Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  Agifo3acca

  1st

  Dear Stone,

  After Klabier fell from the high place on Nu Hirsch, I flew from system to system; twelve systems in all. It was a time-consuming attempt to make it difficult for any 'police' on Nu Hirsch to trace my movements. I felt like an amateur; in the old, barbaric times there were people especially skilled in evading detection. But those skills had been lost long ago; why would anybody want to evade detection in our modern Utopia? Why would anybody warrant detection in the t'T? Equally, and luckily for me, I suppose that the skills of the detectors had also declined, with nobody to detect. I, certainly, had to make it all up as I was going along.

  Finally I arrived at Nu Fallow after a month or more of travelling. That was a strange time, stone; the best part of a month swaddled up in foam, floating in that trance-like interstellar state. I revisited my childhood. You know about my childhood now; but I went backwards in time – a premonition, in a way, looking forward to the conclusion of my mission. For what was waiting for me at the end.

  What? No. I am not trying to be mysterious.

  Yes, I miss somebody to talk to. There is nobody to talk to in this place.

  'Travelling on,' I told the (human) helpers at the Nu Fallow orbital. 'I won't be going down the elevator.' They smiled. Why would they not?

  Have you decided whether you are going to fulfil your part of the bargain? asked my AI. By now, of course, I knew it was not at an AI at all, but I was in the habit of calling it that; and I didn't know what else to call it. Or would you prefer to go straight back to jail? You've killed twice since you got out, you know.

  This brought a stinging, allergic sensation to my eyeballs. I fought to keep the tears down, but they started out anyway. I had to turn to the wall to stop the helpers noticing me.

  You said yourself, I subvocalised, that Klabier was almost certainly not dead.

  I don't think I used the phrase 'almost certainly'.

  You torment me.

  You torment yourself.

  I said nothing. After a while, the AI started into a speech as stilted and awkward as if it had been prepared and written down and was now being badly read aloud.

  Near here is a system called Colar. It is thirty or so light years from Nu Fallow, but is very close to the Wallows so travel speed is low. It may take you months, or even longer, to get there. It depends upon the extent to which your faster-than-light travel degrades as you approach.

  It stopped speaking. 'And this,' I said aloud, 'is the world you wish me to murder?'

  I could feel the AI assenting to my question without it actually forming words. Your info-chip, in the insect carapace, will help you.

  'Dear old Narcissian,' I said, feeling savage and sarcastic. 'What was his name?'

  Tag-matteo.

  'Dear old dead man. I am extremely curious to see what it was he put into his info-chip. Extremely curious, you see, to find out what is in there and why he felt he had to camouflage it as an insect body-part.'

  I can understand, the AI said slowly, that you are feeling unhappy that the mission is now imminent. Might I advise you to look beyond the conclusion? After the mission you will be free forever, and wealthy, and . . .

  'I don't expect you to understand murder,' I said, sharply. 'Whoever, or whatever, you are.'

  There was silence between us for a while.

  You will programme your Zhip-box, said the AI, to the following location. It gave me a location.

  'This is Agifo3acca?'

  His ship has travelled through the narrowest portion of the Wallows. By the time you get to this place, he will be there. For him less than two weeks has elapsed.

  'How lovely it will be to see him again,' I said loudly, as if drunk, although in fact I had only drunk Erzaz.[26] My voice was loud enough to attract attention from the few other people in the orbital's refectory.

  Be quiet, said the AI; but now it sounded weary rather than peeved. Keep control of your emotions, and this will soon be over.

  But keeping control of my emotions was no easy task. My mood swings were more pronounced than ever. That afternoon I felt appalled, depressed, almost suicidal after my conversation with the AI. A mental image of pushing Klabier from the balcony, so vivid as to amount almost to hallucination, asserted itself before me over and again. I thought of all the people I was going to kill, as if I would have to push my thumbs into the soft parts of their necks myself, individually. 'How many people on this world, this Colar?' I asked the AI. But it refused to answer that sort of question, which was wise of it, because any answer would only have deepened the incline of my downward mood. I got sluggish, colours around me seemed to dull. I could barely summon the energy to move my limbs. So I lay myself down and slept. And – miracle! – when I awoke the bad mood had all fled away. I took a seat beside one of the forty-metre square observation windows and took a little more Erzaz, and my spirit clambered upwards. It would soon be over; the AI had said so. I had come so far – had done impossible things. Escaping the jailstar, for instance. Put this task behind me and I would be able to get on with things; and what of the task anyway? Wasn't it, when you looked at it right, wasn't it a rather wonderful thing? A unique achievement? A work of art? As a child I had known the pretensions to being an artist; and art had been created throughout t'T for thousands and thousands of years; artists had used every medium – visual texts, naturally occurring substances, gas, fluid, solid, electrical patternings, patterns and sculptures of pure movement and shape, words, engrams, faces-as-engrams (some artists used dotTech to put their own faces through repeated changes, making themselves their canvasses), programmes, narrative, intensity, dissipation. Form and subject had been extensively explored, birth, life, death, deathlessness, on every conceivable scale. But nobody had used death itself as a medium, had used the snuffing-out-of-life[27] as a mode of artistic expression. Well, I decided, I would. I would leave behind something that would not be forgotten.

  I ate, slept, adjusted myself. After a day or so, I made my way to departures, and strapped on yet another Zhip-box. Yet again, the foam spilled out and formed itself around me. Darkness.

  2nd

  Dear Stone,

  It was a long trip; I assume that the initially rapid passage quickly declined and degraded as we approached the borders of the Wallows. Inside the foam I slept, got bored, thought through what I was doing. It was not too late to change my mind, to pull out. But I wasn't sure how to go about that. The slower I travelled through space, the less trance-like I felt. The timeless fugue state of FTL is in large part a function of the quantum juggling of the transit, playing around in the brain. But we went more and more slowly, and I became more and more conscious. Time dragged. I tried to engage the AI in conversation, just to pass the time, but it did not respond. Either it was playing games, or else the travel speed rendered it incapable in some way. Perhaps it was an AI after all, and the quantum turbulence had mixed it up behind repair. In that darkness, the quiet, the emptiness, all sorts of things seemed possible.

  I slept, I woke. The difference between the two seemed minimal. Time dragged, and dragged.

  I don't know how long it all took.

  When I felt the first lurch, excitement burst up inside me. It meant I was being manoeuvred into a hangar. I had finally reached Agifo3acca's ship; and the mere prospect of a change of scenery was so exciting to me I found myself fidgeting inside the foam. Pressing the pliant material back, pushing forward. I could hardly wait.

  The excitement of my arrival accounted, I think, for the 'happy' mood I found myself in as the foam was washed away and I lay, blinking, on the hangar floor. I had not seen Agifo3acca for well over a year, but still I greeted him as an old friend. 'How is your life, dear man,' I cried. 'Still studying the Gravity Trench?'

  'I am,' he said.

  'I adore you for it!' I declared, warmly. 'I adore you, your obsession and your fraction-God.' I may have been emotionally unstable, I suppose; in a manic phase.

>   I was in the large arched hangar of Agifo3acca's spaceship; the walls were a cobalt blue, tiled (or given the appearance of being tiled) with a paler diamond pattern of turquoise. The floor was mostly flat, except for two indentions, one a sort of sink-hole for waste (like the brown speckled fluid that was my dissolved foam), the other leading towards a sphincter that gave exit to space outside. Ranged against the wall were half-a-dozen car-sized boxes that I took to be shuttles. I looked around me, my brain perhaps less addled with space-flight than might normally be the case, on account of the relatively small speeds possible near the Wallows. The dark, brilliant and somehow intimate space of the hangar – for all its forty metres of height from floor to ceiling – struck me as home.

  'I feel closer to you,' I told the tall Wheah, 'and to your kind than I have ever before.' I believe there were tears coming down my face. 'I feel closer to you Wheah,' I sobbed, 'than I do to my own kind – I understand! I understand why it was you who met me from the jailbreak, and why you're here now!'

  Agifo3acca, startled, broke away from me. If he understood what I was saying he did not show it.

  The last time I had seen him, I had spent only two days with Agifo3acca, and for much of that time I had been recovering from my near-fatal jailbreak. But this time I spent many weeks with him, and got to know him very well indeed.

  He had a disconcerting habit of displaying his teeth, as if aggressively. In fact (I discovered) this was a sort of exaggeration of a smile. He had not done this the first time I had met him, but I certainly noticed him doing it now.

  I wandered around his bizarre, ramble-shackle spaceship; up its ladders and into mushroom shaped chambers designed for some purpose I cannot guess at; down corridors hundreds of metres in length, with regularly spaced holes at the base of their walls like enormous mouseholes. Through rooms draped with some form of rough fabric that looked like the inside of tents. In one room filled with water, which I took to be a swimming and recreation room, except that when I touched the treacly surface of the water it was not water at all, but ink. It stained my fingers; they stayed smudgy-black for days.

  He would eat once a day, shortly before going to bed. I never saw him eat at any other time, and I believe it to be a Wheah habit: one large meal, digested as the subject sleeps, and no food to distract or make sluggish the individual during waking hours.

  'I want to find out everything I can about the Wheah,' I gushed to Agifo3acca during one such mealtime.

  He looked at me, uncertain. He swallowed. 'Why do you desire this?'

  This struck me as funny; that Agifo3acca was keeping up a pretence in this manner. 'I have found out the secret behind my mission.'

  'Mission,' said Agifo3acca, sagely.

  'When you collected me from the jailstar,' I said. 'You talked of the payments you were receiving.'

  'Wealths,' he said. 'I have received more.'

  'Of course you have,' I said, winking. 'Of course. Well I know. But I do not know everything. I need to know the logic behind the Wheah.'

  'The logic?'

  'Tell me about your culture.'

  Agifo3acca stared at me for a while, then put his head down and finished his meal. I asked him several questions, but he simply ignored them.

  The next morning I rambled again through the spaceship. I clambered over a pyramid pile of junk, old processors tumbled together like rubble, to get up to a porthole in the ceiling of one room that seemed to be the only egress. Popping up through this I found myself in a separate space, filled with tall leafy stalks of a yellow colour. They seemed to be naturally grown, a sort of plant I had never encountered before. I explored this for a while, and then dropped back through the trapdoor and out again. Then I found a long corridor, barely tall enough for me to walk along without bending my head, and walked for seven or eight hundred metres; but the corridor ended in a simple dead end. I was convinced that this ending must be a hidden entrance, but for all that I spoke, Friend, to enter, and pushed and pulled at knobs and patterns, nothing happened, no door opened. I found a series of rooms in which great stretches of coloured fabric were stacked; the colour, a plasticky hardness, had been laid over the stretched fabric in some primitive fashion; although the colours were nice in a muted sort of way. Everywhere I went everything was quiet, still, motionless, except for the occasional rustle of a dust-bot crawling over a surface to clean it.

  All this time, I suppose, I was filling my time, trying to avoid facing the prospect of what I had come to this place to do. I think, dear stone, that I was waiting for a prompt from the AI. But my AI had been silent for days, an unusually prolonged period of time.

  I sought out Agifo3acca again. I found him sitting in the middle of a tall wide room given over to stellar imaging. A great blotchy hologram of the local space filled this room.

  It was quaint: this sort of antique method of realising or mapping space. I stood looking down upon it from a sort of balcony.

  'This spaceship,' I told him, 'is like a museum.' He didn't reply, so I came down into the belly of the room, walking through the ghostly stars and gassy shapes, to where he was sitting. 'I have not seen an example of stellar mapping so crude outside of a museum,' I said, pleasantly, taking a seat beside him on the couch.

  Agif had in his hand a pointer-wand with which he was adjusting the positioning of the great misty image, shifting it along, angling it round, yawing it to display one constellation or another.

  'A hobby?' I pressed.

  'A tool,' he said.

  For the first time I actually looked at the image being projected, seeing past the ludicrous antiquity of the mechanism. Was it local space? I did not know the area well enough.

  'Is it t'T space?' I asked. 'A portion? What are you looking at?'

  'The Trench,' he said at once. 'The Gravity Trench.'

  'Of course,' I said. I looked again, feeling stupid I had not noticed the phenomenon amongst the scattering of holo-stars; but even looking carefully it remained hidden. 'Where is it?'

  He gestured with his free hand.

  'I cannot see it. Why do you not have the image machine single out the Trench in some bright colour, so that it is obvious?'

  'Today,' said Agifo3acca, 'I am interested in real-colour representation. The Trench has no colour, it eats colour, and so it is almost invisible to the human eye. But you can sense it by the way its gravity distorts the background stars. See! If I swivel the map, some stars leap from position to position – their light is bent by the gravity of the trench from one side of it suddenly to the other.'

  But I was already bored. Agifo3acca's obsession with the Trench was so last-millennium. I knew, from what he had said before, that he had his own bizarre theories about the thing, but humanity had been through a period of concocting endless bizarre theories about it and still it had refused to give up its secrets, until we had realised that – most likely – it had no 'secrets' to give up.

  'Perhaps,' I said, to bait him, 'it is of natural origin.'

  Agifo3acca shook his head. 'It cannot be.'

  'There are many extraordinary gravity phenomena in the galaxy,' I pointed out. 'Black holes of every dimension, some no bigger than my fist, some super-giant surrounded by superdense particles.'

  'It is no black hole. You do not understand the Trench,' he replied, separating his lips tightly to expose his teeth in that strange expression of his that might have been aggressive or might merely have been smiling. 'Perhaps you don't much understand gravity?'

  I bridled at this. 'It is true I am no gravity-technician, but I have had many years of t'T education.' I stood up, proud, coldly taking offence.

  He patted the air in front of him with his hand: sit-down, sit-down. I stood for just long enough to show that I was not at his beck and call, and then sat.

  'The Gravity Trench,' he said, 'is like nothing else in the galaxy. Gravity draws all things to itself, on all sides, so all gravitational phenomena tend towards the sphere, the spiral, the cone. But this . . . object is a th
ousand-light-year wall, a linear feature. Hundreds of light years tall, thousands long, but only a few kilometres wide. From the bulk to the wallows,' (he was pointing with his stick) -'broken in the middle for some thirty light years, and the physics of that space, that gap in the Trench, are . . . insane.'

  I wasn't sure that Agifo3aeca, whose command of Glice was not perfect, actually meant to use this technical, medical word, so I queried it. 'Insane?' I repeated. '. . . In the middle?'

  He seemed to take me wrongly. 'Yes, and not at either end. It has something to do with the weak-force physics, for the phenomenon seems only to peter out in the Bulk or the Wallows. Diffuse nebulae, higher concentration of gas, the generally disruptive presence matter . . .' He trailed off. 'But why is it broken in the middle, snapped like a bone? Nobody knows. How it formed, we don't know that either. But some answers seem more likely than others.'

  'You've made quite a study of this,' I said. 'Haven't you.'

  He slid his lips apart over gripped teeth and glistening, black gums. 'Many aspects of the worlds of the t'T interest me,' he said. 'But this Trench interests me most of all.'

  'More than it does me,' I said. 'Or any of the people of the t'T, I think. The Trench is just – well, just itself.'

  'Yes,' he started to say, and then hushed himself with a finger on his mouth. 'The people of the t'T,' he said, as if I was no longer one of them, 'they are self-regarding to an amazing degree. They live among wonders, and yet are only interested in their own thoughts and creations, their own habits and sexual preferences.' He leaned towards me. 'Let me try to amaze you. Because for all that you are no longer of the t'T, rid of their devil-machines, yet you still share their numbness to the wonder of the galaxy.'

  'Thank you,' I said, trying to sound ironic and detached but sounding instead intimidated.

  'Let me try to amaze you,' he said again. 'This Gravity Trench — unique in the universe as it is, most likely – is an entirely mass-less phenomenon.'