by Ken MacLeod
None of them made to get off the train at Horrocks’s destination, Big Foot. He uncurled himself from his seat and walked to the door with as much dignity as he could muster. The platform was empty. He noticed a lift to ground level, but decided to take the stairs, and this time to take them upright. Clutching the handrail and moving hand over hand, step by step, he made his way to the ground. There he sat on one of the lower steps and contemplated his surroundings and his next move. In front of the station stood a couple of self-driving wheeled vehicles with bubble canopies. One of them started up and rolled over to where he sat.
“Do you need a ride?” it asked.
“No, thank you.”
The machine backed off.
A path led from the station’s paved concourse through a couple of hundred metres of rolling grassland divided by a stream of water and dotted with clumps of trees and shrubs. Beyond that lay the Big Foot estate. Low wood or stone buildings set in gardens with lakes fed by the water stream formed its main living area. Its design drew the eye: curves and lines, light and shade, rough and smooth were integrated as in a complex abstract sculpture. This area was overlooked from a central rise by an imposing three-storey house about fifty metres long, built from wooden planks, with tall and wide windows and a verandah at the front. Somewhere a dog barked. Ponies cropped the park. Strange aromas, not all of them appetising, wafted from the low sheds that housed the food synthesisers. Off to one side lay a long semicylindrical segmented hut of glassy black ceramic. That would be the incubator, shielding racks of artificial wombs in a warm reddish dark. To Horrocks’s eyes there was something larval about it, almost sinister in its insectile insistence on reproduction. In the cones, women carried their own foetuses, but they didn’t have the acceleration field and the necessity of rapid increase to contend with.
The estate would have looked even more impressive if its pattern hadn’t been repeated, with variations, for kilometres around in all directions. There was something of a relief to the eye in seeing in the far distance, hanging like a pictorial map on the upward curve of the ground, the closer-together and taller buildings of a town. Imagine growing up in a place like this! The first thing you’d want to do, as soon as you could if not sooner, would be to get out. For the first time Horrocks felt what he’d long understood: the outward urge of the ship generation.
This was what he had come for. Something like this. He turned away and climbed back up the steps to the platform and waited for the next forward train.
14 364:09:27 20:38
Sorry about the two-and-a-half-month hiatus, everyone. (Note to self: months, huh? Re primary origin myth question.) I’ve been too busy living to biolog. It’s all very well for adults, who can stick their thoughts on a site for anyone to see. Well, not their thoughts and not anyone, but you know what I mean, and frankly subvocalizations and saved sights and sounds and smells and such seem like cheating compared to writing. When all that adult stuff comes on in my head I’m going to keep on writing. I promise to you my faithful reader(s).
So… to catch up. I’ve turned fifteen and I’ve moved to town. Only the nearest town to Big Foot, mind you, but it’s surprising how different living among ten thousand is from living with five hundred. The town is called Far Crossing — another of these pioneer names — and it absolutely rocking fucks, as I heard somebody say the day I arrived. It’s nearly all ship generation, most of them a bit older than me, not that that’s a drawback. And the buildings and the streets are dense. You can walk a hundred metres and not see a flower or a blade of grass or another living thing except people, and that’s not a drawback either. You appreciate these things more when you’re not surrounded by them all the time. When we go out we’ll have to get used to that, for a while anyway. It’s like with the shops. When you’ve had everything you want all your life you appreciate shops. They’re full of things you don’t want but somebody does. Most of them are owned, if that’s the word, by people who’ve thought of or made something that’s never been made before, and they sell them. Like, you know, somebody might sell space and time on a training habitat, but it’s strange to see small material objects being sold.
Even stranger to buy them. I now have more bracelets and pendants and hair-slides and clothes and would you believe shoes than I ever imagined I would want, and that’s the point I think, I would never have imagined them. I used to get given gifts or take what I fancied from the estate store or make things myself. Even my own business was nothing to do with stuff like this. Atomic’s Enterprise (now Magnetic’s Magic) used to (still does) trade in phenotypic expression derivatives, which is something so rocking abstract that it bores even me.
But enough about me. You know what’s dragged me back to this, it’s what everyone else is talking about too. Doesn’t matter. Someday we’ll look back on this. Eventually everybody in our light-cone will know about this and wonder how it felt, so I think it’s worth noting our first reactions for posterity and our future selves.
This morning I rolled out of bed and made a coffee to wake up and went down to the cafe along the street to have a proper breakfast. There I met Grant—
Let me tell you about Grant. I met him the day I arrived. The thing is, Far Crossing isn’t on the monorail. It isn’t even on one of the roads. You either arrive by air or on foot, slogging across the estates. Guess which way I arrived?
So there I was, leaning on my rucksack where the road runs out at the edge of town, looking along the streets and up at the towers like, well, like someone who has just walked in from a little estate out in the middle of nowhere. Somebody said hello. He was standing in front of me, a boy about my height and age, with very short black hair and a wispy beard. His eyes were very dark, he had broad shoulders and thick biceps and he was wearing a loose black T-shirt and long shorts and scuffed sandals.
“You’ve just arrived?” he said.
I looked down at the pack. “You guessed?”
He stuck out a hand. “Grant Cornforth Dialectical,” he said. He kind of winced. “Sorry about the name, but it’s mine.”
“Atomic Discourse Gale,” I said, shaking his hand.
He brightened. “I can see we’re going to get on well.”
There’s a notion that gets kicked around the cohort that our names have some occult connection with our genotypes, and that names that seem to go together indicate compatibility. It’s not one I’ve ever found plausible, and anyway atomic and dialectic are counterposed. Everyone knows that.
“Maybe,” I said. “Pleased to meet you. Been here long?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Weeks and weeks.”
I stooped to lift the pack.
“Let me take that,” he said.
“There’s no need.”
“I need the exercise. Please.”
“All right,” I said. In truth I was glad to be rid of it. I accompanied him into town. Small parks and plazas buzzed with people building ecologies and machines. The buildings were grey and very smooth. They went up and up. Some were angular, others all sweeping curves and elliptical windows and cup-shaped balconies, many of the shapes priapic or vulval or arboreal, a stone dream of the organic.
“Strange smell in the air,” I said.
“Concrete,” he said. He waved a hand at the buildings. “Structural material.”
“So that’s how it’s done.”
“Right. I find it interesting because that’s what I’m learning: structural engineering. You can use some concrete mixes in vacuum, you know.”
“Water could be a problem.”
“Ice and compression. Proven tech.” He looked at me. “So, what do you do?”
“I used to speculate in organic futures,” I said. “When I was younger, I mean,” I added. I knew it sounded tame and obvious, kids’ stuff about, well, kids. “I recently did my micro-gee training and I’m busy trying to plan my future habitat and put together a team. And I write.”
“Biolog?”
“Yes. ‘Learning the World.�
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“I’ll check it out,” he said, sounding as if he wouldn’t. “I write too.”
“Not a biolog?” I guessed.
“Just the minimum. If anybody wants to get to know me they can rocking well come and meet me. What I’m really writing is a novel.”
More people say that than say they’re biologging. It’s a disease.
“What’s it about?” I asked. I was looking at shop windows and avoiding collisions. Grant was looking straight ahead and letting other people do the collision avoidance.
“Let’s go in here,” he said, stopping and indicating a cafe. “It’ll take a while to tell you about it.”
I didn’t have anything better to do, so I agreed. The place was bright, with yellow tables and blue crockery. It was about half full, with a dozen or so people at various tables. A wall screen at the back was showing airsurfing, or some such sport. The counter was self-service. I got — bought, I should say — a chicken salad and orange juice. Grant shrugged off the pack beside a vacant table and bought a heaped plate of hot processed meats and fried potatoes and a pot of coffee. I could see why he’d jumped at the chance of exercise.
“So tell me about your novel,” I said, when we’d eaten our first few bites.
He leaned forward, gesturing with his fork. I leaned back. He took the hint.
“It’s about the previous generation,” he said. “Our parents’ generation.”
“Oh,” I said. “Old people.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “Nobody else is interested in it. But there must be stories to tell. Think about it, four hundred years! Cities being built and destroyed! Intrigues, affairs, deals! Secrets! Their past before they took ship!”
“Yes,” I said, “but who would read it?”
“The next generation,” he said. “The one after us.”
I leaned back again, this time for a different reason.
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “The old people will be, like, legendary, and we’ll—”
“We’ll just be boring parents. Exactly.”
“So how much have you written?”
“I’ve done a lot of research,” he said. “It’s not easy. I think, well, to be honest I’d have to have all my faculties before actually, you know, writing about—”
I confess I laughed. He looked taken aback.
“You could write about them from the outside,” I said. “Don’t worry about their inner life, for now.”
He blinked. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Thanks.”
But I don’t think he has done anything about it. He showed me around the town and helped me to find a place to stay. I met him at a few parties, and sometimes, as now, in the same cafe.
“Morning,” he said, this morning. He was writing.
I sat down with my pot of coffee and plate of berrybread. Grant absently helped himself to a chunk of the latter and went back to tapping the table. Naked people were doing weird stuff on the screen. I’d finished my first cup before he stopped.
“Working on your novel?” I asked.
“Oh, no.” He waved away the idea. “I’m writing up a habitat proposal. For IC413.”
“Ambitious,” I said. “A low number rock.”
The ship radar has been busy the past few months. Kuiper-belt and asteroid-belt objects are now up in the thousands. Most of the early — thus large and/or near — ones have been tabbed.
“It’s more than a rock,” Grant said. “It’s got everything. Metals, volatiles, carbon…”
“And nobody’s tabbed it?”
He gave me an almost adult look. “It’s not AB, it’s 1C.”
“All the same…”
“It’s a waterworld moon, if you can’t be bothered to look it up. A very small one.”
“No wonder it’s unclaimed.”
“It could become a resort. That’s my proposal.”
“A resort? It’ll be decades before anyone can afford a resort.”
“Yes,” he said, “but think about what this could offer them when they do. It’s a long-term investment.”
“In what? A place to watch algae patches from orbit?”
“Access to the waterworld,” he said. “Build a skyhook down. Sailing, swimming…”
“Swimming? In ten gravities?”
“All right then, surfing. Extreme sports.”
I just snorted. “Drowning is extreme, yes!” I was a little disappointed in him. I’d been toying with the idea of asking him on to my team, though I was sure he intended to found his own. I’ve no intention of going near a gravity well, let alone building a business out of lowering people into one, and the second-deepest in the system at that. I was telling him all this at perhaps unnecessary length and with uncalled-for vehemence when an unusual irritating chime came from the wall screen. Forty-Five Free-Fall Love Positions, or whatever the morning programme was, vanished and the World Service Announcement screen came up. Last time I’d seen that, and heard the chime, was when the news about the electromagnetic spectrum sources came through. I felt a pang in my belly.
Seeing the introduction didn’t make it go away: all about how the probes en route can send back pictures which — because they’re so far apart — can be combined and processed and jiggered with to form an image like what you’d get from an enormous telescope. “Let go my hand,” Grant said. “Sorry,” I said. He sucked his knuckles. Then the first picture came up, of a blue hemisphere whorled with white clouds. We just had time to catch breath when the second came up, and stayed. Strip the cloud layer, enhance, and there it is: a hemisphere almost filled with land.
“Wow,” said Grant. “A supercontinent!”
“Not quite,” I pointed out. “Look, the top half, you can see it’s breaking up.” I counted. “Six chunks. Island continents.”
“Yes, yes,” Grant said. I could hear he was still sore about his fingers. “The southern one on its own is a supercontinent. And the others are so close that a bird could fly across the gaps.”
I leaned back, smiling. “Someday there might be birds. Maybe we should give it to the crows.”
Grant was still staring at the screen. People were shouting and speculating. I was too entranced even to pull out my slate. The brown and green of continents, divided by the narrow blue channels and surrounded by the wide blue sea.
“Green,” Grant said. “Lots of it. Inland.”
“That’s a lot of algae,” I said.
He stared at me. “You get algae mats on oceans, not on land. We’re looking at vegetation. We’re looking at plants!”
It was then that I saw what I was looking at: a rocky terrestrial with a multicellular biosphere, the first in fourteen thousand years.
“Another Earth,” Grant breathed.
I struggled to place the word, then remembered. It’s an archaic name for the Moon’s primary.
“Oh,” I said.
Horrocks Mathematical had a gene complex that processed iron molecules in his head. It lined them up in a delicate tracery that intercepted electromagnetic waves and transmitted electrical currents to his occipital lobes, where they stimulated neurons that formed images in his visual system. The gene complex was activated at puberty and the resulting structure reached maturity several years afterwards. It was not considered suitable for children and adolescents. It was called television.
He also had natural neural connections formed out of experience, like everyone else. His experiences, also like everyone else’s, were unique. Something in that background of experience — it could have been his studies of biology, his fascination with terrestrial planets, his skills at habitat construction, his gambler’s eye on the markets, or all of them together or something altogether else — was bugging him. Whenever he looked at a representation of the signals from the rocky world, he felt a sensation in his head akin to an itch, or to an incipient sneeze, or to the feeling that you have forgotten or overlooked something vital and can’t for the life of you imagine what.
&
nbsp; 6 — The Queen of Heaven’s Daughters
The University Museum was a tall cylindrical structure, ringed within by galleries and bristled without by tubes of wood and ceramic that regulated the humidity of its air circulation. Inside, the drip and sigh of this great battery of devices merged to a single vast whisper like a giant librarian’s hush. The air was clean and clear, scented of timber and water, and carried the merest whiff of the green algae that flourished under the runoffs of the pipes.
Darvin paced along the Gallery of the Southern Rule, glancing at the treasures of leatherwork and metalwork, of chiselled stone and hammered steel on display. The single great continent south of the equator, on the other side of the Middle Channel’s hot, stormy, narrow sea, had laid the basis for an antiquity and continuity of civilization denied by a more fragmented geography to the reaches and realms of the north. No Long Night — and no Dawn Age, either — had interrupted its protracted and undivided day. Nature itself seemed grander and older there. Gigantic predators, similar to the long-extinct monsters whose log-sized, stone-soaked bones sometimes weathered out of the north’s ravines, still haunted its uplands, and preyed on horizon-darkening, earth-shaking herds of likewise gargantuan grazers, likewise long gone elsewhere.
At the cabinets of literature and painting — the distinction was contested, even by experts — Darvin stopped. Parchment scrolls many wingspans long were the main display; every day or two, a museum attendant would wind every scroll forward, to avoid excessive exposure to the daylight. Intricate and colourful, crowded with figurative scenes that sharpened into structures of glyphs before the eye, and with lines of lettering that rioted into characters and animalcules in lush symbolic landscapes even as one tried to descry their rhythm, they glittered with a sensibility at once grave and gay, an outlook solemn and frivolous, a theology horrific and humorous, a philosophy perceptive and pedantic. Darvin hurried past them, seeking another exhibit which he recalled having noticed on his introductory tour.