by Peter Watts
Mostly, though, I just let myself get lost in the visual aesthetic. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“We’re now almost half a degree off course,” Chimp said.
Viktor highlighted a cluster of points. “Still well within expected range of deviation.”
“It’s not random. There’s a consistent coreward bias to Eriophora’s drift.”
“Why does it matter? We make way bigger deviations every time you change course for a new build.”
“The effect is increasing over time.”
“Sure is.” Viktor ran a quick scenario, and whistled in mock awe. “Why, if we don’t make any further course changes, we could be a whole ten degrees off-kilter in a mere four billion years. Horrors.”
“That assumes a continuous linear function. We don’t know if that’s true unless we can ascertain the cause.”
“And you can’t,” Vik surmised.
“I can’t.”
“You’re hoping we can.”
“I am.”
“Even though you asked someone else to do the same thing”—pinging the logs—“less than a hundred terasecs ago.” Viktor sighed. “You put way too much faith in human imagination.”
He got to work, though. Broke Chimp’s calculations down into bite-sized modules, picked a few at random, started rechecking the numbers. Over in the tank, little constellations flared and dimmed with his passage.
“Waste of a perfectly good thaw,” he grumbled, maybe an hour in.
“So what?” I asked him. “What are you saving yourself for?”
“Blue dwarfs.”
I pinged for a definition. “Uh, Vik. Those don’t exist.”
“Yet.” Another module down. So far the Chimp’s calculations were panning out.
“They can’t exist. Universe isn’t old enough yet.”
“That’s my point.”
“I don’t think even we’re gonna get that far. We’d have to make it halfway to Heat Death.”
“Why only halfway?” He fixed me with his outer eyes while his inner ones kept squeezing the data. “Why’d you think I signed on in the first place?”
“Because you were designed to?”
“Facile response, Sunday. How’d that design manifest? I want to see how it turns out.”
“It.”
“Everything. The universe. This—reality. This hologram, this model, whatever we’re in. It had a start, it’s got an endpoint, and the closer we get to it the clearer that becomes. If we just hang in there long enough we’ll at least get to see the outlines.”
“You want to know the purpose of existence.”
“I want to know the destination of existence. Anything less is selling out. Not to cast aspersions on your own epic quest, of course.” He eyed me. “You ever track down Tarantula Boy, by the way?”
I punched him. “Asshole. And no.” Truth be told, it had been driving me crazy. Nobody I’d asked seemed to remember the guy. I was starting to wonder if I’d hallucinated him.
“You probably run into him all the time,” Vik said. “Except you’re looking for someone with a tarantula on his head, and unbeknownst to you he rolled over and squashed the little fucker in his sleep fifty terasecs ago.”
“That would suck. Not least because it would make your epic quest so much easier than mine.”
A sudden hmmmm at something that had caught his inner eye. “Speaking of epic quests. . .”
“Have you discovered the problem?” Chimp asked.
“Not exactly. As far as I can tell—” Vik waved one hand; a bright pulse shivered across the display. “All your calculations are correct, Chimp. We’re not actually off course.”
“I don’t understand,” Chimp said.
“As far as I can tell, we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be. It’s the rest of the universe that’s out of place.”
Lateral thinking.
It’s why we’re even along for the ride.
I would never have even thought of stalking Doron Levi if he hadn’t blinded me on his way out of the bridge.
I didn’t know him well: just another ’spore, originally out of Tel Aviv, same tribe but we’d only pulled a dozen shifts together. I might have called him a friend with a few more mutual builds under our belts, but when I caught him in the act he was still just a friendly acquaintance.
Maybe I’m overstating it. It was really more of a flicker: a momentary fuzz of static at the corner of my eye, a split-second disruption of the icons in my BUD. As if someone had kicked them and shaken the pixels apart. Just for a moment, like I said. He bumped into me, and smiled an apologetic smile, and headed off to his assigned crypt.
Except that’s not where he went. He went down to one of the factory floors, where Chimp builds the vons that build the gates.
He practiced his hobby down there, some kind of multimillennial sculpture forever in-progress. The factory fabbed parts for him when it didn’t have anything better to do. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought if not for that momentary bit of interference: as though one of Eri’s blind spots had whispered past, some small, dark fragment of the Leaning Glade escaped from the heavy zone to haunt the brightness of the Overworld. Which was, of course, crazy.
So I followed him.
The fabbers on the floor were deathly still—a dormant network of machinery stretching far enough for the deck to curve with distance—except for one, its lights blinking, quietly humming to itself down near the port bulkhead. I headed toward it.
Doron jumped out of the shadows.
“What the fuck—”
It was strange, hearing us blurt in sync like that.
He recovered first. “What are you doing down here?”
“I thought you were crypting.”
“I am. Just had an idea for the Tidhar piece. Wanted to enter the specs while they were fresh in my mind.”
“Uh huh.” I glanced back at the thing he’d been lurking behind: one of the matter hoppers. Lithium store.
“What were you doing back here?” Stepping towards it.
“Just, you know. Poking around while the numbers crunched.”
Faint static on my BUD.
“Really.” Around the corner of the hopper, deep shadow.
“Yeah, but it’s probably done by now. So I guess I’m. . .”
I stepped into eclipse. My BUD went out.
“What the fuck.” This time I spoke solo.
All icons, reduced to faint wavering phantoms. Zero network access.
Doron came up behind me. For once, he had nothing to say.
“You’re making blind spots,” I said.
“Sunday—”
“You’re building signal jammers.” I wondered how. Wouldn’t the builds show up in the fab logs? “You’re jamming the Chimp.”
Was he building them by hand?
“Sunday, please don’t tell him.”
“Of course I’m going to tell him. You’re deliberately fucking with ship’s comms. What are you up to, Doron?”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, back again. “Please, Sunday. We don’t have much time.”
“Less than you think. What the hell do you expect to accomplish with this penny-ante—”
“The first step is to gain our freedom,” he said. “Lots of time to figure what to do with it afterward.”
“Wait, what—”
“More to life than living like a troglodyte for a few days every couple thousand years, knowing that I’m never gonna see—”
“How do you know—” I began, and stopped as my BUD rebooted and a roach slid into view around the edge of the hopper. I realized that I’d been hearing the hiss of its approaching wheels for some time.
“Hello Sunday, Doron,” the Chimp said in our heads. “Is there a problem?”
Neither of us spoke. It seemed like years.
Finally: “Nah. Doron’s just tweaking his project before we go down for the night.”
&nb
sp; “By the way,” Doron said, “you hear about our Music Appreciation Club?”
“What, you too?”
“I think you’d like it if you gave it a chance. It’s not just appreciation. It’s critique.”
“Critique.”
“You get to shit on people. You’d like that.”
“I don’t know anything about music.”
“No time like the present. Park’s been working on something, weird Bohlen-Pierce scale, doesn’t even have octaves. But he’s having problems with it. We’ve all been chipping in. Maybe you could take a look. I think he left the score in his quarters.”
“I told you, I don’t—”
“He says the eighth notes in particular are giving him trouble. Plus he thinks maybe a G major chord, but I think C works fine. C major chord at low C. Have a look yourself, maybe—gotta do something with those Sunset Moments of yours, eh?”
He stepped onto the waiting roach. “To the crypt, Chimp.”
The roach rolled away.
Another Sunset Moment. Alone again with my old friend.
Not quite so peaceful this time, though. Something unspoken in the air. An undercurrent.
Bohlen-Pierce scale. Voices from the dead. C major. Signal jamming.
Music fucking appreciation.
I was back in quarters. Not mine. Not anyone’s, now; nobody kept dibs on a bed between shifts, nobody cared which identical suite they crashed in while on deck. But this one had been Park’s, not so long ago. If I hadn’t already known that, the sheaf of paper—pinned to the table by a fist-sized chunk of rock chipped from Eri’s mantle—would have clued me in.
A musical score. I knew that much, anyway.
Something dropped from its pages as I gathered them up, a little cylinder that soundlessly hit the carpet and rolled a few centimeters. A pen. An actual analog pen, filled with ink or something like it. Park must have custom-fabbed it.
He’d written all these notes by hand.
“Chimp, is—” this digitized?
“Yes?”
“Nothing.”
Now I was holding back. Doron’s mistrust—whatever it was—was catching.
All right, music. Make me appreciate you.
I flumped onto the nearest pseudopod, called some up introductory theory from the archives. Sharps and flats, treble clef and bass. Fundamental frequencies. Steps, intervals, scales.
Bohlen-Pierce: there it was. Obscure thirteen-note scale out of North America, already ancient when the Diaspora was new. Tritave interval, “justly tuned,” whatever that meant.
So what?
I ran it through the player. It sounded like shit.
The eighth notes are giving him trouble. Even embedded in the middle of Doron’s strange spiel, that line had seemed just a little off.
Eighth notes. The short guys, only last an eighth as long as those fat ovoid whole notes. Okay.
I played it again, ran my eyes along the score as my ears parsed the sounds. The eighth notes were especially crappy. Almost sounded like some of them had been shoehorned in from another compo—
I took a breath. Thought a moment.
Took my BUD offline.
Park’s pen had appeared in my hand. I was hunched over his pages, my back to the Chimp-eye up in the corner of the compartment. I wasn’t especially comfortable; the ’pod, reflexively compensating for bad posture, shifted under me.
Low C. The note that anchored the chord, and the scale. Let’s not call it C, though; let’s say it anchors an alphabet instead.
Call it A.
So D-flat would be B. Only thirteen notes in the scale, so roll it over into the next octave—sorry, tritave: middle C equals N.
Eighth notes.
The first few sounded fine; it was the fifth that really jarred, an F.
Call that E.
A few more decent bars—nothing to get stuck in your head on endless replay, but melodic enough in a forgettable sort of way. Followed by a couple of consecutive clangers that just sounded flat somehow. Flat was what they were, in fact: B and D. And then, a couple of lines later, a middle C that didn’t belong.
L.O.N.
Turn the page.
The manuscript grew messier the deeper I got: notes scribbled out and replaced, key signatures taking new forms and then, with a few strikethroughs, reverting to older ones. Cryptic acronyms crept in around the margins, initials and numbers I couldn’t begin to decipher. It was as though the very process of writing was driving Park slowly around the bend, as if his notes were somehow bleeding entropy onto the page. But the eighths persisted—every couple of lines, every page, maybe every two or three. Now and then I’d get a reprieve but then there’d be another one, some stupid eighth note clanging against the ear. B D-flat F A MORA, B-flat F G-flat LES. I didn’t get it perfect the first time, it wasn’t all in the eighth notes after all; there were rests for spaces, time-sigs and high notes for numbers. It took a couple of passes to get it right. But eventually I had it, scrawled out in unfamiliar longhand letters almost too small for even me to see; and a moment later, scribbled over and scratched through and blacked out so that no one else ever would. That was okay, though. It was a short message. I couldn’t have forgotten it if I tried.
ELON MORALES C4B
I knew that name. I’d just forgotten that I had. Good ol’ Elon Morales.
Tarantula Boy.
Now I knew where he was.
Crypt 4B. I brought my BUD back up and pinged it: way back by the dorsal mass bungees, fifteen kliks aft. I didn’t think I’d ever bunked down there, never even visited the place since training. I brought up the manifest.
No Elon Morales in C4B.
I widened the search: Elon Morales, if you are sleeping anywhere on board, please have your coffin call Reception.
Nothing.
Maybe Park spelled his name wrong. Not that I was in any position to judge; I’d forgotten the damn thing entirely.
Elan Eylon Eilon Moralez Morrales Maroles.
Nothing.
Had I just imagined the guy? Had I misremembered when he said we were both shipping out on Eri?
Ancient history archives. All Diasporans, everywhere. Elon old buddy? Hello?
No answer.
Well, fuck.
Still, there he was: Elon Morales. There it was: C4B.
I called a roach.
Something was wrong with the crypt.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. The lights rose as I entered, just as they were supposed to. Sarcophagi slumbered in their squashed honeycomb berths to either side, floor to ceiling; the icons winking on their headboards suggested nothing out of the ordinary. The crane hung motionless on its overhead rail, deader than my crewmates until some wake-up call—fifty years from now, or fifty thousand—brought it back to life. There was the raised, rectangular pedestal between the rows—the opposite of an autopsy table, a great socket into which the coffins of the Born Again could be plugged for resurrection. Those stupid arches along the length of the chamber, common to every crypt in the fleet: of no obvious structural value, but someone at the dawn of time had decided that resurrecting the undead warranted some degree of—reverence, I guess. Someone thought the evocation of ancient cathedrals would do the trick.
The weird thing is, it works. Down in the crypt—any crypt—I’ve never heard anyone speak above a hush.
But that wasn’t it either.
I wandered down the aisle, meatsicles stacked to either side. A hint of glycerin and hydrogen sulfide hung in the air, perhaps the faintest whiff of meat gone bad; maybe another ’spore, died in stasis to rot away between stars. Maybe my imagination.
Maybe Elon.
The far end of the chamber resolved ahead of me: a wall of amber resin, the usual translucent, semi-elastic surface concealing the raw basalt behind. I’d never been able to decide whether the stuff had been extruded for structural reasons or merely aesthetic ones.
I put my hand against it. It gave a little, like h
ard rubber.
I looked back the way I’d come: up past the frozen produce, the dormant crane and its overhead gantry; past the medieval arches and the resurrection pedestal to the hatch in the far bulkhead.
It seemed too distinct somehow, that hatch. All the crypts in which I’d ever slept away the ages had seemed endless when I came back from the grave. Their reaches vanished in the fog of some real or imagined distance. They went on forever.
Too small, I thought.
“Pardon?” Chimp asked from nowhere. From everywhere.
“Nothing. Forget it.” I hadn’t realized that I’d spoken aloud. I wondered how often I did that.
I wondered why it mattered, all of a sudden.
“What’s on the other side of this wall?”
“Just rock,” Chimp replied.
It was less than five hundred meters to the nearest Cache. Barely worth taking a roach. I took one anyway; not just for the saved time, but for the extra mass I’d be lugging back. Some of those tiny shaped charges Ghora had used to survey Eriophora’s unmapped extremities. A seismic integrator—just a scroll of smart plastic, really—to read the echoes. A cutting torch with adjustable focal length and steadicam mount: that was the thing that really weighed.
The Chimp said nothing as I unfurled the integrator and pasted it to the bulkhead. He said nothing as I slapped three charges onto the resin around it; nothing as they detonated, as the integrator compiled the shockwaves and rendered the outlines of some greater unmapped space on its display.
The Chimp did not speak at all until I brought out the torch. “Sunday, I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
I tightened the harness. Set the focus. “Really. Some vital circuitry behind this bulkhead, maybe? Some trunk line I might take out?”
“I don’t know,” he said. And then, surprisingly: “I don’t know what might be there.”
“You don’t know.” I plugged into a nearby power socket. “You don’t find that odd?”
“I do.”