The Dreaming Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Callie spun around in her chair and stood up, enjoying the thrum of the engines through the decking under her feet. Thrust gravity was her favorite, better than the spin gravity you got on big space stations, better than being down a gravity well, and better even than the eerie artificial gravity they had now on Glauketas. Thrust gravity meant you were going somewhere. She should hit the gym, get some exercise…

  “Callie,” Elena murmured in her ear. “I figured out the private channel.”

  “Well done.”

  “Would you like to explore some other private channels?”

  Callie grinned. “I was just about to go work out.”

  “Yes?” Elena said. “I don’t see any conflict there.”

  “See you in our quarters, then.” She switched to another comms channel. “Shall, take the helm?”

  “I already took the helm,” he said. “I never relinquished the helm in the first place. This is a spaceship, not a sailboat. Squishy organic brains can’t be trusted in such circumstances.”

  “Squishy organic bodies have more fun, though.”

  “Pfft,” Shall said. “Have fun crudely manipulating your nervous system and brain chemistry through tactile physical inputs. If you’re lucky you might vaguely approximate the kind of transcendent pleasure I can experience at will just by altering my own sensorium.”

  “Oh, Shall. There’s nothing wrong with masturbation, but I’ve always had more fun collaborating.”

  “You have no idea what goes on in the machine-intelligence-only parts of the Tangle, do you?”

  She made a face. “Nor do I wish to. If the crew wants anything, tell them it can wait, unless it can’t wait, and then… you deal with it.”

  Callie dropped down the ladder and turned toward the corridor that led to her quarters – then drew her sidearm and crouched, staring hard at an empty bit of passageway. Because, just for a moment, it hadn’t looked empty: she’d seen something, a shimmer, like heat haze rising off a badly insulated engine. “Shall, is my infiltration suit still in storage?”

  “Checking… yes, the transponder places it in the locker in your quarters. Why?”

  She had a special suit with active camouflage, that allowed her to blend in with her surroundings – it was almost as good as magical invisibility, except for a slight shimmer when she moved fast. “I thought I saw something in the corridor here.”

  “Crap. Truth-teller assassins?”

  “Ugh. If you want to go all worst-case scenario about it.” The Liars who secretly served the Axiom had all kinds of exotic technology, including short-range teleporters that could let them board her ship, and they might have stealth tech to rival her own. “Could someone have teleported on board?”

  “The Golden Spider isn’t equipped to scan for those signatures – it’s not like they’re a common threat. Ashok had to build the sensors we have on the White Raven and Glauketas.”

  “What can you scan for?”

  “I’m not getting any life signs, heat signatures, unexplained motion, inexplicable sounds… of course, a stealth suit could mask a lot of that, but they’re not common. Yours is a one-of-a-kind experimental model. How sure are you that you saw something?”

  “Maybe sixty percent.” She thought about how many repairs Ashok had done on the ship, and how poorly parts of it were still insulated – she might have actually seen a heat shimmer. “Maybe less.”

  “You do have squishy human eyes, Callie, and you’ve been staring at screens for a while, and also you’ve been pretty bored. Maybe the shimmer was just a visual artifact?”

  “You’re saying I have space madness?”

  “I’m saying you might have space madness, yes.”

  “It’s possible,” she said. “Keep a close eye on things, though, would you? Ratchet up the security protocols another notch.”

  “My vigilance is eternal.”

  Callie tried to put it out of her mind, but she watched the air closely and kept her hand on her weapon until she reached her quarters, and got properly distracted.

  Afterward, Elena and Callie lay curled together in the captain’s bunk – the nicest bed in the nicest cabin on the Golden Spider, which was rather worse than the worst berth on the White Raven – just pleasantly afterglowing.

  “So,” Elena said. “Why are we really going to Ganymede?” She pushed herself up on her elbow and looked down at Callie, half-smiling. “I did a little research. You’re right that Titan is a craphole, but Callisto is closer than Ganymede at the moment, and by all accounts it’s bigger and better.”

  Callie sniffed. “Callisto is too fancy. It’s a step below the floating cities, but it’s still crammed full of rich people, and the people who make a living sucking up to rich people. Ganymede isn’t a shithole like Io, but it’s not totally gentrified, either. There are still artists there, people doing interesting music, young professionals just starting out. It feels alive. Callisto is great if you’re rich, but if you’re not, you’re just standing around looking at the exteriors of places you’ll never see the interiors of, and getting glared at by clerks who can smell the lack of money on you. It’s like walking around in a museum, or visiting that elderly relative who covers the furniture in plastic and only has hard candies to eat. Ganymede is more vibrant.”

  “So that’s the only reason you picked Ganymede? Your reliable reverse snobbery?”

  “Ha.” Callie sighed. “OK, it’s kind of awkward, and I’ve been waiting for the right moment to bring it up, but… I used to live on Ganymede.” She cleared her throat. “It’s where I got married.”

  “Ah. So the ex is still there?”

  “The ex is still there. The ex’s family has extensive business operations in Taliesen, which means I can ask them if they’ve seen any weird activity that might connect to the disappearance of the truth-teller cell there. Also… the ex thinks I’m dead, and he’s holding a memorial service for me.”

  Elena smacked her on the chest and said, “Oh, shit!”

  Callie glared. “Ow. You don’t have to hit me.”

  Elena smacked her again. “You’re going to your own funeral?”

  “It’s more like a celebration of my life,” she grumbled. “Though I don’t have a lot of friends left on Ganymede. Michael kept most of them in the divorce. He was always more fond of other people than I was. Which… was kind of the problem.”

  Elena wrinkled her forehead in that adorable way she had. “How so?”

  “Michael was so fond of other people that he had sex with many of them behind my back.”

  Elena winced. “I guess social mores haven’t changed that much in the past five hundred years. Cheating is still cheating.”

  “We got married, which is pretty old-fashioned anyway. Michael works in the financial arm of his family’s corporation, and that family is old Jovian money, so it’s a conservative crowd. He actually had a travel pass, is the thing – I told him he was allowed to have casual sex, if he took proper precautions, while I was out in the big empty working for long stretches. He promised to be monogamous when I was home, though, to focus on me when he had me… and he broke that promise. Repeatedly. The sex didn’t bother me much. But the betrayal of trust? That’s different. Without trust, what have you got?”

  Elena murmured sympathetically.

  “Of course, when I got suspicious, instead of confronting Michael about it, I snooped on his personal devices and read all his correspondence. At one point I threw a tablet in the general direction of his head, though I gave him plenty of time to duck. It’s not like I covered myself in glory, either, is what I’m saying. Self-righteousness is a wonderful drug, but the come-down is brutal.”

  Elena whistled. “Was the divorce nasty?”

  “Not when we finally got around to it. He was very mea culpa about everything when I caught him, and begged for counseling. I tried, for over a year. Eventually I told him that since counseling couldn’t turn back time and take his dick out of all those other people, I didn’t see the
point in going forward with it. We separated for a while – I moved out of the house in Ilus and made my home base on Meditreme Station instead – but officially we were still married, and I even did holidays with his horrible family for a while longer, to keep up appearances, and leave the door open to reconciliation. When we decided there was no going back, and agreed to formally dissolve our relationship a couple of years ago, he was open to my offer for how to separate our finances. I took a little money and the White Raven, and he kept the house and most of our savings. The alternative was to sell them both and split the money, and he loves the house like I love my ship, so.” She sighed. “Though it wasn’t easy, having an artificial intelligence based on Michael’s mind and personality as my ship’s computer.”

  “He Who Shall Not Be Named,” Elena said. Shall was an AI based on a template of Michael’s mind, and seeded with his memories. Using human minds as conceptual frameworks was the only way to create artificial intelligences that took any interest in humankind at all; pure machine AIs just withdrew from all human contact and lived their own inscrutable lives of the mind… or else tried to murder everyone.

  “The very same.” Callie rolled over and looked at Elena’s face. She could read every emotion there, and she saw a lot of sympathy and not much pity, so that was good. “The original idea was that having my ship’s AI based on Michael’s personality would help our marriage. Hearing his voice, talking to someone so much like him, would allow me to feel connected to Michael when I was elsewhere in the galaxy, so I wouldn’t miss him as much. But it turned out to be more like talking to Michael’s twin brother, the one who doesn’t have a wandering dick. Maybe I should have put an AI based on me in the house, to keep him company on my voyages. Robo-Callie could have gotten in some nice nasty remarks when he brought lovers over, at least.”

  Elena chuckled. “And now he’s having a memorial for you. Wow. And you’re crashing it. I don’t know if I’d have the courage to do that.”

  “Is it courage? It feels like guilt. I hate that he thinks I’m dead. We haven’t spoken in over a year anyway, but that was my choice, not his. He still cares about me, and I want him to know I’m alive, even if it’s still better for the rest of the world to think I’m dead.”

  “What are you going to say to him?”

  “I’m not sure. I try to run through the scenario, you know, imagine how it might go, but my thoughts just skitter away from the subject. Thinking about Michael… it pisses me off, is the thing. He’s sad, but I’m mad. That’s why I was so shitty to Shall for so long – because hearing his voice, his idioms, the jokes he makes, even the compliments he pays me, it all reminded me of Michael. But Shall saved my life on the Axiom station, so I decided to get over myself. It’s not Shall’s fault that his mental model has poor impulse control. Just because Michael betrayed me doesn’t mean Shall ever will.”

  Elena nodded. “I’m glad you and Shall made up. He’s great. Is he really a lot like Michael?”

  Callie hmmmed. “They’ve diverged a lot, of course, over the years. Shall is a machine intelligence, but he’s still a person, and he grows and changes based on his experiences, which have been very different from Michael’s. Chasing down space pirates is a lot different than adjusting spreadsheets and massaging databases. But even so, they’re a lot alike. Shall is what Michael might be if he’d spent the past several years in space with me, and didn’t have the physical apparatus necessary for cheating.” She frowned. “The funny thing is… Never mind.”

  “No, what?” Elena nudged her in the shoulder. “I knew you had an emotional landscape, but the terrain was largely mysterious. I’m enjoying this rare glimpse behind the curtain.”

  “More like into the abyss. When we were in counseling, Michael said he felt like I was cheating on him, emotionally – with Shall. I don’t think that’s fair, but I’ll admit, the situation was… confusing at the time. The two of them were so similar, in voice, and in mannerism, and I spent a lot of time on the ship talking to Shall, often while in my bunk, in the dark, so it was almost pillow talk. When I’d come home, I’d mention some story, but Michael wouldn’t know what I was talking about, because I’d only told Shall, not him, and I’d forgotten. Or I’d make some inside joke, or refer to some previous conversation, and when Michael looked at me blankly, I’d remember I’d actually had that exchange with Shall, not him. Michael tried to laugh about it at first. He’d joke about how Shall was my ‘other husband,’ or say I’d replaced him with a newer model, someone faster and smarter and always available – shit like that. It took me longer than it should have to realize they weren’t really jokes. In one counseling session, Michael said that’s why he cheated – he wanted to feel close to someone again, because he’d lost my heart to his digital doppelganger.” She paused. “At which point I said, ‘OK, but did you need to feel close to, like, seven different someones?’”

  “Oh, good,” Elena said. “For a minute there you almost had me feeling sorry for Michael.” Then, perkily: “So, do I get to meet him?”

  Chapter 6

  Callie switched her viewscreen mode so she could get a real-time look at the vast curve of Jupiter, filling the lower two-thirds of the screen. They were almost at the end of their trip, and she was glad, because the voyage had been gnawing at her nerves. She’d seen two more shimmers, once in the gym and once in the shower, but the former could have been sweat in her eyes, and the latter an artifact of swirling steam. She’d spent a long night stalking through every corridor of the ship in her own infiltration suit, with Shall scanning each millimeter with the best sensors he could muster, telling the others it was just an exercise to keep her skills sharp, without finding any sign of intrusion. She’d sent a discreet message to Lantern, who said there was no indication that any truth-teller assassins knew about them or were pursuing them. She hadn’t wanted to cause panic by telling the crew there might be an intruder, and Shall had very delicately suggested she was just antsy and bored and jumping at shadows. She wasn’t at all sure he was wrong. If there was a secret killer on board, it was taking its time with the killing, and if it was a spy, it wasn’t seeing anything too interesting.

  Elena strolled in, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “We land today!” She dropped into the co-pilot’s chair.

  “That we do.”

  “Look at Jupiter!” Elena spun around in her chair, taking in all the viewscreens. “It’s gorgeous!”

  Callie couldn’t disagree. In terms of visual grandeur, nothing beat the king of the planets: the swirling patterns of a thousand storms interacting, the endless churning of unimaginable titanic forces, great clouds of ammonia and ice forming cyclones and hurricanes and sine waves of colliding atmospheric fronts. The view was even better from the floating storm cities, but those bubbles were playgrounds for the ultra-rich, because building a structure that could float in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium required access to ruinously expensive Liar-made smart matter. Callie had only visited a storm city once, while doing bodyguard work for a visiting Lunar dignitary, and even her jaded soul had been awed by looking down through a transparent floor into a storm bigger than the planet Earth.

  They were going someplace more modest now. Not the craphole of Io, at least, and not the claustrophobic underwater cities of Europa, but the gleaming overlapping domes of Ilus. Her old home, once upon a time, when she’d made a living running freight and passengers through the bridge to other colony systems and back instead of scrounging scrap and chasing bad guys out in Trans-Neptunian Space… and well before she was in the freelance being-dead-and-saving-the-universe business. Old memories were swirling inside her like a Jovian storm.

  “It’ll be good to stand on dirt again,” Elena said. “The closest I’ve come to being on solid land since I shipped out for my goldilocks mission is Glauketas. Otherwise it’s been all ships and stations. Ganymede is practically planet-sized!”

  “Nearly half the size of Earth,” Callie said. “Not very massive, though, so don’t exp
ect much, gravity-wise. It’s like a tenth of a G down there.”

  “Point-one-four-six,” Shall corrected.

  “Are you excited to go home?”

  “The White Raven is my home these days, but if you have to go down a gravity well, Ganymede’s not so bad.”

  “Not so bad! That’s high praise from you, Captain Callie. Tell me something you liked about it. Be excited with me.”

  “The views are good,” Callie conceded. “Ganymede is tidally locked, so the same side always faces Jupiter – that’s the fashionable side, where Ilus is. The planetward surface is covered in dome cities. They’re pretty, if you like that sort of thing.”

  “Ganymede has its own magnetic field, too,” Shall said. “So it has beautiful aurorae at the poles. Much redder than the aurora borealis on Earth, for, well… physics reasons.”

  Callie didn’t wince. She’d taken a trip to the pole with her ex-husband, early in their marriage, to stay at a luxury hotel with a spectacular view of the aurorae. Shall had memories of that experience too, of course, but here she was, thinking about Michael. Her typical approach to dealing with complex emotions was to seal them up behind a wall in her mind and never think of them again, and now the halls of her mind were full of escaped memories, rampaging up and down. His face, under the reddish lights of the Ganymede aurora… his face, covered in tears in the soft light of their therapist’s office… his face, stony and still while he watched her pack her things to move out forever…

  She shook herself back into the present. Shall was telling Elena various Ganymede facts. “Galileo called Ganymede, and the other three moons of Jupiter he discovered, the ‘Medician Stars,’ in honor of his patrons, the Medici family.”

  “Suck-up,” Callie said.