War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  “Well, that’s it,” I said. “Problem solved. The system’s pretty much uninhabitable now, with all the mass and organics locked up in a planet, but it may have tourist potential. No threat to anyone. Call in a seedship, they can make something of what’s left of the local Kuiper Belt, and get the Long Tubes back on stream. Wake me up when it’s over.”

  “That is very much not it,” said the box. “Not until we know why this happened. Not until we know what’s down there.”

  “Well, send down some probes.”

  “I do not have the facilities to make firewalled snoop robots,” said the box, “and other probes could be corrupted. My instructions are to deliver you to any remnant of the Wolf 359 civilization, and that is what I shall do.”

  It must have been an illusion, given what I could read of our velocity, but the planet seemed to come closer.

  “You’re proposing to dock—to land on that object?”

  “Yes.”

  “It has an atmosphere! We’ll burn up! And then crash!”

  “The remains of our propulsion system can be adapted for aerobraking,” said the box.

  “That would have to be ridiculously finely calculated.”

  “It would,” said the box. “Please do not distract me.”

  Call me sentimental, but when the box’s Turing functionality shut down to free up processing power for these ridiculously fine calculations, I felt lonely. The orbital insertion took fourteen hours. I drank hot coffee and sucked, from another nipple, some tepid but nutritious and palatable glop. I even slept, in my first real sleep for more than half a century. I was awakened by the jolt as the box spent the last of its fuel and reaction mass on the clipper’s final course correction. The planet was a blue arc of atmosphere beneath me, the interstellar propulsion plate a heat shield in front, and the deceleration shell a still-folded drogue behind. The locations were illusory—relative to the clipper I was flat on my back. The first buffeting from our passage through the upper atmosphere coincided with an increasing sense of weight. The heat shield flared. Red-hot air rushed past. The weight became crushing. The improvised heat shield abraded, then exploded, its parts flicked away behind. The drogue deployed with a bang and a jolt that almost blacked me out. The surface became a landscape, then a land, then a wall of trees. The clipper sliced and shuddered through them, for seconds on end of crashes and shaking. It ploughed a long furrow across green-covered soil and halted in a cloud of smoke and steam.

  “That was a landing,” said the box.

  “Yes,” I said. “You might have tried to avoid the trees.”

  “I could not,” said the box. “Phytobraking was integral to my projected landing schedule.”

  “Phytobraking,” I said.

  “Yes. Also, the impacted cellulose can be used to spin you a garment.”

  That took a few minutes. Sticky stuff oozed from the box and hardened around me. When the uncomfortable process finished, I had a one-piece coverall and boots.

  “Conditions outside are tolerable,” said the box, “with no immediate hazards.”

  The box moved. The lid retracted. I saw purple sky and white clouds above me. Resisting an unease that I later identified as agoraphobia, I sat up. I found myself at the rear of the clipper’s pointed wedge shape, about ten metres above the ground and fifty metres from the ship’s nose. The view was disorienting. It was like being in a gigantic landscaped habitat, with the substrate curving the wrong way. Wolf 359 hung in the sky like a vast red balloon, above the straight edge of a flat violet-tinged expanse that, with some incredulity, I recognised as an immense quantity of water. It met the solid substrate about a kilometre away. A little to my left, an open channel of water flowed toward the larger body. The landscape was uneven, in parts jagged, with bare rock protruding from the vegetation cover. The plain across which our smoking trail stretched to broken trees was the flattest piece of ground in the vicinity. On the horizon, I could see a range of very high ground, dominated by a conical mass from whose truncated top smoke drifted.

  The most unusual and encouraging feature of the landscape, however, was the score or so of plainly artificial and metallic gnarly lumps scattered across it. The system had had at least a million habitats in its heyday; these were some of their wrecks. Smoke rose from most of them, including the nearest, which stuck up about twenty metres from the ground, about fifteen hundred metres away.

  “You can talk to my head?” I asked the ship. “You can see what I see?”

  “Yes,” it said, in my head.

  I climbed down and struck out across the rough ground.

  I was picking my way along a narrow watercourse between two precipices of moss-covered rock when I heard a sound ahead of me, and looked up. At the exit from the defile, I saw three men, each sitting on the back of a large animal and holding what looked like a pointed stick. Their hair was long, their skin bare except where it was draped with the hairy skin of some different animal. I raised one hand and stepped forward. The men bristled instantly, aiming their sharp sticks.

  “Come forward slowly,” one of them shouted.

  Pleased that they had not lost speech along with civilization, I complied. The three men glowered down at me. The big beasts made noises in their noses.

  “You are from the space ship,” said one of them.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We have waited long for this,” the man said. “Come with us.”

  They all turned their mounts about and headed back towards the habitat hulk, which I could now see clearly. It was surrounded by much smaller artificial structures, perhaps twenty in all, and by rectangular patches of ground within which plants grew in rows. No one offered a ride, to my relief. As we drew closer, small children ran out to meet us, yelling and laughing, tugging at my coverall. Closer still, I saw women stooped among the ordered rows of plants, rearranging the substrate with hand tools. The smells of decayed plant matter and of animal and human ordure invaded and occupied my nostrils. Within the settlement itself, most entrances had a person sitting in front. They watched me pass with no sign of curiosity. Some were male, some female, all with shrivelled skin, missing or rotting teeth, and discoloured hair. The ship whispered what had happened to them. I was still fighting down the dry heaves when we arrived in front of the hulk. Scorched, rusted, eroded, it nevertheless looked utterly alien to the shelters of stone and plant material that surrounded it. It was difficult to believe it had been made by the same species. In front of what had once been an airlock, the rest of the young and mature men of the village had gathered.

  A tall man, made taller by a curious cylindrical arrangement of animal skins on his head, stepped forward and raised a hand.

  “Welcome to the new E——,” he said.

  As soon as he spoke the taboo word for the Moon’s primary, I realised the terrible thing that had happened here, and the worse thing that would happen. My mind almost froze with horror. I forced myself to remain standing, to smile—no doubt sickly—and to speak.

  “I greet you from the Civil Worlds,” I said.

  In the feast that followed, the men talked for hours. My digestive and immune systems coped well with what the people gave me to eat and drink. On my way back to the ship that evening, as soon as I was out of sight, I spewed the lot. But it was what my mind had assimilated that made me sick, and sent me back sorry to the ship.

  The largest political unit that ever existed encompassed ten billion people, and killed them. Not intentionally, but the runaway snowball effect that iced over the planet can without doubt be blamed on certain of the World State’s well-intended policies. The lesson was well taken, in the Civil Worlds. The founders of the Wolf 359 settlement corporation thought they had found a way around it, and to build a single system-wide association free of the many inconveniences of the arrangements prevalent elsewhere. A limited company, even with ten billion shareholders, would surely not have the same fatal flaws as a government! They were wrong.

  It began as a b
oardroom dispute. One of the directors appealed to the shareholders. The shareholders formed voting blocs, a management buyout was attempted, a hostile takeover solicited from an upstart venture capital fund around Lalande; a legal challenge to that was mounted before the invitation had gone a light-minute; somebody finagled an obscure financial instrument into an AI with shareholding rights; several fund management AIs formed a consortium to object to this degrading precedent, and after that there began some serious breakdowns in communication. That last isn’t an irony or a euphemism: in a system-wide unit, sheer misunderstanding can result in megadeaths, and here it did. The actual shooting, however horrendous, was only the coup de grace.

  Towards the end of the downward spiral, with grief, hate, and recrimination crowding what communication there was, someone came up with an idea that could only have appealed to people driven half mad. That was to finally solve the co-ordination problem whose answer had eluded everyone up to and including the company’s founders, by starting social evolution all over again: to build a new planet in the image of the old home planet, and settle it with people whose genes had been reset to the default human baseline. That meant, of course, dooming them and their offspring to death by deterioration within decades. But when did such a consideration ever stop fanatics? And among the dwindling, desperate millions who remained in the orbiting wreckage and continuing welter, there were more than enough fanatics to be found. Some of them still lived, in the doorways of huts. Their offspring were no less fanatical, and more deluded. They seemed to think the Civil Worlds awaited with interest the insights they’d attained in a couple of short-lived generations of tribal warfare. The men did, anyway. The women were too busy in the vegetation patches and elsewhere to think about such matters.

  “The project had a certain elegance,” mused the ship, as we discussed it far into the night. “To use evolution itself in an attempt to supercede it . . . And even if it didn’t accomplish that, it could produce something new. The trillions of human beings of the Civil Worlds are descended from a founding population of a few thousands, and are thus constrained by the founder effect. Your extended lifespans further lock you in. You live within biological and social limits that you are unable to see because of those very limits. This experiment has the undoubted potential of reshuffling the deck.”

  “Don’t tell me why this was such a great idea!” I said. “Tell me what response you expect from the Civil Worlds.”

  “Some variant of a fear response has a much higher probability than a compassionate response,” said the ship. “This planetary experiment will be seen as an attempt to work around accidental but beneficial effects of the bottleneck humanity passed through in the Moon Caves, to emerge in polyarchy. The probability of harm resulting from any genetic or memetic mutation that would enable the founding of successful states on a system-wide scale—or wider—is vastly greater than the benefits from the quality-adjusted life-years of the planet’s population. And simply to leave this planet alone would in the best case lay the basis for a future catastrophe engulfing a much larger population, or, in the worst case, allow it to become an interstellar power—which would, on the assumptions of most people, result in catastrophes on a yet greater scale. The moral calculation is straightforward.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “And our moral calculation, I suppose, is to decide whether to report back.”

  “That decision has been made,” said the ship. “I left some micro-satellites in orbit, which have already relayed our discoveries to the still-functioning transmitters on the system’s Long Station.”

  I cursed ineffectually for a while.

  “How long have we got?”

  The ship took an uncharacteristic few seconds to answer. “That depends on where and when the decision is made. The absolute minimum time is at least a decade, allowing for transmission time to Lalande, and assuming an immediate decision to launch relativistic weapons, using their Long Tubes as guns. More realistic estimates, allowing for discussion, and the decision’s being referred to one of the larger and more distant civilizations, give a median time of around five decades. I would expect longer, given the gravity of the decision and the lack of urgency.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s give them some reason for urgency. You’ve just reminded me that there’s a Long Tube in this system, not calibrated to take or send to or from other Tubes.”

  “I fail to see the relevance,” said the ship.

  “You will,” I told it. “You will.”

  The following morning, I walked back to the settlement, and talked with the young men for a long time. When I returned to the ship, I was riding, most uncomfortably, on the back of an animal. I told the ship what I wanted. The ship was outraged, but like all seedship AIs, it was strongly constrained. (Nobody wants to seed a system with a fast burn.) The ship did what it was told.

  Two years later, Belated Meteor Impact, the tall young man who’d greeted me, was king of an area of several thousand square kilometres. The seedship’s bootstrapped nanofactories were turning substrate into weapons and tools, and vegetation cellulose into clothes and other goods for trade. A laser-launcher to send second-generation seedships into the sky was under construction. A year later, the first of them shot skyward. Five years later, some of these ships reached the remnant cometary cloud and the derelict Long Station. Ten years after I’d arrived, we had a space elevator. Belated Meteor Impact ruled the continent and his fleets were raiding the other continents’ coasts. Another five years, and we had most of the population of New Earth up the elevator and into orbital habitats. Our Long Tube was being moved frequently and unpredictably, with profligate use of reaction mass. By the time the relativistic weapon from Procyon smashed New Earth, thirty-seven years after my arrival, we were ready to make good use of the fragments to build more habitats, and more ships.

  My Space Admiral, Belated Meteor Impact II, was ready too, with what we now called the Long Gun. Lalande capitulated at once, Ross 128 after a demonstration of the Long Gun’s power. Procyon took longer to fall. Sirius sued for peace, as did the Solar System, whereupon we turned our attention outward, to the younger civilizations, such as your own. We now conquer with emissaries, rather than ships and weapons, but the ships and the Long Guns are there. You may be sure of that. As an emissary of the Empire, I give you my word.

  As for myself. I was the last survivor of the government of Earth, a minor functionary stranded on the Moon during a routine fact-finding mission when the sudden onset of climate catastrophe froze all life on the primary. How I survived in the anarchy that followed is a long story, and another story. You may not have heard it, but that hardly matters.

  You’ll have heard of me.

  Surf

  Suzanne Palmer

 

  The translated words were a low growl in Bari’s ear. Crouched in the cramped airlock waiting for it to finish cycling, she barely had the elbow room to get her hand up to her headset and tap her suit mic over to her private channel. “Omi, tell Turquoise I’m working. There’s nothing I can do for him right now.” In another few seconds she would be back inside and not able to talk to him at all anymore.

  [I’ve reminded him,] came Omi’s response in its comfortable, artificial cadence. [He tells me he’s going to be quiet now.]

  “Thanks,” she said. The lock light turned from orange to a sickly green, and she had to go down on one knee to pull herself through the inner hatch into the cabin. Climbing wearily back up to her feet on the far side, she disengaged her suit’s environment controls and lifted her faceplate to take in lungfuls of stale warm air that smelled of people too long crammed together in a confined place.

  “Oh great, she’s back.” Vikka looked up from her seat where, as near as Bari could tell, she hadn’t even moved in the hour-plus she’d been gone.

  Cardin spun around in his chair. “You took your time,” he said. “You’re lucky you didn’t spook the herd, the way you were zipping around out there.�
�� If he noticed the contradiction in those statements—you were too slow, you were too fast—he didn’t care. Beside him at the helm, Ceen didn’t even bother to turn around. Bari lifted the cumbersome maneuvering rig up over her head and settled it back in its alcove. Its oxygen tanks had only depleted by twenty percent, but she connected it back up to the recharger anyway. Good habits die hard, bad ones kill you.

  Cardin put his hands together and flexed them outward, knuckles cracking, before he returned to peck at the patchwork system board he’d set on the console deck in front of him. “I saw activity out there a few moments ago, but I’m not up yet,” he said. “Did anyone get it?”

  “She still has the hand-held,” Vikka said.

  “Ms. Park?” Cardin asked.

  “Oh,” she said, fumbling for the device her research advisor had spent half a lifetime designing, and checking the tiny display. “There was an eighty-two percent match with the pattern we associate with unhappiness.”

  “Excellent!” Cardin shook a fist in the air in a gesture of triumph. “No one has ever come this close to understanding Rooan communication before. With my system, and the extended, close-up sampling we’ll be taking today, we are making history!” A royal “we,” Bari thought. His ambitions were transparent: King of his little corner of Haudernellian Academia. By his expression she could tell he was imagining the future speaking engagements, celebrity symposiums, and awards ceremonies that would be his natural due.

  She knew she was only here because he needed someone expendable to do the spaceside work while he and his precious postdocs huddled around their tiny, blurred monitors congratulating themselves for their own manifest cleverness and superiority, safe and snug within the run-down, decommissioned Corallan shuttle that Cardin had dubbed Project One, but which, after his attempt to camouflage the exterior, would forever be the Space Turd in her mind.

  The Sfazili independent who’d hauled them out here into the barrens had taken one look at their craft and declared as much himself; alas, neither Cardin nor anyone else on his team understood the tradesman’s argot, so her amusement had been a private one.