by Ken MacLeod
Darvin saw out of the corner of his eye a red glint in the sky and thought it was the landing-light of the airship they awaited, but as he looked up he saw it was only the gleam of the fire reflecting off the tethered blimp. It reminded him of the etheric reflection off the third moon. That passing thought stirred the same obscure excitement in his mind that he’d felt the day he’d invented the wind tunnel, and failed to invent the aeroplane.
He rocked forward on his haunches. Orro’s hand darted for the bone, then returned it disappointed. Darvin twitched his lips at his friend and stood up and walked slowly away into the dark. This time, he was determined not to let whatever insight he’d glimpsed flash away like a fish. Once outside the firelight he could see the stars, and the underside of the blimp. He sprang into the air and flapped upward, and turned. He soared above the fire — his friends looked up and called out — then began circling it, climbing in the warm thermal updraught until he was almost at the height of the blimp. He flew back and forth above the quiet, busy camp. Flying helped him to think, and there was objectivity in that view from a height. Height! That was it! Height and sight! He dropped.
He landed beside the fire in a whoosh of wings and a flurry of smoke and ash.
“Hey!” complained Kwarive, fanning the air in front of her eyes.
“Sorry.” Darvin settled beside her, put a wing around her, and spread the other wing and both hands before the fire to feel the warmth.
“What was that all about?” asked Nollam, who had meantime won the bone.
“Just a thought,” said Darvin. “One that might occur to a bright young tech like yourself. An idea that could get a man noticed.”
Nollam sucked a greasy finger and regarded him. “I’d be interested.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Darvin. “Maybe I’ll keep it to myself. Guard it, you might say, like some tasty morsel.”
Nollam tossed him the charred femur. “There’s some left.”
With a show of gallantry Darvin handed it to Kwarive.
“All right,” he said. “Far be it from me to pick your brains for military secrets. But the marrow of the thing, one might say, is point-to-point, line-of-sight communication. Hilltop to hilltop, like beacon fires. Now, I don’t ask you to say that’s what it is. All I’m saying is, if that’s all the Might is using it for they’re missing a trick.”
“Go on,” said Nollam, ears pricking.
“Today the message from the sky was received over a wide area, or so Markhan gave us to suppose. By receivers that were nowhere near within sight of each other.”
“They were all within sight of the third moon,” said Nollam. His ear twitched and his brows rose. “Aha! I see what you’re getting at, but we can’t put transmitters or transmission aerials in the sky.”
Darvin looked upwards, slowly enough to let Nollam track his gaze. The blimp glowed red above them.
“Can we not?” he said.
13 — Contact Clause
The summons had a priority override that lasered it through layer after layer of firewall: from the No-Trace on the recipient’s location, through the Do Not Disturb aura around his room and several subtler obstacles in his head, to finally penetrate the last barrier, sleep. Horrocks woke with heart pounding and eyes staring. In the dark a ghastly hallucination of the Oldest Man blazed in front of him, demanded his presence, and vanished.
The jolt of his awakening had disturbed Genome. She rolled, mumbling. Horrocks caressed her shoulders.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Conference call.”
“Talk quiet,” she said.
Her fingertips trailed across his back and thigh as he pushed away. He split the side of the permeable cocoon they’d shared and drifted across the still-dark room to the utility wall. The cocoon sealed itself again behind him. He docked with his clothes while sucking a hot-enough coffee. Its dim infrared lit his way to the hatch. The corridor’s daylight strip struck him like a rush, its wavelengths rebooting wakefulness faster than the black drug. He finger-thrust the wall and launched himself along; grabbed a handhold outside the first unoccupied nook, fifty metres along; swung in, braced himself against its curving walls like a child between the trunk and branch of a tree, and closed his eyes.
The summons’s track-back pulsed in front of him like a migraine. He tagged it and was yanked into a hasty telepresence. Constantine glowered from the far pole. Eleven other people were already there, of whom Horrocks recognised two by sight: Awlin Halegap, the speculator, and Amend Locke, the science-team boss for the Destiny II probe. A quick scan of their tags identified the others as team members or brokers in terrestrials. All science and finance, then; and all crew. All except himself were old hands.
“Jury is quorate,” said Constantine. “We thank the youngest member for his prompt arrival, all things considered.” The spark of humour faded as fast as Horrocks’s surge of alarm flared. A jury! And not one chosen by lot! Whatever this was, it was serious.
“We must proceed with all despatch,” Constantine continued. “Not fifteen minutes ago I learned, to my great displeasure and dismay, that the Destiny II probe has made contact with the inhabitants. More precisely, the inhabitants have made contact with it, and it has responded.”
Shouts rose all round; if it had been a real space, they would have echoed. Constantine ignored them and flashed a file into common view. The clamour died in a moment of silent study. The first picture was a white rectangle unequally divided by a jagged, curving black line with an isolated arrow-like shape well above it, somewhere about the middle. On to the rectangle, a second or two later, a coloured picture was overlain: a planetary survey photograph. Blue sea, green coast, brown desert. The jagged line fitted the coast, the arrow marked a spot in the desert. The image zoomed to the spot. Under maximum resolution it picked out a dusty polygon of low structures, which on enhancement resolved to buildings and ramps.
“The sketch-map was the signal, and the spot you’re looking at was the source,” said Constantine. The view pulled back from the first picture to include it, as a piece of white card or paper, in a raw bug’s-eye view of two of the bat people staring straight into camera. “The natives are using our own surveillance devices to communicate with us. The response from the orbiter was this…”
Horrocks almost laughed to see a prerecorded image of the Oldest Man himself in his best silk formals, announcing that the expedition came in peace and showing off a view of the interior of the sunliner, followed by a brief download of the ship’s specs and the latest news from the Red Sun system. That last was still running when Constantine flicked the view off.
“Who is responsible for this?” Constantine demanded.
“I am,” said Amend Locke. “You recorded the introduction for me about three hundred years ago. It’s the standard courtesy call to a claim-jumper or a data colony.”
“Yes, yes,” said Constantine. “I remember that. What I don’t remember is authorising its use here and now.”
“It’s a default,” said Amend Locke. “As soon as the probe detects a clear attempt to hail it, however obscure, it fires off the standard message.”
A flicker of corroborating data interchange accompanied the dialogue. Horrocks didn’t bother to do more than glance at it, but filed it for later.
“If there was a wall here,” said Constantine, “I swear I should now be banging my head against it. We knew by the time the probe went into orbit that we weren’t dealing with a claim-jump or a data colony. Why wasn’t that default… amended, Locke?”
“It was overlooked,” she said. “The responsibility is mine. The default is buried deep in the probe’s software and, well, with all the new information coming in we…”
“All right,” said Constantine, with a wave of the hand. “Next question. From a swift study of these latest pictures I see that the bugs are borne by some kind of beetle, big enough and common enough for the inhabitants to notice. How did that happen? And why didn’t we notice?”
“That’s straightforward,” said Hardcastle Wood, the biologist. “The bugs are adaptive and opportunistic. In all hitherto existing situations they’ve never had anything bigger to work with than single-celled organisms or slime moulds, and natural prominences — rocks, essentially — for their amplifiers. When the assemblers encountered a fast-breeding and ubiquitous insectoid they seized upon it. Likewise with trees. As for why we didn’t notice… the virtuality software is seamless independently of the quality of the incoming data, and, ah, the lay viewers just referred casually to ‘bugs,’ and we ourselves—”
“Defaults, defaults, everyone’s got defaults,” chanted Constantine. “Tell me about it. Don’t tell me about it. I know what fifteen thousand years of confirmed conjecture can do to harden paths and bury assumptions. And speaking of assumptions — I take it there is a size limit on these bugs? We are not talking about bat people, or even the little bat beasts, fluttering around with wires in their optics?”
“No,” said Wood. “Although if they were left long enough to mutate—” He looked thoughtful. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Good,” said Constantine. “Glad you’ve got that well in hand. Now: action?”
“We could cobble together a more comprehensible and apt message,” said Amend. “After all, now that we know they’ve detected us, we might as well talk back to them. There’s a standard CETI package somewhere deep in the vaults.”
“Riddled with defaults and assumptions, I’ll warrant,” said Constantine. “No, thank you. Let me remind you that the ship’s complement has yet to decide what we’re to do here. The matter is moot. I move that we terminate the message at once, and the surveillance.”
“The surveillance?” Hardcastle Wood asked, outraged.
“Yes. Burn out the bugs.” Constantine paused, frowning. “They do have a self-destruct mechanism?”
“Oh yes,” said Amend Locke. “It’s a default.” Constantine glared at her, but Horrocks could see in the interchange that Constantine had accepted the dig as payback for his earlier pun on her name.
“But why should we do it?” protested Wood. “Terminate the message, yes, but the surveillance?”
Emphatic nods all round, except from Horrocks and Constantine.
To Horrocks’s surprise, a prompt from Constantine flashed in front of his eyes: you tell them.
“Two reasons,” Horrocks said, before he’d thought of one. He paused and raised a finger to stall while he gathered his wits. “Ah, first, there’s no telling what the aliens will learn from studying the bugs, now that they’ve figured out what they are. They’ve grasped electronics but haven’t yet achieved miniaturized circuits, let alone nanotechnology. The bugs could inspire them to these and more, at an earlier and even less stable stage of development than our ancestors did. Second… this has more to do with us, but I think immersion in the Destiny II virtualities is becoming bad for morale.”
Constantine’s private ping flashed: Yes!!!
Which was more than Horrocks felt. He had made his second point without thinking, and without having thought of it before. But, now that he’d said it, it made sense of a lot of what he’d taken from his encounter with the Red Sun Circle, and with Atomic and Grant. It even made sense, at some still obscure level, of why he’d spent the night with Genome.
“Why do you say that?” asked Claudin Empirio, one of the scientists.
Over to you, Horrocks flashed to Constantine. He could see himself getting used to this mode of surreptitious, footnoted conversation.
“What our young colleague is driving at,” said Constantine, “is that immersion in the doubtless fascinating details of the lives of the bat people is undermining our objectivity. We are becoming fractious, my friends. We have decisions to make about what we do in this system. We already know all we need to know to make them. We already have far more data than we could process in a decade. Further immersion in Destiny II can serve only to raise the emotional temperature. Once more, I move to terminate the message and the surveillance.”
“May we take that in two parts?” asked Hardcastle Wood.
“No,” said Constantine. “If we don’t end the surveillance, it becomes the message — and one over which we have no control. Both parts stand or fall together.”
“Further point of order,” said Amend Locke. “If we burn out the bugs, other stuff is certain to burn. Damage to life and property is inevitable.”
“We must all accept full responsibility,” said Constantine. “Before the bat people themselves, if it should come to that. My whole case is that the consequences of leaving them in place could be incalculable and severe.”
This seemed to satisfy everyone, though Horrocks suspected it was because harm to the bat people did not seem real, and facing their justice — if they had such a thing, which they probably did — a remote prospect indeed.
A minute or so of discussion ensued, all electronic and too fast for Horrocks to follow. It reminded him of the final moments of the wrestling bouts he’d seen in White City. The result was as swift, and as final. The vote went nine to four in favour, with Wood, Empirio, Locke, and Halegap against.
Constantine’s finger stabbed at a virtual key somewhere the second the vote was taken.
“Done,” he said. He smiled around at everyone. “Jury dissolved. Now it is we who are on trial. Goodbye and good luck.”
The virtuality broke up. Horrocks blinked out of it and gazed for a while past his knees at the wall of the nook. Then he elbowed out of it and into the now busy corridor and joined the traffic flow in the direction back to his room. He wanted one last untrammelled fuck before he became notorious.
14 365:05:25 10:20
It’s like being jolted awake from a dream.
And then to be shown a glimpse of another dream, and to have that dashed too. The Yellow Wall is full of angry voices and quiet weeping. Not from me.
Of course I’m furious about them crashing the virtualities. I’m even more upset about them breaking off the contact. The bat people contacted us! Surely that counts for something about their maturity? Their desire to learn from us? That map with the arrow in the middle — what else could it have been but an invitation! This is where we are; please drop in! I’m shaking with rage at the jury, especially Horrocks Mathematical. I’d have expected better of him.
But I must stay calm, and so must you. A lot of you are outraged about the decision, and so am I, but we should base our arguments on facts. And one thing that is not a fact is what many of you believe: that the decision was illegal.
It wasn’t.
So to calm ourselves down, let’s think about the ship’s constitution. I started reading up about the Contract after coming across the contact clause. (Still no response on that, by the way. Don’t any of you care!) You’ll notice I said reading about. Reading the Contract itself would take years. In fact, only software can read it all and understand it, and that software is itself very old and much modified. (You see where this is going? But that’s a problem for future generations — who will of course be ever so much smarter than us. We hope.) The Contract is vast, and it’s vast for a reason, as I’ve found. I found it by starting with kids’ stuff that I learned back on the estate, and refreshing my knowledge of that and working my way up.
Forming a ship’s complement partakes both of launching a company and founding a new world. Over fourteen millennia it’s been done many, many times, and we’re all descended from people on ships whose Contract worked; or, if it went wrong, could be changed to make it work. Successful changes became incorporated in other ships’ Contracts, and so it went on. Social evolution!
That’s why the Contract is full of patches and makeshifts and amendments and exceptions, like very old software or the DNA in a natural genome, and far too long to read. But the basics are simple, robust, time-tested, and hard-wired. You start with one or two or three hundred thousand people who (hope they) are willing to spend about four centuries in each other’s company, completely is
olated (apart from comms) from everyone else in the universe. They’re willing to spend that time turning a gigantic reaction-mass tank into a comfortable habitat, by means of turning it again and again into properties that inevitably end up as reaction mass. Along the way, some might do very well, and others — by bad luck or incompetence — might lose out. Which is, as you know, all well and good and the natural order of things, but for some reason people are a little unwilling to sign up for it (and when they do, in desperate situations, the ships go bad; we know that now).
Hence the Contract. What it boils down to is that nobody can end up owning nothing, nobody (no individual, no group, and no everybody) can end up owning everything, and every adult gets a say in decisions. Not all decisions (which would get you back to everybody owning everything) and not even all big decisions, but all decisions “within everyone’s competence and wherein everyone has standing” (it says here).
Such decisions, it turns out, are few. (Compared to all decisions taken, that is. The Ship’s Council is not short of work.)
Others are up to individuals and smaller groups, and one type of group is the jury.
And yes, I’m afraid it is within the competence of a jury of scientists and financiers and rocking Horrocks Mathematical to decide to trash our virtualities from Destiny II.
Which doesn’t mean we have to agree with it, or let it stand, and I for one don’t mean to do one or the other. Neither should you. Not because it’s illegal, but because it’s insincere. The reasons given in the public record aren’t those for which the decision was taken. Nor do the spoken deliberations have anything to do with the real arguments that prevailed. These, of course, remain in people’s heads, where not even a Council subpoena can get at them. We’re all watching the Council debates at the moment, but I can’t help thinking they’re debating without all the relevant information.
Look at the transcript! Do they really expect us to believe that the probe team didn’t know about the prerecorded message? That they didn’t know the bugs would parasitise large organisms? That the aliens would find the bugs? Or, for that matter, that they decided so casually to start fires on Destiny II? What really went on at that jury was not what we’ve been told.