The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  Not an adequate, rational, theory in any case.

  She set all audio inputs to silent and flicked a new comms into being. “Kallus, are you anywhere near me?”

  “F deck, ma’am,” the man replied. His breathing was ragged. “Just sternward of frame twenty-seven. We’re shutting down some smart guys trying to mess with the number two forward power feed.”

  Cannon checked her map. Polyphemus showed F deck as orange between hull frames twenty-two and twenty-nine. She tapped up a force status display. Four hostiles functioning, nine of Kallus’s men. “Do you have Obasanjo with you? I believe you’re prevailing. Have him take over the mop-up and come find me.”

  “Usual location?”

  She smiled. Once an op-sec man, always an op-sec man. “Nowhere else I’d rather be.” Captain Siddiq had ceded the reserve bridge to her fellow Before early on in the voyage. Cannon had spent several years-subjective making sure she was properly integrated with Polyphemus, and had access to whatever systems she could worm her way into. A surprising amount of both data and computing power was isolated from the core intelligence on a starship—some by design, some by accident, some by conspiracy.

  Actually, there were a lot of places she’d rather be, but this would serve so long as they were at back end of the relativistic voyage.

  SURFACE OF SIDERO

  Siddiq, aboard the relativistic ship Sword and Arm [unpaired]

  The hatch dilated without leaking any light. Not so much as a keypad glowed within. The Before Raisa Siddiq stepped inside. She ignored the resemblance to a coffin as the brittle gleam of starlight spiraled into metal darkness with the closing of the hatch.

  For a long, long moment she was immobilized in nearly complete sensory deprivation. Siddiq realized that she could hear a faint pinging—something coming into thermal equilibrium as air returned in sufficient pressure to carry sound to her ears.

  The bulkhead behind her dilated open and she stepped backward into a dimly lit passageway. She hadn’t bothered with weapons for this trip. The Ekumen would not attempt to slay her here. And like most Befores, Siddiq was very hard to kill. Those of her brethren who weren’t extremely high-survival had died out long ago.

  Father Goulo waited there.

  He’d always seemed to her on the verge of attack, for all of his vows of pacifism. The man was as muscular-thin as the Before Michaela Cannon, though he was a mainline human of the current generation. Mayflies, she thought, then cast the word aside. Short-lived or not, it didn’t matter. This man was here now, with the next piece of her project.

  She looked him over. Father Goulo kept his hair as close-cropped as any Marine, and favored small steel-framed spectacles with round lenses of ground glass, as if he dwelt on some unRecontacted world still reeling from the Mistake. An anachronism of a man, traveling alone on an anachronism of a ship.

  “Yes,” he said in answer to the question she had not asked. He spoke Polish in that slow, thin voice of his, accent untraceable even to her very experienced ears. “Sword and Arm still carries a fully maintained thread needle drive.”

  She had Polish, too, legacy of a childhood almost a millennium and a half gone in twenty-first-century Wroclaw. “How would you know?”

  “I know.” Father Goulo removed his spectacles and polished them on the sleeve of his crimson robe. “That is sufficient.” He restored his glasses to his face and stared quietly at her. “How do you know our project will succeed?” The Ekumen priest reached out to touch her bare chest. “You have frost on your skin.”

  “Virtually the entire universe is very, very cold, Father.”

  Father Goulo rubbed his fingertips together, a tiny stream of bright crystals flaking away. “Some might find it distressing that you wander hard vacuum without a pressure suit.”

  “Some might suck on my icy ass,” she replied. This conversation was growing tiresome. “Now do you have the project ready?”

  Goulo switched to Polito, though his curious accent followed him. “I have spent the last six years-subjective aboard this ship in the absence of human company precisely in order to ensure that the project is ready.” The father pursed his lips, which was as much expression as she had ever seen from him. “Only a man of my education and experience could have hoped to succeed without either one of us arriving at the madhouse.”

  She followed his language change. “Either one of you…?”

  “The project is awake.” One eyebrow twitched. “It has grown quite adept at playing go, these past years.”

  Go. A children’s game, checkers for the quicker-witted. “And it is ready?”

  “For your purposes?” Father Goulo didn’t actually shrug, but she got the impression of a shrug in some subtle change in the set of his shoulder. “I could not say, madam. You are the starship captain, the mighty Before. I am merely a programmer who serves the majesty of the divine through the poor vehicle of the Ekumen.”

  “You have never been merely anything in your life, Father.” The man had a mind like a Before, for all that he couldn’t be much older than fifty. Not with current-state medtech in the Imperium Humanum. “Now, I would like to meet the project.”

  “Please, Captain, step this way.”

  She followed Father Goulo through another irised hatch into a room that glowed a deep, low-lux crimson.

  Something whispered within, a voice bidding them welcome in a voice of poetry and madness.

  CONTEXT

  Humanity had spread across three thousand light-years of the Orion Arm, spilling into the deeper, darker spaces outside the trail of stars that led coreward from old Earth. The Polity was unified, in its way; and unopposed.

  Then the Mistake had happened. The Fermi paradox unraveled catastrophically. The underlying metastability of a vast quasi-democracy including more than two thousand worlds, over a million habitats, and countless ship-clades was betrayed, which caused the deaths of trillions.

  What had begun as an almost accidental expansion, then morphed into a bid for species immortality, very nearly became a yawning grave of stardust and radioactive debris.

  The attackers vanished as mysteriously and swiftly as they had emerged. They left little evidence behind as to who they were, or what their purposes might be beyond the obvious goal of extinction of the Polity.

  Still, H. sap is harder to kill than an infestation of cockroaches in an algae-based oxygen scrubber. The combination of stealthed attacks, wetware memebombs, and culture viruses that raged along the interstellar shipping lanes was enough to stop all visible technological activity for at least three generations, but it wasn’t enough to drown out the raging sense of purpose that had driven our most distant ancestors down out of the trees onto the lost African savannah.

  The human race would never go home to die.

  CANNON, ABOARD POLYPHEMUS

  Kallus slipped Cannon’s door routines and entered the reserve bridge. Which was well enough; the Before had opened a security hole for him to that purpose, but some part of her still felt nerved when someone penetrated her perimeter.

  He was a handsome enough man, for a mainline human. Medium-height, thick-bodied, gray at his temples, but with a squared face and big hands and pale blue eyes that would have piqued interest from a statue. She’d never been much for men, even back when her body might have known what to do with one—women had always been her style, certain women specifically, and there was a memory to be pushed aside—but Kallus had a way about him which stirred old ghosts in her dormant hormonal systems.

  “Before,” he said.

  Kallus was always properly respectful to her, but with a quiet leer in his voice. Perhaps it was that tone that stirred memories. She had a body like corpse-leather, which didn’t attract many, not even those who failed to be properly terrified of Befores.

  “Help me with something.”

  Kallus nodded, smiling.

  “Sometimes I think too much like a Before. Especially when contemplating another Before.”

  “None o
f you is exactly human, Michaela. Of course you think like a Before.”

  “So think like a human,” she urged. “What in the Mistake is Captain Siddiq doing leading a mutiny against her own command? And why is she doing it down on the surface of Sidero while the fighting’s going on here?”

  “Siddiq?” Kallus seemed surprised, for perhaps the first time in the thirty years-objective she’d known him.

  “The Before Raisa Siddiq,” Cannon said dryly. “I am certain you’ve made her acquaintance.”

  “I was wondering where she was.” Kallus tugged his chin. “I’d figured her for dropping off the network mesh to be invisible in the fighting.”

  “She’s dropped off our entire orbit. Downside on Sidero, don’t know where without a lot more survey assets than we bothered to bring with us on this little jaunt.”

  “Captain made her movements nonreportable.”

  “Precisely.” Cannon called up a projection map of Sidero’s surface. “So where did she go, and why?”

  Kallus stifled a laugh. “On a hollow iron world with fullerene snow? My best guess is temporal psychosis. Gets all you Befores in the end. Human mind isn’t designed to live a thousand years and more.”

  Cannon shook off a flash of anger. Now was not the moment. “Never jest about that.”

  “I am not jesting, Michaela. There’s a reason nobody’s made more of you since the Mistake. Siddiq cracking up is the most sensible explanation, given what we know.”

  She had to rein in her voice. “Kallus. Do not trifle with me. I am not concerned with what we know. I’m concerned with what we don’t know. Raisa is not suffering from temporal psychosis.”

  The name had slipped out; she hadn’t meant to say it. Was she weakening?

  Kallus, being the man he was, didn’t miss the mistake. “Raisa? Five years-objective on this starship and I’ve never heard you call the Captain by her first name.”

  Cannon’s anger finally got the better of her, riding a mix of old betrayal and a bitter cocktail of the years. “Kallus, if you ever use that name in my presence again, so help me, it will be the last word that ever passes your lips.”

  He stared past her shoulder at a glowing image. She turned to see a painfully young Raisa, hair spread in sunlight, walking with a laughing woman who was far too familiar.

  “No…” whispered the Before Michaela Cannon.

  SHIPMIND, POLYPHEMUS

  The starship was distressed, or at least what passed for distress amid the fluid pairs of her shipmind. Unstable conditions going unaddressed created a cascading series of alarms with escalating priorities that were inherently disturbing.

  The degree of disruption within her decks was approaching intolerable. Seven deaths had occurred so far. Eleven more crew were wounded with a high likelihood of imminent fatalities.

  Plan Federo forbade her from dispatching aid. Likewise, she couldn’t respond to the emergency conditions all over herself except by direct, literal request.

  Meanwhile, Captain Siddiq’s comprehensive unreportability was itself triggering a whole new series of failure conditions and alarms. Polyphemus was indeed distinctly uncomfortable.

  She could not oppose Plan Federo. Cannon’s logic barbs were set far too deep in the shipmind’s undercode. But she could work around the perimeters of the restrictions laid upon her by the two warring women.

  The Before Michaela Cannon had been deep in conversation when the starship decided to intervene. Polyphemus needed her people to be aligned. The mutiny had to stop.

  She called up media clips—the oldest clips—to bring memory back to the mind of the ones who were cutting her away from her strength. One she shifted to Cannon, another she placed on store-and-forward for the Captain whenever Siddiq returned to reportability.

  The starship wished, not for the first time, that she could bypass the compartmentalization infrastructures in her mentarium, to see into subsystems and sensor grids denied to her by process traps, operational requirements, or the sorts of overrides set into her by the Befores Michaela Cannon and Raisa Siddiq.

  Polyphemus found herself with a new sensation rising to overcome her sense of distress. After some time, she identified it as anger.

  SIDDIQ, ABOARD SWORD AND ARM

  “I am ready,” whispered the project. Its voice hissed from the very air of the room—a neat, simple trick of molecular manipulation which only worked inside well-controlled spaces.

  Siddiq stared down at the thing in the box.

  The project lay quivering amid a gel-matrix in a medical carrier. No, that wasn’t right, the Captain realized. The project was a gel-matrix in a medical carrier.

  Biological computing. A twist of horror shuddered through her. Somehow she’d not realized it would come to this.

  “You used the human genome to build this?” Siddiq asked.

  “I did not,” replied Father Goulo. “But yes, it was used. How else were we to develop an architecture utterly independent of the quantum matrices that underlie shipminds?”

  There is a quantum matrix inside my head, Siddiq thought. She held the words very far back inside, as a cascade of data about coal beds opened into her mind. “Why did it matter?” she asked.

  “I am not a hardware architect.” The priest cocked an eyebrow. “But as I understand it, quantum matrices have resonances with other matrices to which they have been introduced. The physics are related to paired-drive physics, I believe. In order to keep the Uncial effect from taking hold on a new shipmind, to allow our vessels to be more pliable and obedient, we needed to create an architecture that could not be, well…contaminated…in this fashion.”

  “Is this true of all quantum matrices?” She held the importance of the question close in her mind—more than a thousand years of living made anyone a good poker player. If it was true, then the possibility of leakage between her thoughts and Polyphemus’s shipmind was real. And thus very worrisome.

  “I cannot say. The fundamental technology is Polity-era. These days, it’s more engineering than theory. And this is a line of investigation that has not been…encouraged.”

  “Bioengineered intelligence is hardly a contemporary technology.”

  “I am not bioengineered,” said the project, interrupting them. “I am a cultivated intelligence, and I am as real as you are. Humans come in many forms, many sizes.” It paused. “Many ages.”

  Siddiq winced.

  The project continued: “I am not human, but I am real. Not a thing. Not like an Uncial-class shipmind.”

  The Captain focused on the business at hand. “And you are ready to assume control of Polyphemus?”

  “Father Goulo has been running simulations based on engineering diagrams of the starship.” Siddiq could swear the project was proud of itself. “I can handle the raw bitrate of the dataflow, as well as the computational throughput required to manage the starship’s systems. As for the rest, my effective intelligence is more than adequate to handling the decisioning requirements. And I have trained.”

  “Trained to operate paired drives,” Siddiq said. This had always been the weakest point in the plan. That an intelligence created outside the operating environment of a starship could handle this. The shipminds themselves required multiple pairing runs to awaken into preconsciousness. Teams of specialists managed the initial shakedowns of a new starship with their concomitant awakening, a process that could take up to twenty years-subjective, and more than twice that in years-objective.

  “Yes.”

  Father Goulo spoke. “We cannot eliminate the quantum matrix processing required for the paired drives. What we can do is collapse the emergent cognitive core structures above those matrices, then decouple the cross-connects binding the matrices and separately route each pairing control path into Memphisto.”

  “Memphisto?” The sheer gall of that name amazed Siddiq.

  “Me,” said the project, its voice flowing with pride now. “That will be my ship-name, too.”

  Could she con Memphisto?
Would this intelligence allow her to command? The very act of installing the cultivated intelligence would require destruction of Polyphemus’s shipmind. But the reward for that risk…freedom from the dangerous monopoly Uncial’s descendants had on FTL. Such a mighty game they played.

  They fell into a lengthy discussion of transition and control processes, project readiness, and timing. Eventually, Siddiq excused herself to return to Polyphemus. Father Goulo walked her to the airlock, handing her a data card as they went.

  “Memphisto doesn’t have a net outside his compartment,” the priest said quietly.

  “Why?” Siddiq asked. She could think of a number of very good reasons, but she was curious about his logic.

  “He is not what I might have chosen him to be. In his way, he is as soullessly dangerous as what we seek to overthrow.”

  That was closer than Siddiq had ever expected to hear Father Goulo come to expressing either doubt or regret. “Do we abort the plan?”

  “Now?” He actually smiled, a crooked, almost charming set of his lips. “No. We can…improve…on Memphisto for future, ah, deployments.”

  “And for this deployment, I have to sail him home. The long way, if the pairing doesn’t carry over to the new intelligence.”

  “It will not be the worst years of your ancient life, Before.”

  Siddiq refused to consider that statement carefully. Only someone who had not lived through the Mistake and its aftermath could think to make such a comparison.

  “I will disable Polyphemus’s shipmind when I judge the moment to be right,” she said, turning over the memebomb card virus that the priest had given her. Her own words gave her pause, a cold grip on her heart. This game was worth the stake, it had to be—planning had been going on for over a human lifetime to reach the point they were at today. The individual personalities of both Polyphemus and Memphisto were not at issue. “Watch for a wideband signal from orbit,” she continued. “Lift and get to me. The ship’s systems will run autonomously for an indefinite period, but the crew will respond erratically to silence from the shipmind.”