Firefall

by Peter Watts

  It was murder on our ancestors, even if those same enemy genes—co-opted now—served us so well when we left the sun a half-million years later. But it was almost—heartening, I guess—to think that maybe Sarasti felt the tug of other genes, some aversion to prolonged visibility shaped by generations of natural selection. Maybe he spent every moment in our company fighting voices that urged him to hide, hide, let them forget. Maybe he retreated when they got too loud, maybe we made him as uneasy as he made us.

  We could always hope.

  ***

  Our final orbit combined discretion and valor in equal measure.

  Rorschach described a perfect equatorial circle 87,900 km from Big Ben's center of gravity. Sarasti was unwilling to let it out of sight, and you didn't have to be a vampire to mistrust relay sats when swinging through a radiation-soaked blizzard of rock and machinery. The obvious alternative was to match orbits.

  At the same time, all the debate over whether or not Rorschach had meant—or even understood—the threats it had made was a bit beside the point. Counterintrusion measures were a distinct possibility either way, and ongoing proximity only increased the risk. So Sarasti had derived some optimum compromise, a mildly eccentric orbit that nearly brushed the artefact at perigee but kept a discreet distance the rest of the time. It was a longer trajectory than Rorschach's, and higher—we had to burn on the descending arc to keep in synch—but the end result was continuously line-of-sight, and only brought us within striking distance for three hours either side of bottoming out.

  Our striking distance, that is. For all we knew Rorschach could have reached out and swatted us from the sky before we'd even left the solar system.

  Sarasti gave the command from his tent. ConSensus carried his voice into the drum as Theseus coasted to apogee: "Now."

  Jack had erected a tent about itself, a blister glued to Rorschach's hull and blown semi-taut against vacuum with the merest whiff of nitrogen. Now it brought lasers to bear and started digging; if we'd read the vibrations right, the ground should be only thirty-four centimeters deep beneath its feet. The beams stuttered as they cut, despite six millimeters of doped shielding.

  "Son of a bitch," Szpindel murmured. "It's working."

  We burned through tough fibrous epidermis. We burned through veins of insulation that might have been some sort of programmable asbestos. We burned through alternating layers of superconducting mesh, and the strata of flaking carbon separating them.

  We burned through.

  The lasers shut down instantly. Within seconds Rorschach's intestinal gases had blown taut the skin of the tent. Black carbon smoke swirled and danced in sudden thick atmosphere.

  Nothing shot back at us. Nothing reacted. Partial pressures piled up on ConSensus: methane, ammonia, hydrogen. Lots of water vapor, freezing as fast as it registered.

  Szpindel grunted. "Reducing atmosphere. Pre-Snowball." He sounded disappointed.

  "Maybe it's a work in progress," James suggested. "Like the structure itself."

  "Maybe."

  Jack stuck out its tongue, a giant mechanical sperm with a myo-optical tail. Its head was a thick-skinned lozenge, at least half ceramic shielding by cross-section; the tiny payload of sensors at its core was rudimentary, but small enough for the whole assembly to thread through the pencil-thin hole the laser had cut. It unspooled down the hole, rimming Rorschach's newly-torn orifice.

  "Dark down there," James observed.

  Bates: "But warm." 281°K. Above freezing.

  The endoscope emerged into darkness. Infrared served up a grainy grayscale of a — a tunnel, it looked like, replete with mist and exotic rock formations. The walls curved like honeycomb, like the insides of fossilized intestine. Cul-de-sacs and branches proliferated down the passage. The basic substrate appeared to be a dense pastry of carbon-fiber leaves. Some of the gaps between those layers were barely thick as fingernails; others looked wide enough to stack bodies.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Szpindel said softly, "The Devil's Baklava."

  I could have sworn I saw something move. I could have sworn it looked familiar.

  The camera died.

  I COULDN'T SAY goodbye to Dad. I didn't even know where he was.

  I didn't want to say goodbye to Helen. I didn't want to go back there. That was the problem: I didn't have to. There was nowhere left in the world where the mountain couldn't simply pick up and move to Mohammed. Heaven was merely a suburb of the global village, and the global village left me no excuse.

  I linked from my own apartment. My new inlays—mission-specific, slid into my head just the week before—shook hands with the noosphere and knocked upon the Pearly Gates. Some tame spirit, more plausible than Saint Peter if no less ethereal, took a message and disappeared.

  And I was inside.

  This was no antechamber, no visiting room. Heaven was not intended for the casual visitor; any paradise in which the flesh-constrained would feel at home would have been intolerably pedestrian to the disembodied souls who lived there. Of course, there was no reason why visitor and resident had to share the same view. I could have pulled any conventional worldview off the shelf if I'd wanted, seen this place rendered in any style I chose. Except for the Ascended themselves, of course. That was one of the perks of the Afterlife: only they got to choose the face we saw.

  But the thing my mother had become had no face, and I was damned if she was going to see me hide behind some mask.

  "Hello, Helen."

  "Siri! What a wonderful surprise!"

  She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated. She swirled before me like a school of fish. Her world echoed her body: lights and angles and three-dimensional Escher impossibilities, piled like bright thunderheads. And yet, somehow I would have recognised her anywhere. Heaven was a dream; only upon waking do you realize that the characters you encountered looked nothing like they do in real life.

  There was only one familiar landmark anywhere in the whole sensorium. My mother's heaven smelled of cinnamon.

  I beheld her luminous avatar and imagined the corpus soaking in a tank of nutrients, deep underground. "How are you doing?"

  "Very well. Very well. Of course, it takes a little getting used to, knowing your mind isn't quite yours any more." Heaven didn't just feed the brains of its residents; it fed off them, used the surplus power of idle synapses to run its own infrastructure. "You have to move in here, sooner better than later. You'll never leave."

  "Actually, I am leaving," I said. "We're shipping out tomorrow."

  "Shipping out?"

  "The Kuiper. You know. The Fireflies?"

  "Oh yes. I think I heard something about that. We don't get much news from the outside world, you know."

  "Anyway, just thought I'd call in and say goodbye."

  "I'm glad you did. I've been hoping to see you without, you know."

  "Without what?"

  "You know. Without your father listening in."

  Not again.

  "Dad's in the field, Helen. Interplanetary crisis. You might have heard something."

  "I certainly have. You know, I haven't always been happy about your father's—extended assignments, but maybe it was really a blessing in disguise. The less he was around, the less he could do."

  "Do?"

  "To you." The apparition stilled for a few moments, feigning hesitation. "I've never told you this before, but—no. I shouldn't."

  "Shouldn't what?"

  "Bring up, well, old hurts."

  "What old hurts?" Right on cue. I couldn't help myself, the training went too deep. I always barked on command.

  "Well," she began, "sometimes you'd come back—you were so very young—and your face would be so set and hard, and I'd wonder why are you so angry, little boy? What can someone so young have to be so angry about?"

  "Helen, what are you talking about? Back from where?"


  "Just from the places he'd take you." Something like a shiver passed across her facets. "He was still around back then. He wasn't so important, he was just an accountant with a karate fetish, going on about forensics and game theory and astronomy until he put everyone to sleep."

  I tried to imagine it: my father, the chatterbox. "That doesn't sound like Dad."

  "Well of course not. You were too young to remember, but he was just a little man, then. He still is, really, under all the secret missions and classified briefings. I've never understood why people never saw that. But even back then he liked to—well, it wasn't his fault, I suppose. He had a very difficult childhood, and he never learned to deal with problems like an adult. He, well, he'd throw his weight around, I guess you'd say. Of course I didn't know that before we married. If I had, I—but I made a commitment. I made a commitment, and I never broke it."

  "What, are you saying you were abused?" Back from the places he'd take you. "Are—are you saying I was?"

  "There are all kinds of abuse, Siri. Words can hurt more than bullets, sometimes. And child abandonment—"

  "He didn't abandon me." He left me with you.

  "He abandoned us, Siri. Sometimes for months at a time, and I—and we never knew if he was coming back And he chose to do that to us, Siri. He didn't need that job, there were so many other things he was qualified to do. Things that had been redundant for years."

  I shook my head, incredulous, unable to say it aloud: she hated him because he hadn't had the good grace to grow unnecessary?

  "It's not Dad's fault that planetary security is still an essential service," I said.

  She continued as if she hadn't heard. "Now there was a time when it was unavoidable, when people our age had to work just to make ends meet. But even back then people wanted to spend time with their families. Even if they couldn't afford to. To, to choose to stay working when it isn't even necessary, that's—" She shattered and reassembled at my shoulder. "Yes, Siri. I believe that's a kind of abuse. And if your father had been half as loyal to me as I've been to him all these years..."

  I remembered Jim, the last time I'd seen him: snorting vassopressin under the restless eyes of robot sentries. "I don't think Dad's been disloyal to either of us."

  Helen sighed. "I don't really expect you to understand. I'm not completely stupid, I've seen how it played out. I pretty much had to raise you myself all these years. I always had to play the heavy, always had to be the one to hand out the discipline because your father was off on some secret assignment. And then he'd come home for a week or two and he was the golden-haired boy just because he'd seen fit to drop in. I don't really blame you for that any more than I blame him. Blame doesn't solve anything at this stage. I just thought—well, really, I thought you ought to know. Take it for what it's worth."

  A memory, unbidden: called into Helen's bed when I was nine, her hand stroking my scar, her stale sweet breath stirring against my cheek. You're the man of the house now Siri. We can't count on your father any more. It's just you and me...

  I didn't say anything for a while. Finally: "Didn't it help at all?"

  "What do you mean?"

  I glanced around at all that customized abstraction: internal feedback, lucidly dreamed. "You're omnipotent in here. Desire anything, imagine anything; there it is. I'd thought it would have changed you more."

  Rainbow tiles danced, and forced a laugh. "This isn't enough of a change for you?"

  Not nearly.

  Because Heaven had a catch. No matter how many constructs and avatars Helen built in there, no matter how many empty vessels sang her praises or commiserated over the injustices she'd suffered, when it came right down to it she was only talking to herself. There were other realities over which she had no control, other people who didn't play by her rules—and if they thought of Helen at all, they thought as they damn well pleased.

  She could go the rest of her life without ever meeting any of them. But she knew they were out there, and it drove her crazy. Taking my leave of Heaven, it occurred to me that omnipotent though she was, there was only be one way my mother would ever be truly happy in her own personal creation.

  The rest of creation would have to go.

  ***

  "This shouldn't keep happening," Bates said. "The shielding was good."

  The Gang was up across the drum, squaring away something in their tent. Sarasti lurked offstage today, monitoring the proceedings from his quarters. That left me with Bates and Szpindel in the Commons.

  "Maybe against direct EM." Szpindel stretched, stifled a yawn. "Ultrasound boots up magnetic fields through shielding sometimes, in living tissue at least. Any chance something like that could be happening with your electronics?"

  Bates spread her hands. "Who knows? Might as well be black magic and elves down there."

  "Well, it's not a total wash. We can make a few smart guesses, eh?"

  "Such as."

  Szpindel raised one finger. "The layers we cut through couldn't result from any metabolic process I know about. So it's not 'alive', not in the biological sense. Not that that means anything these days," he added, glancing around the belly of our beast.

  "What about life inside the structure?"

  "Anoxic atmosphere. Probably rules out complex multicellular life. Microbes, maybe, although if so I wish to hell they show up in the samples. But anything complex enough to think, let alone build something like that"—a wave at the image in ConSensus—"is gonna need a high-energy metabolism, and that means oxygen."

  "So you think it's empty?"

  "Didn't say that, did I? I know aliens are supposed to be all mysterious and everything, but I still don't see why anyone would build a city-sized wildlife refuge for anaerobic microbes."

  "It's got to be a habitat for something. Why any atmosphere at all, if it's just some kind of terraforming machine?"

  Szpindel pointed up at the Gang's tent. "What Susan said. Atmosphere's still under construction and we get a free ride until the owners show up."

  "Free?"

  "Freeish. And I know we've only seen a fraction of a fraction of what's inside. But something obviously saw us coming. It yelled at us, as I recall. If they're smart and they're hostile, why aren't they shooting?"

  "Maybe they are."

  "If something's hiding down the hall wrecking your robots, it's not frying them any faster than the baseline environment would do anyway."

  "What you call a baseline environment might be an active counterintrusion measure. Why else would a habitat be so uninhabitable?"

  Szpindel rolled his eyes. "Okay, I was wrong. We don't know enough to make a few smart guesses."

  Not that we hadn't tried. Once Jack's sensor head had been irreparably fried, we'd relegated it to surface excavation; it had widened the bore in infinitesimal increments, patiently burning back the edges of our initial peephole until it measured almost a meter across. Meanwhile we'd customized Bates's grunts—shielded them against nuclear reactors and the insides of cyclotrons—and come perigee we'd thrown them at Rorschach like stones chucked into a haunted forest. Each had gone through Jack's portal, unspooling whisker-thin fiberop behind them to pass intelligence through the charged atmosphere.

  They'd sent glimpses, mostly. A few extended vignettes. We'd seen Rorschach's walls move, slow lazy waves of peristalsis rippling along its gut. We'd seen treacly invaginations in progress, painstaking constrictions that would presumably, given time, seal off a passageway. Our grunts had sailed through some quarters, staggered through others where the magnetic ambience threw them off balance. They'd passed through strange throats lined with razor-thin teeth, thousands of triangular blades in parallel rows, helically twisted. They'd edged cautiously around clouds of mist sculpted into abstract fractal shapes, shifting and endlessly recursive, their charged droplets strung along a myriad converging lines of electromagnetic force.

  Ultimately, every one of them had died or disappeared.

  "Any way to increase the shie
lding?" I wondered.

  Szpindel gave me a look.

  "We've shielded everything except the sensor heads," Bates explained. "If we shield those we're blind."

  "But visible light's harmless enough. What about purely optical li—"

  "We're using optical links, commissar," Szpindel snapped. "And you may have noticed the shit's getting through anyway."

  "But aren't there, you know—" I groped for the word— "bandpass filters? Something that lets visible wavelengths through, cuts out the lethal stuff on both sides?"

  He snorted. "Sure. It's called an atmosphere, and if we'd brought one with us—about fifty times deeper than Earth's— it might block some of that soup down there. Course, Earth also gets a lot of help from its magnetic field, but I'm not betting my life on any EM we set up in that place."

  "If we didn't keep running into these spikes," Bates said. "That's the real problem."

  "Are they random?" I wondered.

  Szpindel's shrug was half shiver. "I don't think anything about that place is random. But who knows? We need more data."

  "Which we're not likely to get," James said, walking around the ceiling to join us, "if our drones keep shorting out."

  The conditional was pure formality. We'd tried playing the odds, sacrificing drone after drone in the hope that one of them would get lucky; survival rates tailed exponentially to zero with distance from base camp. We'd tried shielding the fiberop to reduce aperture leakage; the resulting tethers were stiff and unwieldy, wrapped in so many layers of ferroceramic that we were virtually waving the bots around on the end of a stick. We'd tried cutting the tethers entirely, sending the machines out to explore on their own, squinting against the radiant blizzard and storing their findings for later download; none had returned. We'd tried everything.

  "We can go in ourselves," James said.

  Almost everything.

  "Right," Szpindel replied in a voice that couldn't mean anything but wrong.

  "It's the only way to learn anything useful."

  "Yeah. Like how many seconds it would take your brain to turn into synchrotron soup."