Rice stared at him. “Cold-blooded little cuss, aren’t you?” He glared down at Emeline’s letter. “All right, you got my attention. Now, Miss Dutt, you say you’ve been talking about this with the folks back home. Right? So when is this big bubble going to burst? How long have we got?”
“About five centuries,” Bisesa said. “The calculations are difficult—it’s hard to be sure.”
Rice stared at her. “Five fucking centuries, pardon me. When we haven’t got food stock to last us five weeks. Well, I think I’ll put that in my ‘pending’ tray for now.” He rubbed his eyes, energetic but obviously stressed. “Five centuries. Jesus Christ! All right, what’s next?”
Next was the solar system.
Gifford Oker breathed, “I read your letter, Miss Dutt. You traveled to Mars, in a space clipper. How marvelous your century must be!” He preened. “When I was a small boy, you know, I once met Jules Verne. Great man. Very great man. He would have understood about sailing to Mars, I should think!”
“Can we stick to the point?” Rice snarled. “Jules Verne, Jesus Christ! Just show the lady your drawings, Professor; I can see that’s what you’re longing to do.”
“Yes. Here is the result of our exploration of the solar system, Miss Dutt.” Oker opened his briefcase, and spread his material over the mayor’s desk. There were images of the planets, some blurry black-and-white photographs, but mostly color images laboriously sketched in pencil. And there were what looked like spectrograph results, like blurred barcodes.
Bisesa leaned forward. Almost subvocally she murmured, “Can you see?”
Her phone whispered back, “Well enough, Bisesa.”
Oker pushed forward one set of images. “Here,” he said, “is Venus.”
In Bisesa’s reality Venus was a ball of cloud. The spaceprobes had found an atmosphere as thick as an ocean, and a land so hot that lead would melt. But this Venus was different. It looked, at first glance, like an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth from space: swaths of cloud, gray-blue ocean, small caps of ice at the poles.
Oker said, “It’s all ocean, ocean and ice. We’ve detected no land, not a trace. The ocean is water.” He scrabbled for a spectrograph result. “The air is nitrogen, with some oxygen—less than Earth’s—and rather a lot of carbon dioxide, which must seep into the water. The oceans of Venus must fizz like Coca Cola!” It was a professor’s well-worn joke. But now he leaned forward. “And there is life there: life on Venus.”
“How do you know?”
He pointed to green smudges on some of the drawings. “We can see no details, but there must be animals in the endless seas—fish perhaps, immense whales, feeding on the plankton. We can expect it to be more or less like terrestrial analogues, due to processes of convergence,” he said confidently.
Oker showed more results. On the bare face of the Moon, transient atmospheres and even glimmers of open water pooled in the deep craters and the rills; and again the Chicagoan astronomers thought they saw life.
There were some extraordinary images of Mercury. These were blurred sketches of structures of light, like netting, flung over the innermost planet’s dark side, glimpsed at the very limits of visibility. Oker said there was once a partial eclipse of the sun, and some of his students reported that they had seen similar “webs of plasma,” or “plasmoids,” in the tenuous solar air. Perhaps this too was a form of life, much stranger, a life of superhot gases that swam from the fires of the sun to the face of its nearest child.
Under the cover of a coughing spasm, Bisesa withdrew and murmured to her phone. “Do you think it’s likely?”
“Plasma life is not impossible,” the phone murmured. “There are structures in the solar atmosphere, bound together by magnetic flux.”
Bisesa replied grimly, “Yes. We all became experts on the sun in the storm years. What do you think is going on here?”
“Mir is a sampling of life on Earth, taken during the period when intelligence, mankind, has arisen. The planetologists think Venus was warm and wet when very young. So perhaps Venus has been similarly ‘sampled.’ This seems to be a sort of optimized version of the solar system, Bisesa, each of the worlds, and perhaps slices within those worlds, selected for the maximality of its life. I wonder what’s happening on Europa or Titan in this universe, beyond the reach of the Chicagoans’ telescopes…”
Now Professor Oker, with a glimmer of a showman’s instinct, was unveiling the climax of his presentation: Mars.
But this wasn’t the Mars Bisesa had grown up with, and even visited. This blue-gray Mars was more Earthlike even than watery Venus, for here there was plenty of dry land, a world of continents and oceans, capped by ice at the poles, swathed in wispy cloud. There was some familiarity. That green stripe might be the Valles Marineris; the blue scar in the southern hemisphere could be the tremendous basin of Hellas. Most of the northern hemisphere appeared to be dry.
The phone whispered, “Something’s wrong, Bisesa. If Mars, our Mars, were flooded, the whole of the northern hemisphere would be drowned under an ocean.”
“The Vastitas Borealis.”
“Yes. Something dramatic must happen to this Mars in the future, something that changes the shape of the entire planet.”
Rice listened to Oker impatiently, and at last cut him off. “Come on, Gifford. Get to the good stuff. Tell her what you told me, about the Martians.”
Oker grinned. “We see straight-line traces cutting across the Martian plains. Lines that must be hundreds of miles long.”
“Canals,” Abdi said immediately.
“What else could they be? And on land we, some of us, believe we have glimpsed structures. Walls, perhaps, tremendously long. This is controversial; we are at the limits of seeing. But about this,” Oker said, “there is no controversy at all.” He produced a photograph, taken in polarized light, which showed bright lights, like stars, scattered over the face of Mars. “Cities,” breathed Professor Oker.
Emeline leaned forward and tapped the image. “I told her about that,” she said.
Rice sat back. “So there you have it, Miss Dutt,” he said. “The question is, what use is any of this to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I need to talk to my contacts at home.”
“And,” Abdi said to Oker, “I’d like to get to work with you, Professor. We have much to share.”
“Yes,” said Oker, smiling.
“All right,” Rice said. “But when you have something, you come tell me, you hear?” It was a clear order.
“So. Enough spooky stuff for one day. Let’s talk of other things.” As the professor stowed away his images, Rice sat back in his chair, rested his feet on the desk—he wore cowboy boots, with spurs—and blew out cigar smoke. “Would you like another drink, a smoke? No? For one thing,” he said to Abdi, “I would very much like to hear about what’s going on across the Atlantic. Alexander the Great and his ‘world empire’—sounds like my kind of guy.”
Abdi glanced at Bisesa and Emeline, and shrugged. “Where would you like me to begin?”
“Tell me about his armies. And his navies, too. Does he have steamships yet? How soon before he can cross the Atlantic in force?…”
With Rice’s attention occupied by Abdi, Bisesa murmured to her phone again. “What do you think?”
“I need to get to work transferring all this data back to Mars. It will take a long time.”
“But?”
“But I have a feeling, Bisesa, that this is why you were summoned to Mars.”
46: A-LINE
June 2070
“Since coming through the A-line we aren’t alone with Q any more, Mum. There’s a regular flotilla escorting the thing now, like a navy flag day, all the rock miners and bubble-dwellers coming out to see the beast as it passes. It’s kind of strange for us. After a cruise of fourteen months, we’ve got all this company. But they don’t know we’re here. The Liberator is staying inside her stealth shroud, and there are a couple other navy tubs out
here, keeping the sight-seers at a good distance and coordinating the latest assault on Q…”
“Bella,” Thales said softly.
“Pause.” Edna’s talking head froze, a tiny holographic bust suspended over the surface of Bella’s desk. “Can’t it wait, Thales?”
“Cassie Duflot is here.”
“Oh, crap.” Wife of dead hero space-worker, and professional pain in the backside.
“You did ask me to inform you as soon as she arrived.”
“I did.”
The message from Edna was still coming in. Bella was a mother as well as a politician; she had rights too. “Ask her to wait.”
“Of course, Bella.”
“And Thales, while she’s waiting, don’t let her mail, record, comment, blog, explore, analyze, or speculate. Give her coffee and distract her.”
“I understand, Bella. Incidentally—”
“Yes?”
“It’s little more than an hour to the principal strike. The Big Whack. Or rather until the report reaches us.”
She didn’t need reminding of that. The Big Whack, mankind’s last hope against the Q-bomb—and perhaps the end of her daughter’s life. “Okay, Thales, thank you, I’m on it. Resume.”
Edna’s frozen image came alive again.
Edna’s voice, having spent twenty-four minutes crawling across the plane of the solar system, sounded strongly in Bella’s Mount Weather office. And Thales smoothly produced pictures to match the words, images captured by a variety of ships and monitors.
There was the Q-bomb, a ghostly droplet of smeared starlight, hovering over Bella’s desk. It was passing through the asteroid belt right now—the navy’s A-line—and she was shown a distant sprinkling of rocks, magnified and brightened for her benefit. There was something awesome about the image; six years almost to the day since the object had first been spotted swimming past Saturn’s moons, here it was among the asteroids, home to a branch of mankind. The Q-bomb was here, in human space. And in just six more months—at Christmas time in this year of 2070—the Q-bomb was destined to make its rendezvous with Earth itself.
But the bomb’s passage through the belt gave one more chance for an assault.
Edna was talking about the attempts so far. Thales showed images of nuclear weapons blossoming against the bomb’s impassive surface, and ships, manned and robotic, deploying energy weapons, particle beams, and lasers, even a stream of rocks thrown from a major asteroid fitted with a mass driver, an electromagnetic catapult.
“Pea shooters against an elephant,” Edna commented. “Except it isn’t quite. Every time we hit that thing it loses a little mass-energy, a loss in proportion to what we throw at it. Just a flea-bite each time, but it’s non-zero. Lyla Neal has been doing some modeling of this; Professor Carel will brief you. In fact we hope one outcome of the Big Whack, assuming we don’t knock the thing off its rails altogether, is to confirm Lyla’s modeling, with a data point orders of magnitude away from what we’ve been able to deploy so far. Anyhow we’ll find out soon.
“As for the cannonball, the tractor is doing its job so far. All systems are nominal, and the cannonball’s deflection is matching the predictions…” In her quiet, professional voice, Edna summarized the status of the weapon.
When she was done, she smiled. Despite her peaked cap, she looked heartbreakingly young.
“I’m doing fine in myself. After more than a year aboard this tub I need some fresh air, or fresher anyhow. And under a dictionary definition of ‘stir crazy’ you could write down ‘John Metternes.’ But at least we haven’t killed each other yet. And if you look at this cruise as an extended shakedown of the Liberator she’s performed fine. I think we have a good new technology here, Mum. Not that that’s much consolation if we fail to deflect Q, I guess; we’ll all be in deep yogurt then.
“The other crews are doing fine too. I guess this is an operational test for the navy itself. A few veterans of the old wet navy say they feel out of place on board ships where even the rawest nugget has passed out of the USNPG.” That was the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey. “Right now, while we’re waiting for the drama to begin, there’s a sort of open-loop church service going on. Those who choose to are saying their prayers to Our Lady of Loreto, the patron saint of aviators.
“As for the Spacers, they are cooperating, mostly, with the cordon and other measures. But we’re ready to take whatever action you see fit for us to take, Mum.
“Sixty minutes to showtime. I’ll speak to you after the Whack, Mum. Love you. Liberator out.”
Bella had time for only a short reply, for it would reach Edna with only minutes left before the strike. “I love you too,” she said. “And I know you’ll do your duty, as you always do.” She was horribly aware that these might be the last words she ever spoke to Edna, and that in the next hour she might lose her only daughter, as poor, angry Cassie Duflot, waiting outside, had already lost her husband. But she could think of nothing else to add. “Bella out. Thales, close this down.”
The holographic display popped out of existence, leaving a bare desk, with only a chronometer counting down to the time of the Big Whack assault, and the still more important moment when news of it would reach the Earth.
Bella composed herself. “Show Cassie in.”
Somehow Bella had expected Cassie Duflot to show up in black, as when Bella had last met her when she had handed over her husband’s Tooke medal: still in widow’s weeds, after all this time. But Cassie wore a suit of a bright lilac color, attractive and practical. And nor, Bella reminded herself, was Cassie going to be sunk in grief as she had been during that visit. It would be easy to underestimate her.
“It’s good of you to see me,” Cassie said formally, shaking Bella’s hand.
“I’m not sure if I had much choice,” Bella said. “You’ve been making quite a splash since we last met.”
Cassie smiled, a cold expression almost like a politician’s. “I didn’t mean to make any kind of ‘splash,’ or to cause anybody any trouble. All I am is the widow of a navy engineer, who started asking questions about how and why her husband had died.”
“And you didn’t get good enough answers, right? Coffee?”
Bella went to the percolator herself. She used the interval to size up her opponent, for that was how she had to think of Cassie Duflot.
Cassie was a young woman, and a young mother, and a widow; that gave her an immediately sympathetic angle to snag the public’s attention. But Cassie also worked in the public relations department of Thule, Inc., one of the world’s great eco-conservation agencies, specializing in post-sunstorm reconstruction in the Canadian Arctic. Not only that, her mother-in-law, Phillippa, had moved in senior circles in London before the sunstorm, and had no doubt kept up a web of contacts since. Cassie knew how to use the media.
Cassie Duflot looked strong. Not neurotic, or resentful, or bitter. She wasn’t after any kind of revenge for her husband’s death or for the disruption of her life, Bella saw immediately. She was after something deeper, and more satisfying. The truth, perhaps. And that made her more formidable still.
Bella gave Cassie her coffee and sat down. “Questions with no answers,” she prompted.
“Yes. Look, Chair Fingal—”
“Call me Bella.”
Cassie said she had known a little of her husband’s activities in his last years. He had been a space engineer; Cassie knew he was working on a secret program, and roughly where he was stationed.
“And that’s all,” she said. “While James was alive that was all I wanted to know. I accepted the need for security. We’re at war, and during wartime you keep your mouth shut. But after he died, and after the funeral and the ceremonials—you were kind enough to visit us—”
Bella nodded. “You started to ask your questions.”
“I didn’t want much,” Cassie said. She was twisting the wedding ring on her finger, self-conscious now. “I didn’t want to endanger anybody, least of all James’s frie
nds. I just wanted to know something of how he died, so that one day the children, when they ask about him—you know.”
“I’m a mother myself. In fact, a grandmother. Yes, I do know.”
It seemed the navy had badly mishandled queries that had initially been valid and quite innocent. “They stonewalled me. One by one, the navy’s liaison officers and the counselors stopped returning my calls. Even James’s friends drew away.” This blank shutting-out had, quite predictably, incensed Cassie. She had consulted her mother, and had begun her own digging.
And she had started drafting queries for Thales.
“I think because Thales exists, whispering in the ear of anybody on the planet who asks him a question, people believe that our society is free and open. In fact Thales is just as much an instrument of government control as any other outlet. Isn’t that true?”
Bella said, “Go on.”
“But I found out there are ways even to get information out of an AI’s nonanswers as well as its answers.” She had become something of a self-taught expert on the analysis of an AI traumatized by being ordered to lie. She produced a softscreen from her bag and spread it over the desk. It showed a schematic of a network laid out in gold thread, with sections cordoned off by severe red lines. “You can’t just dig a memory out of an AI without leaving a hole. Everything is interconnected—”
Bella cut her off. “That’s enough. Look, Cassie. Others have asked the same sort of questions before. It’s just that you, being who you are, have become more prominent than most.”
“And where are those others? Locked away somewhere?”
In fact some were, in a detention center in the Sea of Moscow, on the far side of the Moon. It was Bella’s own darkest secret. She said, “Not all of them.”
Cassie took back her softscreen and leaned forward, her face intent. “I’m not intimidated by you,” she said softly.
“I’m sure you’re not. But, Cassie—sit back. The office has various features designed to respond to any threat made against me. They’re not always very clever at decoding body language.”
A Time Odyssey Omnibus Page 88