Learning the World

by Ken MacLeod

  That sounds a little cantankerous. The fact is, I like it here. Even after two days—

  That phrase again. OK, now for the hard part:

  Even after two days, I can’t understand or forgive the Council. I can hardly believe it.

  They tried to nuke us!

  It may have been “only” an BMP hit, but the effects of that could still have killed people. Suppose some critical systems had gone down? Suppose the nuke had gone off a fraction of a second too soon or too late? I can’t believe that the founders would risk killing people just to get their way. This will not be forgotten or forgiven.

  I’m almost as shocked, in a way, with what Constantine and his scientist clique have done. They used us (obviously — lots of fusion plants, huh). They went behind the backs of the Council. They’ve left us no choice but to make some kind of intervention. I can see why the Council members were furious. But how anyone on the Council could have thought that the crew would allow Constantine to be detained I don’t know. Maybe what I now see of the crew, and the crew quarters, helps to explain it. The founders just didn’t understand how different and strange the crew are. Only people as clannish and devious as the crew could have come up with the scheme to enlighten the slaves and translate the languages. Giving them speech and then reverse engineering from the language module! I ask you. Not to mention using as amplifiers, of all things, the underground bodies of fungi and lichens: fairy rings.

  But, you know, kudos for the panache.

  Horrocks Mathematical’s viewpoint hung in space, looking down at ruins. Even though he was safe inside crew quarters, guiding a tiny telemetry probe, it helped to think of himself as looking down, and not as looking straight ahead — or worse, up — at a vast unstable cliff. Most of the rock at the base of the reserve tank had remained trapped by the web of buckyrope cables. The mesh had been devised to hold the asteroid and cometary chunks in place under normal acceleration and manoeuvres. Under the five or six gravities of the cone’s headlong flight from the nukes, the entire content of the tank had slammed against the base, the impact cushioned somewhat by the gigantic elastic cables. As soon as the drive had been turned off, the cables had recoiled. Most of the larger rocks had remained trapped, but broken-off masses of rock had been catapulted against the sides of the tank. The fragile material from carbonaceous chondrites and cometary ice had been smashed and partly melted. Smaller fragments had ricocheted around, their gradual ablation under repeated collisions pitting the interior walls and filling the space with drifting dust and granules.

  As for the habitats and machinery, everything that had not been salvaged to crew quarters had been flung about or crushed. Dust-covered diamond bubbles bulged from the wreckage, but anything inside might as well be written off. The original plan had been for the separation to be prepared in clandestinity and to be sprung as a surprise. A gentle acceleration would have left the habitats and fabrication units intact, for later release into the asteroid belt or among the gas-giant moons. Now colonization would have to proceed from scratch. At least the ship kids now had some real experience under their belts, but their disappointment would be deep, and their financial losses severe.

  “Compensation claims,” Awlin Halegap said when Horrocks backed out of the view and gave him his assessment of the disaster. “No problem.”

  “What?” said Horrocks. “It could be years before we get compensation out of the founders.”

  “Assuming the legal software even agrees,” added Genome. “The issue of who broke the Contract, or if anyone did, is so complex—”

  Halegap looked at both of them and shook his head. “You’re so naive,” he said. “We start a market in compensation claims. The ship kids can sell their claims for ready cash. They’ll lose out on the discount, but they’ll still raise enough capital for start-ups.”

  “Oh yes?” said Genome. “And who will they sell their claims to?”

  “Me, for a start,” said Halegap. “I hope nobody has thought of it already. Excuse me…”

  His virtual presence vanished with a sound effect of rubbing hands. Over the next seconds Horrocks watched with his inner eye and virtual vision an entire financial sector flare out of nowhere like a nuclear explosion in the void. He grinned at Genome and turned to the crowd of ship kids behind him. The telemetry room was an irregular shape and strung with lianas. Water bubbled through transparent piping. A score or so of former settlers hung in the organic mesh at all angles. Others were no doubt watching from elsewhere, or following other probes.

  “What was all that about?” asked a young fellow with a cockatoo-crest of blue plumes. They had seen the devastation on their own interfaces, but most of them hadn’t been able to follow the swift spectral byplay with Halegap.

  “Speculation,” said Horrocks. “The guy’s a friend, and I’m no adviser, but… I’d advise you to keep your options open if somebody offers to buy your compensation claims any time in the next, oh, week or so. By then you might get a good price for them.”

  “I don’t want compensation!” somebody else shouted. “I want my habitat back!”

  Rattlings of lianas, drummings on the bulkhead, shouts.

  “Yeah, everything’s ruined!”

  “We should go back and kick out the Council!”

  “Rip some stuff off the old ship!”

  “What about the crew? It’s all their fault in the first place!”

  Horrocks blinked and shrank back from the hubbub. Genome pushed forward.

  “Shut up!” she yelled above the din. Her pitch and volume made Horrocks flinch. A startled silence fell. “That’s better,” she went on. “I know you’re upset. I’m upset. Horrocks is upset. We helped build these habitats. We don’t like seeing them wrecked any more than you do. It’s terrible. But the fact is that they are badly damaged and there’s no easy way to get them back. We can salvage some of what’s down there, but it’s going to be hard, heartbreaking work. And we’re millions of kilometres away from the old ship. We’re not going anywhere near it until we’ve struck enough deals to make ourselves safe. One of these deals will be compensation, OK? There are people willing to give you money now, or next week as Horrocks says, just on the off chance that we’ll make these deals — who knows when! That’s your good fortune. We’re heading for the asteroid belt and when we get there you can get busy on some real settlement, right out in free space. That’s what you all want, right? And until then, don’t let me hear anyone talking about ‘the crew’ as if the crew are some other group of people. When you agreed to carry out the Order of the Day, you joined the crew. You’re all crew now, as long as you’re in this ship. And for the moment, this cone is the ship. We’re all in it together — literally. So rocking well grow up, OK?”

  Her gaze swept the room like a spotlight, stopping here and there. “Everybody happy?” she asked.

  Silence.

  “Anybody not happy?”

  More silence.

  “Good,” said Genome. “See you around, crewmates.”

  She arrowed to the exit hatch. Horrocks followed, looking straight ahead. Outside in the corridor and out of earshot he caught her ankle and pulled up to face her. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.

  “I guess I’ve had younger trainees than you in the past,” she said.

  “That yell—”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s the training-habitat voice.”

  “How do you know we’re going to the asteroid belt?”

  “Aren’t we?”

  14 366:02:28 17:20

  One advantage of being detached from the ship is that we can skip around the system like a flea on a griddle. Right now we’re headed for the asteroid belt at such a clip I doubt we show up as even a streak on long-exposure photographs. Even so, we won’t be there for weeks. In the meantime—

  I think the crew are at a bit of a loss as to what to do with us. They must have expected the settlements to survive the separation, with any repair work to be quite enough to keep
us occupied until the rocks could be decanted into independent orbit. Right now we’re poor, idle and fending off investors offering rock-bottom (hah!) prices for our compensation claims. Exploring crew quarters is fun but after a while that’s bound to pall. Salvage… I don’t have the heart for it, though Grant does. He enjoys the challenge.

  But there’s one thing we can do that is more than just killing time. We can go into the new virtualities, the ones uploading data from the slaves — the trudges, as I gather we’re now supposed to call them.

  I’m surprised the crew haven’t suggested it. Maybe they think it’s too reminiscent of how the founders tried to keep us occupied. Maybe they want to make any decisions about intervention without any pressure or clamour from us. I take their point. But we are, after all, the ones who are going to have to live with the consequences, long after the crew have gone. So I think we should at least know on what basis the decisions are made.

  Another thought: I miss those of us who were left behind. I miss, in particular, my three-quarter-sister Magnetic. We used to talk and write to each other a lot. It’s not something I ever mentioned here. It was private. But I miss her, and I’m saying so now because it’s about time someone did. There’s been a lot of tough talk about how the kids who didn’t make it to the cone settlements are ones who were slackers or birthrighters anyway. This is nonsense. Most of them were just too young, or had you forgotten that? And cut out the talk about how we don’t need them anyway. There are enough of us here to make viable settlements, for sure. But we need the rest of the ship generation to fulfil our plans and hopes — and theirs. There are tens of thousands of our younger brothers and sisters stranded back there in the habitat. We are not going to abandon them.

  So don’t give up. Don’t turn into a new kind of slackers. Get stuck into those virtualities, try to observe what is going on down there, and keep up the pressure on the crew to come up with an explanation of how we are going to get the rest of our generation back.

  “It’s time to reopen contact,” Synchronic had said, two days ago at a meeting of the Red Sun Circle at the villa in White City. The others around the pool had, to all appearances, engaged in glum counsel with the mullets, or divination with the wrack. Then one by one they had looked up and nodded. The Council had, after a likewise unfathomable deliberation, come around to the same decision.

  But as she sat in the estate garden, real thumb poised over a virtual switch, Synchronic found herself hesitating. When you’d lived long enough, she’d sometimes reflected, when certain habits had become ingrained no matter what refreshment of the neural pathways the immortality genes could bestow, ethics and etiquette became ever less distinct. Hitherto the involuntary equation had read one way, in disproportionate pangs of conscience over a small breach of manners. Now the terms had been inverted, and she felt over the Council majority’s horrible, criminal, potentially murderous mistake the sort of acute embarrassment that might have been appropriate for some ghastly faux pas. Dreadfully sorry, I’m such a ditz about these nuclear attack protocols…

  Oh well. A week had passed since the separation, a day since the decision. She had deliberately not followed the exchanges between crew and Council. She presumed any initial awkwardness had been got over, and negotiations opened. The full brunt would have passed. Constantine, at least, would have calmed down.

  She sighed and opened the channel. There was a moment of light-speed lag.

  “You’ve got a rocking nerve,” said Constantine. “Showing up here.”

  He lounged in some real-world environment beside a centrifugal wheel of water. In the background she could see people swimming, up and over, around and around. The Man was naked. Discarded drink-bulbs drifted around him. It had been a long while since she’d seen him like that.

  “Excuse me?” she said. “I sent you the warning.”

  “Well, whoop-de-do,” said Constantine. “That was good, but it’s not good enough. It was you who tried to have me arrested. It was you and your clique who set out to ruin our finances. That you drew back from the brink is very much to your credit, Synch, but it was a brink you’d brought us to.”

  There was this to be said for comms delay: it gave you cover for speechlessness.

  “I could recriminate too,” she said at last. “But I won’t.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Constantine. He took a squirt of his drink. “Do you have anything constructive to say?”

  “We can discuss a timetable for contact and colonization, to minimize—”

  Constantine had had his hand up, she reckoned, by the time she had said “discuss.”

  “Not up for discussion. What I and the crew are waiting to hear about is the steps you’ve taken to have the Council deposed, arrested, and slung in the brig.”

  She blinked up a couple of words in her dictionary. “Out of the question,” she said.

  Constantine reached forward to cut the connection.

  “Wait!” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “We can’t possibly unseat the Council. My position was in a minority.”

  “So? Last I heard, the Council had a couple hundred members. You have tens of thousands of ship-generation kids. No contest.”

  His words conjured up an absurd image of a crowd surrounding the Council building, marching in and carrying off its members. At that point her imagination failed, and she knew she had him on the run.

  “That’s absurd,” she said. “The Council has nothing with which to enforce its will but its moral authority and the agreement of the Complement. If that goes, on what does whatever replaces the Council rely? Armed force?”

  “I’m not asking you to use armed force, or unarmed either. Heaven forfend that civilized people like us should resort to violence. That could escalate all the way up to nuclear. No, you can do it constitutionally. Raise a petition to have them impeached. Trigger a recall referendum. Whatever. It’s all in the Contract. I don’t care if you succeed or not, as it happens. In a few years the ship generation will all be old enough to vote. But what I want to see now, and I think I speak for most of us, is some evidence of good faith on the part of the Council minority. Some real protest at what happened. Not some apology and let’s put it all behind us and move on. Until we see that, we’ll continue to put you behind us and move on.” He chuckled. “At some considerable velocity.”

  “We could demand the same of you, about the intervention.”

  “You could, but it would be a waste of breath. The situations aren’t symmetrical. We are in the right, your majority is in the wrong even if we made a mistake, which I don’t think we did. So we’re going to sort out the consequences of what we’ve done, with or without the rest of you.”

  Synchronic sat silent for a moment. This was a private channel. She didn’t need or want the advice of the Circle. The situation looked like an impasse. Neither side could physically damage the other, even if — unthinkably — they’d wanted to. Their anti-meteor defences were more than adequate to handle the other side’s turning their own missiles and lasers to offensive use. That had been for millennia part of the minimum spec, in the light of the possibility of ships going bad. It had only been the close proximity of the escaping cones that had made the intended BMP hit even a possibility.

  The cylindrical habitat was self-sufficient. Not indefinitely — it would need system resources in at most ten years — but it could hold out for the time that mattered. It had the finances, the resources, and the experience to make colonization a fast and smooth process. The trouble was, the cones had all the most enterprising and energetic colonists. Without economic links to the future settlements and industries, the habitat was doomed to be a backwater. And a backwater occupied, not just with frustrated founders, but with an ever-growing crowd of frustrated would-be colonists.

  Physically, it was secure. Socially, it was a sealed vessel with pressure building up. Enough pressure to—

  Enough pressure to blow the place apart.

 
She smiled. “I think we’ll do the same,” she said. “Keep in touch.”

  She cut the link before Constantine could do more than open his mouth.

  14 366:04:10 12:32

  Six weeks since separation. Grant’s been working in salvage a lot. We have a place in one of these complicated arboreal arrangements. Even the water supply oozes rather than flows. Capillary effects, right? Grant says it’s like working in a cave and coming home to a tree. He seems to enjoy it.

  I’ve been doing what I can with our diminished funds, scouring the exchanges every day, and talking to as many people as I can reach back in the ship. It’s good to make contact again, but with the comms lag old friends seem oddly distant. Well, not just the comms lag. We may be growing apart as fast as we’re moving apart. They feel, for now at any rate, that they’re in it together with the founders, but more than that (and I can tell there are tensions with the founders already), they feel that we have somehow abandoned them and let them down. We feel we’re in it together with the crew. The main reason I keep in touch is to reduce that feeling of abandonment, but it’s a struggle.