by Ken MacLeod
Horrocks Mathematical’s head rang with incoming messages. Filtering them made it ache. A scanty sampling had determined him to ignore most of them. He now knew what Atomic had meant by “hate mail.” The strange thing was that here in the Engineer’s Dream, where he’d taken refuge, he was the toast of the company.
“This’ll get the little breeders back to work,” someone had said. The sentiment was general. Micro-gee trainers had seen a significant slackening of business as the alien virtualities had gripped the ship generation. Constructors’ orders for seeding vessels had dried to a far lower level than even the preliminary trickle that would be expected at this stage of the process.
Horrocks closed his eyes and shook his head. He suspected he had drunk too much. When he opened his eyes he found Genome looking at him with curiosity and concern. “You can turn it off, you know,” she said.
“What?”
“Your headphone. The messages will just reroute to your externals.”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
He’d never had so much incoming to handle; the bombardment itself had prevented him from recalling how to cope with it. He closed his eyes again, focused his mind, searched his options, found the choice and made it. For some reason the cutout presented itself to his natural sensorium as an aural hallucination of a distinct clunk. The silence was joyous, the relief ecstatic. “It’s like when you’re a little kid,” said Genome, “and you bang your head on the wall just for the feeling you get when you stop.”
“You did that?” said Horrocks, baffled.
“When I was very small,” said Genome. She looked like she wanted to change the subject. “Speaking of kids, your favourite flatfoot has been badmouthing you again.”
Horrocks swigged. “I’m not surprised. Nor interested.”
“Take a look anyway,” said Genome. She sent him a ping and outlined with her forefingers a rectangle in the air; the ping carried the data, the gesture evoked the page for him. As he scanned the text a cross-reference niggled at his mind, too persistent to brush away. There was some real urgency there, of the kind that most people would blush to attach to a mere angry note.
“She sent me a call, too,” said Horrocks. He grinned at Genome. “Mind if I share it? I might need some moral support.”
She squeezed his shoulder. “Go ahead.”
Horrocks sent a tightly specified query into his log of stored calls. It returned as text. Atomic had wasted no bandwidth on voice, let alone video. That was what he thought first; then he noticed the heavy cladding of encryption around the message: she’d had no bandwidth to waste.
“Hello Horrocks,” she’d written. “If I know you, what went on in that jury went right over your head, just as it would have gone over mine. The difference is, that you have it in your head. I urge you to take some time to take a look at it. When you’ve done that, I’m sure you’ll know what to do, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to influence you. But do please take a look. Regards, Atomic Discourse Gale.”
“At least she’s polite,” said Genome.
“There is that,” said Horrocks. “I expected my ears to burn.”
“Are you going to do what she asked?”
“Yes,” said Horrocks, dreading the prospect of wading through screen upon screen of elliptical, high-density discourse. “When I’m sober.”
Genome ran a hand along her bandolier of inhalers and extracted a slim green cylinder.
“Snort this,” she said, holding it up in a billow of blue sleeve. It smelt like pine.
Horrocks felt as if he’d wakened from a deep, refreshing sleep eager to tackle an absorbing job of work. The room became sharp and clear, a tawdry hang of red-tinged light and lolling bodies and loud, empty talk.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Genome.
“Sorry,” said Horrocks. “It isn’t you, it’s—”
“I know,” said Genome. She gave him a conniving smile and a hard shove. “Go away and read your transcripts before it wears off.”
Her push sent him to the exit. He caught the jamb on the way through, swung around and thrust off, looking for somewhere quiet. The corridor was wide, elliptical in section, and heavy with colour-coded utility piping and small bulk transport conveyor belts. A practice-habitat component a couple of metres across moved past him, its glum owner straphanging behind. It was heading away from the locks that led to the main cylinder. Horrocks drifted, kicked, drifted again. He noticed an unobtrusive tag marking an access tube that went off to one side in an inward direction. It labelled it as leading to the engine vault.
The engine vault was a place for quiet contemplation and discreet assignation, a place where people tended to go when they were very young or very old. Like the rare transparent panels in the outside of the cone where one could look at the stars as directly as it was possible to do through metre upon metre of flawless sheet diamond, and experience — or at any rate, appreciate — the very photons from the stars themselves impact upon one’s very own retinae, the engine vault was a site of natural wonder, and one whose awe few presumed to blunt with undue familiarity.
He jackknifed in to the tube and pushed along it. After twenty metres he reached the open far end. He jammed his hands against the sides and moved forward so that his head projected out into the vault. He found himself somewhere near the middle of the wall of the vast space, a couple of hundred metres above the floor and as much below the ceiling. Other such pinprick holes were visible here and there on the inward-curving sweep of the wall below as black dots. A few tens of metres from his face, the engine loomed like a cliff, stretching off into a blue-hazed distance half a kilometre on either side. In its complexity too it looked like a cliff-face, but Horrocks knew that every curve, every hollow, every flange and protrusion, every minute pit in it was not the random result of weathering but features whose function he could not guess, but might some day centuries hence aspire to learn.
Sublime as the sight was, it took a knowledge of what it did to take the full measure of its magnificence. Like its polar counterpart in the rearward cone, the titanic engine was a cosmogonic machine. At its core was a process that — second by second when it powered the ship’s flight, hour by hour when, as now, it powered only the sunline — compacted the equivalent of a multi-megaton nuclear explosion into a space the size of a hydrogen atom. Its primary effect was to accelerate the reaction mass to relativistic velocities. As a side effect, invisible but inevitable, it generated universes. From each compacted explosion, like a stray spark from a hammer, a new singularity exploded out of space-time and inflated in an instant to give birth to a new cosmos. Some inconceivably minute fraction of the energy of that inflation could be tapped to make the engine self-sustaining. Invented in the Moon Caves, the cosmogonic engine had given man the stars. At one level efficient beyond cavil, on another it was the most profligate of man’s devices: it blew multiple universes like bubbles, for the mere sake of moving mass, and at an average speed of 0.01 c at that.
Horrocks gave these considerations a moment of due respect, wedged himself comfortably in the hole, accessed the transcript files in his mind and settled down to read. It didn’t take him long to discover that the only thing he could reliably make sense of were the names. The actual dialogue was so elaborate, so allusive, so technical and at the same time so playful that it would have taken him years to parse it, decades to uncover evidence of a conspiracy or a hidden agenda. For all he could tell, this entire arcane undertow to the exoteric proceedings of the jury might have served only to reinforce and document what had been spoken in the open. After struggling with it for a while, he pasted the entire transcript to a call and sent it to Atomic. “Do what you want with this,” he said.
14 365:05:25 18:15
I’m in a dilemma. A fix. A trap. A cleft stick.
I have what may be incontrovertible evidence that the jury was a sham and that some elements in the crew have been less than candid with the rest of us.
I have every reaso
n to think that I was meant to get and release this information, and that doing so will only advance the next item on someone’s agenda.
But if I don’t, then I’ll be party to something else. Some other twist. No matter which way I turn, I’m advancing someone else’s purposes, wittingly or not.
I’ll have to think about this and get back to you.
14 365:05:25 19:20
All right. Here it is. I’m releasing this to all channels and all newslines and to the Council’s live feedback. Read this if you can make sense of it.
[Link to attached documentation.]
Here’s my educated guess.
As I’ve told you before, and as you can easily see from the public record, most of the founder generation — which means, let’s be clear, most of the voting-age population, what the Contract calls the Complement — are interested in a moratorium on colonization. Most of the ship generation, to put it mildly, aren’t. What we hadn’t factored in was that the crew are on our side in this; they tend to steer clear of public debates, so it wasn’t as obvious as it should have been.
Obviously, these are crude generalizations, but the breakdown of consensus is along the following divisions:
The founders are going to be in this system a long time. They have a lot of speculative and venture capital riding on our projects, but for the long term, stability is their watchword. They want — need — to be absolutely sure things are not going to blow up with the locals before we venture forth. They also have, it’s fair to say, a genuine humanitarian — if that’s the word — concern about the locals. They don’t want some ghastly global conflict on their consciences, and nor should they, and nor do I.
We, dear readers, have a rather different calculus of concern. We want to get out there, and we’re confident we can handle the consequences. I mean, come on! In a decade or two we’ll have settled a good tenth of the asteroids, industrialised most of the moons, and have advanced projects under way around the gas giant and the waterworld. We’ll have a power station on the mercurial that’ll outshine the bat people’s global energy output every second. We’ll have started building a long tube. And with all that we can’t even intimidate them into behaving decently — to each other, and to us? Let alone what our power and example of peaceful cooperation and progress could do to show them the way.
The crew have their own interest and their own code. They want us out there, because they need us to harvest the resources and breed the replacement population for the next journey. They have no long-term investments outside the ship. They don’t plan to stick around for long, and to them — marvellous as the discovery of aliens is — our dealings with each other and with the bat people are just one more instance of the sort of intrasystem bickering they’ve made it their life’s business and the habit of centuries to walk away from. (If you already feel that way yourself, consider joining the crew. A minority of every ship generation does, just as a minority of crew become system-settlers.)
So, on this issue, the crew are on the same side as the ship generation.
The Destiny II virtualities became an arena of that conflict of interest. Remember I warned that we would get very frustrated without something to channel our energies and urge to explore? The virtualities were on the way to becoming just that: we were all slacking off on our projects and exploring Destiny II. It’s not just that the founders want us immersed in virtualities until the bat people are set on some kind of stable path. It’s not just cynical. By understanding the bat people and the planet in more depth, we’d be better prepared to contact them, communicate with them, and if necessary intervene when the time came to do so. Who knows how long that would be — years? decades? But until then, the founders want to avoid contact, and any too obvious activity in the system, at almost any cost.
Some well-placed people in the crew, I suspect, have done their best to rock this.
What I can’t understand is why they summoned Horrocks to the jury, unless they knew he’d leak the proceedings — the real ones — and wanted him to do so. They must want the founders and the Council to know. Why?
Send me your ideas.
14 365:05:26 00:00
To the reader: This message was not posted by the author of this biolog. It is being posted to all channels of live communication simultaneously. This biolog and all other private one-to-many channels are temporarily suspended with immediate effect. Private (one-to-one) communications are not affected or monitored. For the next twelve hours, only emergency calls are being routed. A state of emergency exists. The contact clause has been invoked. For documentation and Contract verification, query ship memory on relevant phrases. For further information, please locate and use regular public news channels. Expect service interruptions.
14 — The Extraordinary and Remarkable Ship
In the third outer-month after the turning of the year, in the early spring, a ship flying the golden lizard pennant of the Southern Rule sailed up the Broad Channel from the west. It made port first at Low Lassir, the great harbour of Gevork, linked by river to its inland capital; then after three days of lading and unlading tacked across the channel and — somewhat to the surprise of informed observers — made for the jetty at the mouth of Long Finger River at Five Ravines.
Among the low barges, grubby coalers, and gay sailboats that shared that backwater, the ship stood out like a lordly roost above stables. Its steam engine gave off little smoke, and its propulsion churned the sea at greater depth than any known propeller. Its sails rose bright and white in odd-angled but harmonious shapes, like pieces of a geometric puzzle. Though its hull and superstructure were wooden, and its paint gaudy, its lines displayed something of the elegance of a leaping fish and the camber of a well-poised wing. As soon as its topmast rose above the horizon it attracted attention; by the time its hull was in full view it was an indispensable sight for anyone with the least pretension to being abreast of events; and when it sailed in to the harbour it had almost as many adult sightseers circling its masts at a respectful and admiring distance as it had screaming kits chasing the sea flitters that followed in its wake.
Before it had hove to, an eager crowd lined the jetty. Every merchant of drugs and spices in town had sent at least a boy with a list and a line of scrip; ladies and gentlemen of fashion hastened to the quay in hope of fine ribbons, bright buckles, keen blades, and grotesque belts; reporters from the local press came in search of distant news and outlandish opinion; draughtsmen from the cheaper journals did not scruple to snatch the sheets of newsprint in which the wares were wrapped, and steal from their coloured woodcuts inspiration; students and scholars sought exotica and erotica. Few in that crowd were disappointed, and fewer still noticed a member of the ship’s company balance on the rail, peer this way and that, check a bearing with tilted eye and levelled compass and an investigative sniff at the air, then take deliberate wing to the university quarter.
Darvin watched the students who had attended his lecture swirl skyward, shuffled his notes together, and sighed. Most of the students might have understood his presentation of the method of estimating stellar distances by parallax, but he was certain that some would not. A few essays would come his way explaining that it was done by looking at stars through binoculars and closing one eye at a time. He switched off the projector, stuffed his notes in his belt pouch, and began clambering up the expanding concentric rings of the lecture tower. He didn’t have the energy to take a running jump into the air.
The winter months had been trying. Since the collapse of the contact he had not been called upon to do anything for Project Signal. Debarred from publicising his only-significant discovery, the Object, Darvin had lost enthusiasm for his search for the hypothetical outer planet. That research project falling fallow, he’d turned more of his time over to teaching. It was a measure of his avoidance of contention that he conducted, not advanced seminars with his peers who might have shown interest in his own work, but lectures to novice students. Their reminders of himself a few
years earlier irritated and depressed him.
Orro, on the other wing, had spent half his time away on aeronautical research, at some distant strip in the desert. On his returns to the university he’d been too preoccupied with catching up with his teaching — about which he was conscientious — to say much, even of the little the project’s secrecy permitted. Once, after a second or third stumblefruit, he had confessed to feeling burdened by the deaths of two test pilots in flying machines of his design. He understood perfectly the moral logic of his innocence: he had given the designs his best, the pilots were enthusiastic volunteers who knew the risks, and they were all working at the limits of the known; but he could not shake off the sense of culpability. The lucid imperatives of civil and indeed military ethics warred in his conscience with the gallant, foolish ethos of the sabreur.
Halfway up the slope of circular rails Darvin clutched with his feet, leaned forward, and launched off. He swooped, then climbed, and flitted out between the lip of the pit and its canopy. As soon as he was out of the tower’s shadowy interior, with the sun on his face and the fresh wind rushing through his fur, he felt better. As he banked towards the Faculty of Impractical Sciences he spotted a new and tall ship down at the quay. He guessed from its lines that it was a Southern Rule ship, and then noted with satisfaction the long triangle of the banner that confirmed his guess: green, with a gold wavy line that he couldn’t make out in detail at this distance, but knew to represent a stylised lizard, symbolic of the Southern Rule’s vaunted antiquity. He made a mental note to visit it later, and dived to the department’s ledge.