Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  Music thudded or moaned from every shopfront and open window, or so it seemed. The air floated pheromones of frustration and molecules of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens. The people in the street affected in their attire a studied casualness — space-rigger fatigues, mesh and nanofibre — or the louche, bedraggled formality of ill-matched, half-fastened outfits like those of people returning drunk from a party. Some of them, Horrocks realised with disdain, were returning drunk from parties. It was the middle of the afternoon.

  He felt pinched and short of the ready. The stuff in the shops was out of his reach. Six months of seeing terrestrials stock tank and not much in the way of training fees had left him, not poor, but cost-conscious in a way he hadn’t been before. The thought of Constantine’s scheme put a bounce in his step.

  The Yellow Wall held a surprise. It had changed in a different direction. Most of the tables were occupied by two or three people, but it was as quiet as a library. A lot of reading and writing was going on. Some heads were even bent over physical books: pages printed out and bound in codices. Horrocks had come across this before, as a work-around for certain access restrictions. He couldn’t see it as anything but bad for the eyesight.

  Atomic sat alone near the window. She stared in front of her, fingers tapping, a neglected coffee cooling. Her hair was tied up by a complex braid of threads, her makeup colours clashed, and she wore a thin vest and long shorts. A bulky crew-surplus jacket hung on the seatback.

  Her eyes blinked and refocused as he sat down. He had two fresh coffees; he pushed one across the table.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he said before she could say anything, and before he had thought of what to say. Her smile surprised him, but it conveyed detached amusement more than welcome.

  “I knew you’d be back,” she said. “What brings you here this time? Another message from Synchronic?”

  “No, no, nothing to do with her. And no message. Just an idea.”

  Eyes narrow, seen through a wisp of steam. “What kind of idea?”

  “One that’s been kicked about in the crew quarters for a while,” he said. “You know I got a lot of stick for supporting the embargo, though what I did on the jury kind of offsets that.”

  Atomic snorted. “Not as far as I’m concerned!”

  “I know,” he said. “Anyway, we’re all hurting from the embargo. I am, for sure. By this stage we should be raking in asteroid organics, and construction consultancies and training fees. Some of us were grumbling about all this when somebody pointed out that we can get hold of massive chunks of asteroids and chondrites and cometary dirty ice and so forth, in vacuum and free fall, without going outside the ship.”

  “Where?”

  “In the reaction-mass tanks in the cones. They’re not exactly a reserve, but they’re a bit extra over and above what was in the cylinder. They were full at the start, and now they’re much depleted, but there’s a good bit of rock and ice still in there.”

  She gave him a sceptical smile. “Oh, come on, what does that add up to — a few boulders?”

  He pulled over the cold cup, dipped his finger in, and drew a triangle on the table, about ten centimetres to a side, and dropped a perpendicular from the apex. “That has the proportions about right,” he said. “The sides represent the space that’s used around the surface and rear of the cone, for living space and machinery and so on. The perpendicular contains the engine, and more living quarters and amenities. The empty spaces stand for the tank. So we’re looking at a conical volume sixty-odd kilometres across the base, less the spaces I mentioned.” He looked up. “You do the math.” He noticed her gaze go blank. “I didn’t mean literally.”

  “How much rock is in there?”

  He shrugged. “Millions of tons. The tanks aren’t full up. Maybe a tenth of the volume is solid, the rest vacuum — well, very thin gases. The rocks are kind of piled up against the surfaces the deceleration pressed them against — the top of the forward cone at the front, the base at the rear.”

  “You’re thinking of us working on them?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Colonize them, if you like. Stake claims. You could build whole habitats, mines, fabrication units, fusion plants…”

  She breathed in sharply. “Wow — I can see that, but I can’t imagine working or settling on rocks all bumping about—”

  “They wouldn’t be,” he assured her. “The first job would be to stabilise them. Move them out a little — you’d get that as a by-product of working them, or we could fire off a tiny acceleration burn on the drive, move the ship in relation to them — then tether them in place with massive buckyropes.” He shrugged. “Or use attitude jets. It’s an engineering detail.”

  “But what would be the point? I mean, OK, we could mine them, but what’s the point of settling them? Inside the ship? It would be just playing at colonization.”

  “Even if it was, it would be good practice,” Horrocks said, “but they needn’t be inside the ship forever. The cone surface is segmented. Whole sections of it can swing open. That’s how the rocks get loaded in the first place.”

  “So we could settle and someday… move out?”

  “You got it.”

  She leaned back, gazing above his head. “That sounds wonderful,” she said. “So what do we have to do to get this going?”

  “Well,” he said, “like I was saying, it’s just an idea that a few of the crew have come up with. I’d want to see it discussed a bit more widely, among the old hands especially. Thrash out the feasibility. And I suppose you’d have to get the Council’s blessing, though technically I’m not quite sure if it has standing in regard to the rocks. Raise funding from founder capital, maybe by swapping for other stakes that are… at a discount right now. Oh, and I guess you’d have to see if any of the ship generation were interested.”

  “You must be joking! They’d jump at it!”

  “I’ve seen a few today who wouldn’t.”

  She waved an airy hand. “The slackers? They’ll join in too, you’ll see, but who cares if they don’t? You’ll get enough of us going for it, that’s for sure.”

  “Great!” he said. “Ah—”

  “What?”

  “There is one drawback. The legal situation.”

  “How’s that?”

  “When we first came up with the idea we checked the Contract.”

  “You’re telling me it has no provision?”

  “Oh, it has a provision all right. Not for this situation, exactly, but it’s very specific about who can vote and who can’t. About who is in the Complement. Crew, of course. Founders and ship generation over sixteen, as long as they live in the habitat. The habitat, not the ship. It definitely has provision for people moving to nearby celestial bodies in the same orbit. Which applies to the rocks in the tanks.”

  “You’re saying we’d lose our votes?”

  “Possibly. Very likely.”

  He expected her to balk or bridle at this, but she just stared off into space for a moment. “Hmm,” she said at last. “How many of us could move out in six months?”

  “Oh, a few thousand, I should imagine.”

  “Ah!” Her face cleared. “That’s all right. There’ll still be plenty behind who can vote.”

  “You know how they’ll vote?”

  “Once this gets going — oh yes.”

  “Well, I’m sure you know how to spread the word.”

  Her face fell a little. “Yeah. It’s just a lot more difficult these days.”

  “There’s a rumour going around,” he said, “that the Council is thinking of lifting the comms restrictions.”

  “I haven’t heard it”

  “It’s bandied in the cones.” He drained his cup and rose to leave.

  “Do you have to go?”

  “Yes,” he said. “To be honest, this isn’t the only place I want to visit. Spread the word in person.”

  Her nod was firm, her look a little disappointed. “Good idea. Come back somet
ime, OK?”

  “Sure.”

  When he looked back from the doorway she was already writing.

  14 366:02:12 00:17

  Haven’t written much recently. Nor received many comments. Is anybody still reading this? Is anybody else still biologging?

  Oh yes. I see you are. Those of you who haven’t come out here yet, and are still just talking and planning, planning, planning.

  Well, this is for you. I haven’t written much because I’ve been doing things. And because it’s exhausting out here. It’s exhausting but it’s fun. It’s pioneering. It’s what we were born for.

  Out here… Let me just pause for a moment and clarify a point of terminology. Words are important. I see from a quick search through the biologs that most of you refer to us in the cones as “in there.” We’re not “in there.” You are: you’re in there in the habitat. We’re out here.

  It’s not outer space. But it’s hard vacuum (well, hard-ish), it’s free fall (well, microgravity), and it’s black all around. An aperture on the sunline burns in the sky like a nearby sun. The rocks we’re working on are hundreds of metres across. Most of them are less than a kilometre apart from each other, so it all looks like a child’s cartoon illustration of an asteroid belt rather than the real thing, with millions of klicks between one and the other. It’s a bit like being in a Ring, but without the collisions and the ablation and the micrometeorites going like sandblasters and the dying full of holes in a cloud of blood and stuff.

  But it’s still the real thing. If you want the full illusion of being outside, you can tune your eyes to the external view and see the stars — and those of the planets that are visible at the moment — just as they would be if they were outside your faceplate. That’s cool, but admittedly you can do that anywhere in the ship. And somehow, we don’t feel the need to. Being in this enormous space is enough.

  Because we really are pioneering. These rocks have never even been prospected! If they’d ever had to be processed, they’d have been refined and sifted for useful minerals and organics before the slag was thrown in the drive. But I’m sure a lot would have been missed. Apart from anything else, we’re doing real science. These rocks are after all from the Red Sun system, and some of them date back to its formation, and we’re actually finding out stuff that I’ll bet their own scientists back there haven’t got round to yet. Well, maybe not, but it’s new to us, and it’s fun finding out secrets four billion years old. Delicate crystal formations; complex organic molecules; microscopic bubbles trapped in the rock or ice, of gases with curious isotope ratios; shock patterns that indicate or suggest that at least one rock out here was chipped off a larger body, which some have identified from the records as likely to be Red Sun VII 14.

  All right, that’s exciting to me, but maybe not to you, and anyway we’re not out here to do science. Science is a sideshow. The main event — events, rather — are mining and extracting, synthesising and building. We’re building habitats! Real habitats we’re actually living in, and that one day — soon, I hope — may orbit freely around the Destiny Star on their own.

  Nobody’s got the habitat of their dreams. (Mine needs a much bigger asteroid.) Everybody has had to divvy up or share. For this rock we’re on it’s a team: me, Grant, a few people from Far Crossing, and the New Lamarck crowd. Of course there are more machines than people, which makes it feel more crowded but also makes things happen fast. We’ve already got a beautiful cluster of diamond bubbles that look green from outside with all the plants within.

  Nobody’s doing the exact project they’d planned. Again, most of these are tagged to specific features or moons or rocks, so they’re not relevant at the moment. That doesn’t matter. There’s a whole lot of projects we’re working on with the crew, both because it’s valuable experience and because it’s trade for the expertise and resources we get from them. (Any accountancy software experts still hesitating? There’s work for you out here.)

  Oh, and speaking of work, anybody with power-engineering ambitions should just drop everything and emigrate here, because you’ll never get a better chance to hone your skills and serve a sound apprenticeship with old crew hands. Fusion power plants aren’t strictly necessary here, but they’ll be useful in the future. Same goes for missile and laser batteries. We’re building plenty of them, there’s a whole industry going on (amazing the explosives and fuels you can cook out of gunk from carbonaceous chondrites, and the reaction and refinery paths are way complex and cool). They’ll be sold around when we move out. Likewise the power plants. Like I said, the opportunities in that line are amazing. We are building a lot of fusion power plants.

  It had been a long three months for the Red Sun Circle and its associates. For a time the entire scheme had hung in the balance, with the more energetic elements of the younger generation divided between those who most wanted to get on with constructive work, and those whose top priority was ending the emergency and voting out the Council. Synchronic wasn’t sure how much effect her caredaughter’s passionate appeals for the former option had had, but she couldn’t discount them.

  Now the stream of young settlers to the hollow spaces of both cones was steady; the lifting of comms restrictions had allowed first an outpouring of discontent and then its gradual fading; and among the majority of the voting-age cohort who remained behind, a growing minority had begun to voice a grudging recognition of the wisdom of the founders in vetoing colonisation until future relations with the aliens could be sorted out.

  Her one disappointment was that almost all the ship generation had lost all interest in the Destiny II virtualities now that they no longer had a live feed. The archives of the virtualities were vast, and in large part unexplored. An immense amount of information of undeniable future use lay untapped. She’d expected that this hoard of insight into the very first alien civilization — and indeed multicellular biosphere — to come within the ken of humanity would lure many bright young minds. But few indeed still entered it. It was as though it was old news, and that only the constant unfolding of the planet’s present moment could seize attention.

  She’d have been tempted to write this off as the superficiality of the youth of today, but her own contemporaries in the founder generation were almost as remiss. They too were entranced by incoming live data, in their case from other planetary probes and system surveys. Speculation on resources remained brisk, though with long futures. There was even a market in shorter futures, betting on the possibility that the embargo would be reversed; Council discouragement and disapproval of this dubious activity had merely and predictably given rise to secondary and tertiary markets in moral hazard.

  So she herself had taken to doing what she’d once hoped the ship generation would become absorbed in doing. In hours of relaxation and recreation she roamed the vault of uplinked and recorded and synthesised impressions, trying to make sense of the bat people’s world.

  Today she haunted the simulacrum of an upland settlement, somewhere in the typical altiplano of the continental hinterlands. Scrub and brush on the hills, a richer and greener vegetation in the hollows that might have been the local analogue of grass, grazed by the big four-footed beasts. A narrow, rickety tower on a hilltop, surrounded by fenced and hedged orchards and a scatter of low sheds. You couldn’t call the place a farm: the bat people didn’t practice agriculture. They tended tiny plots of herbs and berries; they built fences and walls that kept the grazers out of patches of ground, wherein fruit trees sprang up, with parabolic inverted-umbrella layers of branches turned to the sky like some ancient SETI radio-telescope array; they herded and hunted, chivvied and chased the grazers, swooping and hallooing around them, driving them with slashing clawed kicks and occasional bites that looked like a vampiric refreshment. When a beast was selected for slaughter, and driven close to the settlement and set upon with tooth and claw and blade, the crowd of wings and the frenzy was such that it seemed a surprise how much meat remained to be cut up and carried off, to be hung and salted a
nd smoked and sent on its way to the cities on the occasional passing cart hauled by machine or slave traction.

  She rotated the POV and drifted it toward the shed that she guessed was the slave pen. As the door came closer — it was wooden, the lower half of solid planking, the top barred — the POV fell through a sudden and disconcerting rift.

  Her viewpoint was now behind the bars, looking out. The time of day, perhaps the day itself or even the season, had changed. The shadows looked shorter, the hillside scrub thicker than they had a moment ago. The quality of the image had sharpened, had become more detailed, dense with verity. It was as if she looked directly upon a real scene, rather than a seamless but guessy, lossy construal stitched together from numerous flaky, tiny inputs. The sound quality had improved too: she heard a sound like breathing, louder and closer than the grassy arboral hiss of the upland wind that carried the lowing of far-off alien kine.

  And, as if from around a corner, voices.

  High-pitched and fast but with almost recognisable syllables, quite other than the bat people’s chirruping patter.

  As she strained to hear, the view before her tipped forward and filled with a crossbar and a pair of four-digited hands. The hands, encumbered about the wrists with a sort of ragged fleshy sleeve, squeezed between the bars and twisted around with a disregard to their own damage that made her flinch. Blood slicked the boards. There was grunt, and then a rattle and squeal of metal, and a hard rap.

  The hands were wrenched back through the slats. For a second or her gaze fixed upon raised wrists, scratched and scored, spiked with splinters, bleeding back to the elbow. Then the wrists reversed and the hands slammed forward, thrusting the door open with a thud. The POV rushed straight ahead, jolting as if from a camera on the forehead or shoulder of someone running. Trampled mud, grass, a ring of cyan fungi, a fence looming, a leap and a frantic scrabble—

  A shout from behind.

  “Hey — the trudge is out!”