-made artifacts captured here and there, some photos and vus, and an ongoing project to infiltrate the smugglers (we had not found any yet, but where there is a border, there are smugglers).
And I was being cautiously approached by the extraterritorial most perfectly suited to embarrassing me: the Lost Legion.
The Lost Legion had begun as an Occitan special unit, like other monoculture special units within the CSPs (the Thorburger Pioneers, Chaka Zulu Scouts, Égalité Rainbow Rangers, and so on). But the Leghio Occitan had been disbanded after the Utilitopia Massacre during the Council intervention in the Caledon Revolution.
I had been in Utilitopia when it happened, on my very first diplomatic mission. The very building where Occitan
troops had killed forty-three civilians, most of them prostrate and screaming for mercy, had been my main base of operations.
Somehow, some of the Occitan Legion had found the resources to establish an extraterritorial colony in Union space. We knew their capital city was Masselha, that they called their culture Noucatharia, and that it was on a planet they had named Aurenga, but not which of many possible suns might be theirs.
“Giraut?"
“Sorry, Margaret, my mind was wandering."
“We could tell. Does anyone have any thoughts?"
“The most interesting thing is that it's so melodramatic,” Paxa observed. “As if—"
“Any other thoughts?” Margaret asked, cutting Paxa off.
“You just got one,” I said, “Possibly a good one."
Margaret glared at me. “If you had been listening, you would know this is the fourth time that Paxa has brought this up, and while we all agree with her, none of us, including Paxa, has been able to make any progress beyond the observation. And I think that if Paxa had actually had anything new to say, she would have begun with it."
Very long silence. Finally Paxa said, “Will you two please let it go? Giraut, she's right, I was repeating myself. Margaret, that was still rude."
“Was it? I'm sorry.” Margaret has a knack for apologies that drip poison. “Till we know what it's about, everything depends on where and when they contact Giraut. Does anyone here propose changing the basic plan?"
No one did.
“Then Giraut will go forward with recording sessions for the new material in Noupeitau, and the rest of you will hang around on the expense accounts until something happens. Paxa, would you like additional resources or changes of procedure?"
“Surely she can just send a memo,” I said, before Paxa walked into whatever trap Margaret was setting. I kept my tone cold. “As long as we all agree that I ought to stay alive, I think we can trust everyone's competence."
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