by Rick Cook
“I don’t see that it’s necessary, Major,” Jenkins said soothingly. “We can jump out of here as fast as we could blow ourselves up.”
“What if something knocks a hole in our hull?”
“That’s not very likely.”
“But we can’t jump unless we can run the drive field over the entire hull, can we? One good hole and we’re stuck here.”
“Major, long before anything could punch that big a hole in us, we’d be out of here. Meanwhile, a destruct mechanism would be at least as big a threat to us as it would be to our aliens.”
Suki sat in one corner of the Maple Lounge intent on the go board in front of him. On every side of him an electronic wind rustled the images of the sun-dappled leaves on the walls. The Japanese ignored them, just as he ignored the two or three other people in the lounge.
He had gotten into the habit of coming here every day at this time to play the ancient Japanese game with anyone who cared to challenge him. Most days that was Father Simon, but today the priest had not come.
“What are you doing?” Carlotti asked as he meandered up to Suki’s table.
“Fuseki. Beginnings. Openings, you call them in chess.” He pointed out the scattering of black and white stones on the board.
Carlotti stared at the board, divided by dark lines into a nineteen by nineteen grid with a half-dozen stones sitting on intersections near the corners. “You study them like chess openings?”
“Yes. For many hundreds of years. Fuseki are very important in go. They make shape that determines the rest of the game.
“Here,” he gestured at two seemingly unconnected stones in the lower left hand corner of the board. “Those two establish that black will be very strong in the corner, but not so strong towards the center. That is an invitation to white to build territory there.”
“But those are just two stones. Couldn’t white still take that corner?”
“Oh yes. But it would be difficult. Perhaps not too profitable. While white is doing this, black would be gaining advantage elsewhere. Perhaps white would win the corner, perhaps not. But he would lose more than he gains.”
The elderly Japanese looked down at the board again.
“In go one must consider the whole board. In fuseki, the board is open. There are many opportunities. Each player must decide where his advantage lies.”
Carlotti nodded. “What you’re saying is that it’s more like cooperation than competition. Each player stakes out territory and doesn’t try to cut into the other player’s territory.”
“Each player strives for the greatest advantage. To clash too soon is not advantageous.” He paused. “Much like life, you see.”
“I see.” Carlotti looked again at the board with its few stones. “By the way, we’re going to be making another jump shortly. We’re staying to study the aliens, but we will jump inward to be closer to their colonies.”
The Japanese nodded and continued to place stones on the board in an opening pattern.
Deep in the bowels of the Maxwell, Billy Toyoda half-sat, half-floated and watched the data pouring in. His world was a glowing three-dimensional construct and he was at the very center of it.
The computer room was within Spin, but it was high up toward the central shaft. Gravity was never strong here and it was easy for the Japanese-American computerman to imagine himself floating in a sea of data.
For him, cyberspace was a dark vastness shot through with neon-bright lines that wavered and pulsed and broke apart and reformed in ever more elaborate arabesques.
From here he saw the world around him as the ship saw it, in raw inputs or neatly organized ranks of massaged data. He floated and watched as the information poured in, totally immersed in it.
But somewhere a fly was buzzing. Caught in the web of glowing, throbbing sense impressions there was a discordance, something beating futilely against the structures trying to get out—or trying to get in.
What? Oh yeah, the comm circuit. Slowly Billy pulled his way back up to the real world and reached over to answer the call.
Peter Jenkins stared distastefully at the young man with the brush-cut hair who blinked at him out of the screen.
“Yessir?” he slurred. “What can I do for you?”
If Toyoda had been a vacuum jack or even an ordinary crew member, Jenkins would have been all over him for being drunk on the job. But he recognized that the man was coming out of a cybertrance and kept his temper. After all, part of Toyoda’s job was to be intimately familiar with the Maxwell’s cyberspace.
“Mr. Toyoda,” Jenkins snapped, “we’re making a major change in the mission. We’re not going to deploy the rest of the arrays and I need an inventory of computing resources that frees up and how we can use them to help us contact these aliens.”
Billy blinked and smiled slowly. “Oh wow, Telescope’s not going to like that.”
“Who?”
“Telescope. The AI that runs the arrays.”
“Right now that’s the least of our worries, Mr. Toyoda. How soon can you get me that information?”
“The inventory? Maybe three hours. You want recommendations on what we can use where?” He shrugged. “That’ll take a little longer, maybe another five, six hours.”
“As quickly as you can, Mr. Toyoda,” said the captain and broke contact.
“He’s damn good at his job,” Iron Alice said neutrally from her little corner of the screen as Jenkins continued to scowl at the place where Toyoda’s face had been.
“No argument there.”
“So why are you so down on him?”
Jenkins sighed. “I suppose because he represents everything that is wrong with this expedition.”
The pilot waited.
“You know why he’s aboard?”
She shrugged. “Not my department.”
“He’s here because his uncle thought it would do him good to get off Earth. And his uncle is a congressman from Middle California. Half the crew is like that and the passengers are worse. Dammit, this crew wasn’t selected. It was negotiated!”
“And?”
“And all of a sudden we’re in shit up to our necks. It would have been hard enough to run this ship on a simple astronomical mission, but this . . .”
“So why don’t we pack up and run?”
“Because the Ship’s Council insists we stay.”
Iron Alice carefully said nothing.
“Look Al, we’re truck drivers on this one. Our job is to take the scientists where they want to go, give them the opportunity to see what they want to see and to ‘assist in any way possible’ as our orders put it.”
“You couldn’t convince them?”
Jenkins made a face. “I didn’t even try. The consensus was so strongly against me it wasn’t even worth opening my mouth.”
He paused for a minute before going on. “The Council does have a point. There is no clear threat to the ship or the crew. They want to stay and see what we can learn.” He shrugged. “So we stay.”
“I wish you’d quit trying to make excuses for them,” DeRosa said.
“I’m not making excuses. I’m trying to see their side of it. You know, Aubrey’s right in a way. Humans do have to learn how to get along with each other better and that means we need to work by consensus rather than command. We’re pretty old fashioned in the Space Force, I guess.”
DeRosa made a face. “I’d like to see someone run a ship consensually.”
“When it gets as big as this one it just about has to be run that way,” Jenkins responded. “At least partially.”
“Partially. So we stay. But with the drive hot.”
“With the drive hot,” Jenkins agreed. “I want to be able to get out of here instantly if we have to.”
“Based on the telescope data we have done a reconstruction of those colonies,” Carlotti said. Instantly, his face was replaced by the diagram. A pointer moved to the center of the picture. “The core is that cluster of rotating cylinders in the cen
ter. We think that’s where the aliens live. The mirror behind it catches sunlight, reflects it off the smaller forward mirror and that shoots it down the center of the tube cluster.”
“Neat,” Ludenemeyer said. “I suppose that forward mirror also serves as a radiation shield for direct solar radiation.”
“We think so. M-type stars are notoriously variable, sometimes as much as twenty percent. That forward mirror is backed by a thick layer of something that looks pretty dense. There may also be an electromagnetic field around it to help control charged particles. That and the spacing would keep down the secondaries. The outsides of the central cylinders are apparently thick enough to provide adequate shielding from other directions.”
Ludenemeyer nodded. “And they control the amount of solar radiation arriving at the colony by changing the size of the mirror. Neat.”
“And the mirrors helped to shield the colonies from us,” Jenkins said.
“Precisely. The colonies on the other side of the system were hidden by the glare from the sun and the ones on this side were covered by their mirrors. Those mirrors radiate remarkably little infrared from their backs, by the way. The reflecting surfaces must be incredible.”
“How big is this thing?” Ludenemeyer asked.
“We’re not exactly sure, but we think each of those cylinders is several kilometers long.”
Ludenemeyer whistled. “That’s a lot of real estate. What do you think the population is, anyway?”
The astronomer shrugged. “Tell me how big the aliens are, how well they stand crowding and how efficient their life support systems are and I might hazard a guess. I’d say it would have to be in the tens of thousands and it might be an order of magnitude above that.”
“And how many colonies have you found?” Jenkins asked.
“There are something over a thousand complexes we have identified so far. Most of them have a structure like this in them, but they have other structures as well.”
“That makes sense,” the engineer said. “With no planet to run to you wouldn’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. Besides, there are some jobs that are better done in separate complexes.” He grinned. “You don’t want to put your petrochemical plant in the same atmosphere as your apartments.”
“What about the aliens themselves?” Jenkins asked.
The astronomer pursed his lips. “That is somewhat harder. You understand we are handicapped because we don’t have a xenologist on board, or even a linguist. As a planetographer, Dr. Dolan is the closest we have to an expert on alien species since it’s a hobby of hers, but we’re still severely handicapped. As for the linguists, well, we’ll just have to do the best we can.” Carlotti sighed. “It’s hardly an ideal situation.”
“Well, do the best you can,” Jenkins told him. “And keep us posted. The more we can learn and the faster we can learn it, the better off we’ll be.”
The cafeteria was crowded and noisy. Most of the tables were taken by the time Sharon got her tray filled and there was still a long line in by the serving area. In another twelve hours, the Maxwell would be spinning down again for another jump and this was the last chance many of the ship’s complement would have to digest a meal on a calm stomach for several days.
But this time, Sharon noticed, no one was complaining about jumping spun down.
“Sharon! Dr. Dolan. Over here.” Major Autro DeLorenzo beckoned to her from a table he shared with several other people.
Sharon wove her way through the room and dropped into the seat next to him.
“Thank you. I was afraid I was going to have to eat standing up.” The others at the table, one of the maintenance people and a young Oriental who Sharon vaguely associated with computers, ignored her and went on with their own conversation.
DeLorenzo gave another of his infectious smiles. “Eat, drink and be merry. So, what did you think of the Ship’s Council meeting?”
Sharon paused, fork halfway to her mouth. “Well, I’m glad we’re staying, of course. I suppose of all the people on the ship I have the most to gain from it professionally.”
“And we all stand to lose,” DeLorenzo said. “I tell you, Sharon, I think this is a dangerous business.”
“Why didn’t you object when the captain said we’d jump deeper into the system?”
DeLorenzo smiled again, but grimly. “The captain is smarter than that weasel Aubrey gives him credit for. By appearing in the middle of them rather than waiting for them to come to us we gain the initiative. We also make it plain we can flick out of their space in an instant.”
“And that keeps us safe?”
“It will help, surely. But the only true safety is in leaving immediately. Unfortunately, the captain will not stand up to the Ship’s Council to go that far.”
Sharon concentrated on her food and said nothing.
DeLorenzo caught the change in her mood immediately. “Oh, our captain is a good man, Sharon, do not misunderstand me. But at bottom he is weak. He does not have the strength to do what he knows to be right.”
“That’s the first time I have ever heard running away characterized as courageous,” she said tartly.
“Sometimes the most courageous thing you can do is to be a coward.” He tapped his chest. “Now me, I am often a great coward. It has kept me alive.” He smiled that infectious little-boy smile of his again.
“I think it’s blasphemous!” another voice put in. Sharon looked up and saw that a dumpy woman in a technician’s smock had put her tray down at the other end of the table. “It’s blasphemous to even think about dealing with these things.” She sat down heavily, deliberately. “Not that that counts for much on this ship.”
“Perhaps you are right,” DeLorenzo said politely and turned his attention to his food.
“Darned right I’m right,” the woman said. “Oh, no good is going to come of this, I can tell you.” She sniffed. “Not that this trip deserves any good, the way they treat people.”
Sharon kept her eyes on her plate and gradually the woman’s litany of complaints dropped to a grumble. Through it all the computer type kept talking to his friend as though there was no one else there.
“Okay look,” Billy Toyoda said earnestly. “How do we know what we know? I mean how do you know I’m sitting here talking to you? You don’t really. All you know is the input from your senses and what your nervous system tells you after it’s processed that shit.” He waved a hand airily. “You’re constructing your reality, man. You’re building it up out of that sense data and you call the result ‘reality’.”
His companion frowned, not really liking the course the conversation was taking. “So what’s that got to do with you and the computers?”
“It’s a different construct is all. Different i/o, different senses. I get a different reality.”
“So you’re saying there is no real reality?”
Billy grinned and ran his hand through the rough-cut black mop of hair. “Reality? Man, reality is just a bigger simulation. We’re all running around inside some computer that’s simulating the entire universe. Not even a good one at that.”
“Huh?”
“Precision. The thing only goes between plus and minus ten to the thirty-eighth on the constants of the universe.”
“How do you figure that?”
Billy waved a hand. “Look at the cosmological constant and some of the other magic numbers. They all fall right around that range.”
“Um, interesting. But what do we do about it?”
“Nah, man. We’re inside, see? We can’t do anything about it.”
“Well, what happens if the computer gets shut off?”
“We never know. When we’re not running, we don’t exist. Probably happens all the time.”
At the end table, Lulu Pine hunched deeper over her meal. Blasphemy, she thought. Even for this ungodly place that was a new level of blasphemy.
Sharon Dolan hung in darkness before the port and sang to the stars that bloomed around her.
The song was an ancient Irish lullaby about a woman held prisoner beneath an elf hill. Someone lost and alone and wanting desperately to be back in her home.
The thirty-foot bubble about her displayed the stars like a planetarium. But these stars were real, not optical projections. Only the double layer of curved window separated the singer from the depths of space.
Her voice was not strong, but it was sweet and pure as she crooned the words in a language she did not understand. Her mother had sung it to her, long ago in a radiation-scarred land light-years away. A neighbor who spoke Irish had told her what it meant once.
On the ship’s blueprints the bubbles were called auxiliary observation stations, although what anyone was supposed to observe from them that couldn’t be seen by the hull-mounted arrays or the deployed sensors wasn’t clear. There were four of them, spaced equidistantly around the blunt nose of the Maxwell.
But if you didn’t mind zero-G you could darken the room and float in the midst of the universe.
For Sharon, the song was comforting and full of yearning at the same time. It held longing for the land half-remembered and the warmer, greener, better land that she knew only through the memory of others.
Sharon was vaguely aware that the door had opened behind her, but she kept her attention on the blazing heavens and continued with her song. Her voice trailed away and she floated silently in the starry sphere.
“That was beautiful, Miss Dolan,” Father Simon said at last.
Sharon flinched at the broken silence and then relaxed. “Thank you, Father,” she said without taking her eyes off the panorama.
Father Simon was the only person on the ship who called her “Miss Dolan.” Titles for marital status had largely gone out of fashion and everyone either called her Sharon or Dr. Dolan. Somehow the old form of address was comforting in the priest’s mouth.
“What does it mean?”