by Ian Douglas
THE PARTY at the Lloyd residence in Jefferson had been going for some time when St. Clair and Lisa finally arrived hours later. Jefferson was a minor city located cross-cylinder and forward of Bethesda, a straight-line distance of about fifteen kilometers, and he’d requisitioned a private magfloater to make the trip. Jefferson currently lay within a band of artificial night, and the residence compound was a brightly lit patch outshining the nearby city lights. As they stepped out of the craft and onto the imitation teak landing platform, Clayton Lloyd himself greeted them.
“Welcome, Lord Commander!” he said. “I’m so glad you could make it!”
“Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. It’s good to be here.”
It was a bald-faced lie, and both of them knew it . . . but it was both a socially acceptable and a politically necessary one.
The Directorate ambassador was stylishly nude, save for his sleek sensory helmet and a line of luminous blue fractal designs running up his left leg, side, and arm.
St. Clair had opted for a more conservative and formally traditional costume for the evening—his full-dress Navy blacks. While the party was a purely social event, he fully expected to be beset by wolves—with wolves defined as the politicians who’d decided that they knew better than he how to skipper the Ad Astra.
He noted, in passing, that Lloyd had completely ignored Lisa with his greeting. Was he a dominioner? Interesting, if so. St. Clair decided he would need to do some research on the man.
“Lisa was just telling me how much she was looking forward to seeing your place,” St. Clair said. He felt Lisa’s reaction beside him, but knew she wouldn’t challenge his statement in public. She had, of course, said no such thing.
“Indeed?” Lloyd looked at Lisa, scanning her briefly from head to foot and back. The left side of her body, including her face, was covered by an animated liquid-light tattoo, bright green with on-again, off-again red highlights, writhing and boiling like time-lapsed stormclouds; the right side of her body was nude. It was a fashion motif popular in North America just now . . . or, rather, St. Clair reminded himself, it had been, 4 billion years ago.
“Help yourself to the buffet,” Lloyd said, again ignoring the gynoid. “I see some other folks arriving there I need to meet and greet. But I’d like to talk to you a bit later on.”
“Of course.”
The ambassador made his exit.
“Sorry, Lisa,” St. Clair said after Lloyd had left. “Not exactly diplomatic of him, was it?”
She gave a quite human shrug. “The essence of diplomacy is convincing others that something is so, but there’s always an assumption that the attitude of those others whom you are trying to convince is important to you. Obviously, the feelings of robotic AIs are not high on Mr. Lloyd’s list of priorities.”
St. Clair wondered what Lisa had meant by her deliberate use of the word feelings. Was she indicating that she had them, in the sense that humans did?
Or was she making a joke? In some ways, that would be even more astonishing.
Several hundred people had already arrived at the Lloyd residence, and were gathered in small groups throughout the house and outside among the patio gardens. St. Clair had not been here before, and wondered how much of the fancy lighting effects were permanent, and what had been brought in just for this affair. Rippling curtains of liquid light in delicate, luminous pastels provided a measure of privacy for couples and small groups who desired it. Elaborate fountains rained light throughout the gardens, drenching guests in intangible, flowing color.
Quite a few robots were in evidence, St. Clair noticed, both androids and gynoids, serving both as waitstaff and as providers of sexual entertainment for the human guests. He decided that Lloyd’s disdain for Lisa likely had more to do with her rising above her proper station than it did with her being a synthetic.
He sighed. Come the Robot Revolution . . .
It was a much overused theme drawn from entertainment sims and interactives. St. Clair had long thought the current fascination among humans with some kind of mass robot uprising was a symptom of an underlying fear of Humankind’s artificial servants. Modern robots had safeguards and software inhibitors to prevent that sort of thing, but a lot of humans simply didn’t trust them. And while AI robots were okay when they stayed in their place—as servants, as sex partners, as replacements for humans in dangerous or inhospitable surroundings—a robot that thought it was a full partner of organic humans was regarded with deep suspicion.
For St. Clair, the current legal status of synthetics was far too close to outright slavery to suit him. There were laws on the books to prevent mistreatment of sentient machines, certainly, but in the final analyses they still, legally, were property.
To put it succinctly: Lloyd’s stance disgusted him.
“Ah, Commander!” a familiar voice said at his back.
Speaking of disgust . . .
St. Clair turned as Adler approached, hand out, all smiles and warm welcomes. “I was hoping we’d see you tonight.”
“My lord,” St. Clair acknowledged.
“I see Ad Astra’s watering operation is well under way.”
He gestured toward the curving surface of the cylinder’s far side. One of Tellus’s long vista windows was visible from the residence deck almost directly overhead, looking out into space opposite the city of Jefferson, and the cylinder’s rotation had just brought the comet into view, vast and cratered.
“Yes, my lord,” St. Clair replied. “We should be able to top off the water tanks, and even get some organics for the nanufactories.”
“Are we going to investigate the inner planets more closely?”
“No,” St. Clair replied. “Not until we know what we’re up against.”
They’d spotted the star system from some distance out and approached cautiously. There were multiple worlds circling the star, three of them super Earths clearly inhabited at some point in the past. The land areas were covered with ruins, a repeat of the near-lifeless desolation on the Alderson disk.
Rather than approach the planets closely, St. Clair had ordered Ad Astra out to this system’s Oort cloud, where a ten-kilometer comet had in due course been found. The Harvester, a replenishment vessel, had been launched from Ad Astra’s main bay. Approaching the comet’s nucleus, it had released a cloud of mining nano, which had been busily prospecting and disassembling it for hours, now. Mostly ice, the comet held a reservoir of some hundreds of billions of tons of water, but there were many tons of organic material as well—primarily carbon, nitrogen, various silicates, and frozen carbon dioxide and ammonia. Ad Astra’s onboard nanufactories would be able to transform the harvested rawmat into food, clothing, atmosphere, and anything else the human population might need.
“You know, Lord Commander,” Adler said with a cheerful nonchalance, “we’re going to have to go investigate other worlds sometime.”
“I agree, my lord. But we shall do so with due care and deliberation.”
“Your conservative prejudice is showing, sir,” Adler said. “Some might see it as xenophobia.”
“Then some are idiots.”
The thing was, he had given up having this argument a long time ago. He was never going to convince his enemies. In any case, the past was now really past—4 billion years buried. And Adler certainly wasn’t worth the angst here and now.
“There were some back on Earth,” Adler said, “who considered your assignment as Ad Astra’s commander to be a punishment. But you might be interested to know that not everyone thought that.”
Admiral Carruthers had suggested as much. “What was it, then?”
“A chance for redemption, of course. The Imperial Navy got something of a black eye when you called that first electronic press conference, you know.”
“I know.”
“By giving you this command, they proved to the world that there were . . . no hard feelings, shall we say? And you had a chance to demonstrate your loyalty by carrying out a mission with which you
publicly didn’t agree.”
“Yes, well . . . none of that much matters now, does it?”
“But I would say it does.”
Adler’s answer surprised him, but he didn’t let it show. “And why would you say that?”
“Because sooner or later, the population of this expedition will need to set up a government of its own. A civilian government. Unless you plan on running it indefinitely as a military dictatorship?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Perhaps not so absurd. There are some who are already concerned about the seemingly unilateral decisions being made.”
“Then there are definitely some idiots aboard. You know full well that we have always convened before taking large-scale actions.”
“Oh, I know,” he said, holding his hands up as if to say It’s not me saying all these nasty things, and St. Clair was aware he had stumbled into Günter’s trap. Now the Cyb director had the rhetorical upper hand . . . even though the man was clearly lying. To accuse him of that, though, carried very severe consequences, and without actual proof, St. Clair couldn’t make such a statement.
Which Adler knew.
Ever the politician, the director pressed his agenda. “You know the power of rumors, though. Which is why your support of the civilian authority will be important. Very important. I’d be interested in knowing whether you will support an imperial directive . . . or if you’re still wedded to the old idea of a republic.”
Quite frankly, St. Clair had not had the time to think much about the politics of the Tellus colony’s government. But it was, of course, no secret that he didn’t care for the Directorate, didn’t like government by fiat and executive order and rule-of-law pronouncements by the Cybercouncil. He had always been of the opinion that the government that governs best is the one that governs least. Having built-in checks and balances helped keep the jackboots off of people’s throats.
Then again, what did he know? Most people nowadays accepted the Directorate as a reasonable way of getting things done, while washed-up republicans like him were, at best, quaint relics of an earlier, bygone era.
And although he knew this wasn’t what Adler was expecting, the thought that he might actually have a hand in determining the shape of a new civilian government was intriguing.
For now, though, he would hold that little fact close to the vest.
“I think it’s a bit early to worry about that, my lord,” St. Clair replied. “Let’s make contact with whoever is running things on this side of the black hole first.”
Adler nodded soberly, but something about the way his eye crinkled made St. Clair think the director felt he’d won.
Let Adler think he has me cornered. It isn’t the first time an Earth-based politician had made that mistake.
Because St. Clair knew something Adler had clearly forgotten: in space, there really weren’t any corners.
Overhead, the rotation of the habitat cylinder had taken the comet and Harvester out of view. The glowing face of the Milky Way Galaxy drifted slowly past the vista window.
MIKE COLLINS was a vacuumorph.
She didn’t mind that fact, particularly; after all, she’d not had any say in the matter, having decanted from the Clarkeorbital crèches of Dupont Biogenengineering. But like others of her kind she took considerable pride in her talents. Talents that set her apart from prototype humans.
At the moment, she was adrift in free fall, naked in empty space, floating several kilometers from the paired, oppositely rotating cylinders of the Tellus colony. From here, she could look straight into one of the long, transparent panels in the starboard cylinder’s hull as it turned past her point of view. A blaze of light had been visible inside on the far, internal wall, just for a moment—one of the colony’s cities, illuminated against its artificial night. And now it was gone.
She wished she could be a part of that.
Or . . . did she? Homo saps were such peculiar beasties in their outlook, their attitudes, and their culture.
“I hear it’s supposed to be one hell of a party,” Story Musgrove commented, her radio voice picked out of the ether by the electronics in Collins’s brain.
“Maybe we should crash it,” Collins replied.
“Nah. High grav ain’t worth it. And it would just upset the natives.”
Mike Collins and Story Musgrove both were products of genetic engineering, genengineered paramorphs from human stock, designed to live and work in hard vacuum. Homo caelestis individuals tended to be small and compact—only about a meter long—and were encased in massive, pebbly surfaced outer shells that protected their soft tissues from both hard radiation and vacuum desiccation. Deeply recessed eyes behind thick, transparent shields gave Collins an extended visual range, from infrared far into the ultraviolet, while an internal air bladder, and blood rich with artificial respirocytes let her breathe for days at a time between rechargings. Nanochelated electronics grown inside her brain gave her additional senses, including radio telepathy with other vacs, electro- and magnetic senses, and the ability to feel mass.
Perhaps the most startling adaptation, though, was visible in her legs . . . or rather, in her lack of them. Instead of human legs, which were pretty much superfluous in zero gravity, Collins possessed an extra pair of arms attached to her pelvic girdle. At the moment, she was clinging by one lower arm to a support structure extending around one of Harvester’s free-floating matmovers, a ring that collected and directed the stream of microscopic nanobots flooding across from the comet. As rawmat was mined from the surface, it was accelerated, molecule by molecule, by the ’bots and physically carried across to Ad Astra’s rawmat receiver bays. As the matter invisibly streamed through the ring, constant interactions with its magnetic field tended to nudge it out of position. Mike’s job was to monitor the process and correct for drift, using an electrostatic driver grasped in one upper arm and her free lower one. The job was tedious and relatively mindless. A nonsentient robot could have done the job as well as she.
Sometimes, she thought, her H. sap controllers in the logistics department put together assignments like this one solely to justify their existence to Ad Astra’s dispersing office.
Others of her kind were out here as well, some jockeying matmover rings, others swarming across the surface of the comet, overseeing the rawmat mining operations. The local sun was shrunken to the cold gleam of a bright star, suspended in emptiness. Beyond, the spectacular sprawl of two colliding galaxies dominated the heavens in every direction.
That was something her controllers would never appreciate: the sight of those two spirals etched in a clarity of sharp detail that included far-flung clouds of heat generated by interpenetrating dust and gas, and the actinic glare of UV energies pinpointing the birth cries of hot, newborn suns.
Magnificent . . . but what was that?
“Musgrove! Leonov!” she called over the H. cael workchannel. “McAuliffe!”
Vacuumorphs, though technically female, were sterile. Without families of their own, raised in corporate crèches, they were assigned lot numbers, but not names. Since they’d first entered the workforce in the early 2100s, Vacs had chosen their own names, generally taking them from the history of early space exploration, from Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn on down to Zhou Jing, who’d skippered the Emissary of Sol on the first expedition to Alpha Centauri.
“What’s the prob, Collins?” Christa McAuliffe called back.
“Look at Andromeda, will you?”
“Why? What’s the big deal?”
“Use your grav-mass scanners. What do you see?”
Flung by gravitational tides from its home galaxy hundreds of thousands of years ago, the system they were mining was located in the gulf nestled in between the two vast, interpenetrating galaxies. Half of the Milky Way was visible face-on to one side, while just over half of the larger, brighter Andromeda canted off at an angle to the other. Billions of suns shone brightly on both sides, and particularly along the intersection of the two
spirals; as gas clouds collided, they’d triggered a storm of star generation, especially in the froth where the galaxies merged and passed through each other. With their extra senses, the vacs could see not only the heat and UV radiation of the collision, but the somber, deep-blood haze representing mass.
Lots of mass.
More than 84 percent of all matter in the universe, Collins knew, consisted of so-called dark matter—a kind of exotic matter that did not interact at all with light or normal matter, but which made its presence known through gravity. The stuff had been hypothesized as a way of explaining the too-fast rotation of galaxies; stars throughout the universe seemed to orbit their galactic cores at such high velocities that something unseen had to be there, providing the gravitational mass holding those galaxies together and keeping them from flying apart. Exactly what dark matter might be was still unknown, even after two centuries of study.
But by sensing the gravitational mass surrounding the galaxies, Collins and her fellow Vacs could, in a way, actually see the clouds of dark matter around both Andromeda and the Milky Way. She focused her gaze on the Andromedan spiral and mentally dialed down the optical frequencies, until the galaxy’s stars were just visible as pale ghosts imbedded in the red haze of dark matter. She increased the level of detail in the glow, heightening contrast, brightening the haze, pulling up subtle levels of detail.
She could see it moving.
And that was frankly, starkly impossible, because for movement to be visible at such a scale it would have to be moving much, much faster than light.
“Shit! Is that haze moving?” Leonov asked.
“Can’t be,” Musgrove replied.
“Some kind of optical illusion?” McAuliffe suggested.
There was a deep, purplish tint to the red; that, and the apparent movement, distinguished the haze surrounding and filling Andromeda from the haze overlying the Milky Way. And surely that was some kind of illusion too, because there was no reason that the dark matter in one galaxy would be different from the dark matter in the other.
Then again, so little was understood about dark matter that anything was possible.