Firefall

by Peter Watts

  She didn’t turn. “In her hab. With her entourage.”

  “When the ship was breaking—I saw—”

  She tilted her head, lowered her gaze to some point on the far bulkhead. “You see weird things when you go under, sometimes. Near-death experiences, you know?”

  Too near. “This was no Tunnel of Light.”

  “Hardly ever is.” Lianna reached for the railing. “Brain plays tricks when you turn it on and off. Can’t trust your own perceptions.”

  She paused and turned, one hand on the ladder.

  “Then again, when can you?”

  Moore dropped unsmiling onto the deck as Brüks finished pulling on his jumpsuit. He held a personal tent in one hand, a rolled-up cylinder the size of his forearm. “I hear you’ll be joining us.”

  “Try to control your enthusiasm.”

  “You’re an extra variable,” the Colonel told him. “I have a great deal of work to do. And we may not have the luxury of keeping an eye on you if things get sticky. On the other hand—” He shrugged. “I can’t imagine deciding any differently, in your shoes.”

  Brüks raised his left foot, balanced on his right to scratch at his freshly pinkened ankle (someone had removed the cast during his latest coma). “Believe me, getting in the way’s the last thing I want to do, but this isn’t exactly familiar territory for me. I don’t really know the rules.”

  “Just—stay out of the way, basically.” He tossed the tent to Brüks. “You can set up your rack pretty much anywhere you want. The habs are a bit messy—we had to relocate a lot of inventory when they converted the Hold—but we’ve also got fewer people living in them for the time being. So find a spot, set up your tent, buckle down. If you need something and the interface can’t help you, ask Lianna. Or me, if I’m not too busy. The Bicamerals will be coming out of decompression in a few days; try to keep out from underfoot. Needless to say that goes double for the vampire.”

  “What if the vampire wants me underfoot?”

  Moore shook his head. “That’s not likely.”

  “She already went out of her way to—to provoke me...”

  “How, exactly?”

  “You see her arm, after the spoke broke?”

  “I did not.”

  “She broke it. She broke her own fucking arm. Repeatedly. Said I wasn’t setting it right.”

  “But she didn’t attack you. Or threaten you.”

  “Not physically. She really seemed to get off on scaring the shit out of me, though.”

  The Colonel grunted. “In my experience, those things don’t have to try to scare the shit out of anyone. If she wanted you dead or broken, you would be. Vampires have—idiomatic speech patterns. You may have simply misunderstood her.”

  “She called me a cold cut.”

  “And Rakshi Sengupta called you a roach. Unless I miss my guess you took that as an insult, too.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “Common Tran term. Means so primitive you’re unkillable.”

  “I’m plenty killable,” Brüks said.

  “Sure, if someone drops a piano on your head. But you’re also field-tested. We’ve had millions of years to get things right; some of those folks in the Hold are packing augments that didn’t even exist a few months ago. First releases can be buggy, and it takes time for the bugs to shake out—and by then, there’s probably another upgrade they can’t afford to pass up if they want to stay current. So they suffer—glitches, sometimes. If anything, roach connotes a bit of envy.”

  Brüks digested that. “Well, if it was supposed to be some kind of compliment, her delivery needs work. You’d think someone with all that brainpower would be able to cobble together a few social skills.”

  “Funny thing”—Moore’s voice was expressionless—“Sengupta couldn’t figure out how someone with all your interpersonal skills could be so shitty at math.”

  Brüks said nothing.

  “Don’t take this personally,” the Colonel told him, “but try to keep in mind that we’re guests on this ship and your personal standards—whatever they might be—do not reign supreme here. Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat. These people are not baselines with a tweak here and there. They’re closer to, to separate cognitive subspecies. As far as Valerie goes, she and her—bodyguards—have pretty much stayed in their hab since the trip began. I expect that to continue. She finds the ambient lighting too bright, for one thing. I doubt you’ll have trouble as long as you don’t go looking for any.”

  Brüks felt his mouth tighten at the corners. “So”—remembering the briefing in the Hub, in the company of the envious Rakshi Sengupta—“a week to Icarus?”

  “Closer to twelve days,” Moore told him.

  “Why so long?”

  Moore looked grim. “That fiasco at the monastery. The Crown had to launch prematurely. The sep maneuver was always part of the plan—doesn’t take a hive to know a trip like this is going to draw attention—but the replacement drive’s still in pieces. They’re putting it together as we speak.”

  Brüks blinked. “We’ve got no engines at all?”

  “Maneuvering thrusters. Can’t use them yet, not without risking detection.” Moore saw the look on Brüks’s face, added: “Not that I expect we’ll need them in any event. The hive’s ballistic calculations are very accurate. And it’s just as well we’re taking the long way, given the medical situation. The bug was easy enough to fix once they nailed down its specs, but healing takes time and hibernation’s not the same thing as a medical coma. Last thing we want is to hit the zone with our core personnel compromised.” Moore’s face hardened at some grim insight, relaxed again. “My advice? Look on this as an extended sabbatical. Maybe you get a ringside seat to some amazing discoveries; maybe it’s a dead end and you’ll be bored out of your skull. Either way, you can weigh it against a painful death in the Oregon desert and call it a win on points.” He spread his hands. “Here endeth the lesson.”

  The lights had been dimmed in the northern hemisphere. Climbing into the Hub, Brüks could see a wash of arcane tacticals through the equatorial grille, a chromatic mishmash he knew would make no sense even with an unobstructed view.

  “Wrong way,” said a familiar voice as he headed for the next spoke.

  Sengupta.

  “What?”

  He couldn’t see her, even through the grille; the mirrorball eclipsed the view. But her voice carried clearly around the chamber: “You visiting the vampire?”

  “Uh, no.” God no.

  “Then you’re going the wrong way.”

  “Thanks.” He second-guessed himself, decided to risk it (hey, she’d started the conversation), swam through the air, and bull’s-eyed the doorway more through luck than skill.

  She was still embedded in her acceleration couch. Her face turned away as soon as he came into view.

  She kept up her end, though. “Where you going?”

  I don’t know. I don’t have a clue. “Commons. Galley.”

  “Other way. Two spokes over.”

  “Thanks.”

  She said nothing. Her eyes jiggled in their sockets. Every now and then a ruby highlight winked off her cornea as some unseen laser read commands there.

  “Meatspace display,” Brüks tried after a moment.

  “What about it?”

  “I thought everyone here used ConSensus.”

  “This is ConSensus.”

  He tapped his temple. “I mean, you know. Cortical.”

  “Wireless can bite my clit anyone can peek.”

  The fruit of her labor sprawled across a good twenty degrees of the dome, a light storm of numbers and images and—over on the far left side—a stack of something that looked like voiceprints. It didn’t look like any kind of astrogation display Brüks had ever seen.

  She was spelunking the cache.

  “I can peek,” he said. “I’m peeking right now.”

  “Why should I care about you?”
Sengupta snorted.

  Cats and dogs, he thought, and held his tongue.

  He tried again. “So I guess I’ve got you to thank for that?”

  “Thank for what?”

  He gestured at weeks-old echoes plastered across the sky. “Grabbing that snapshot on the way out. Don’t know what I’d do for the next twelve days if I didn’t have some kind of Quinternet access.”

  “Sure why not. You’re eating our food you’re huffing our O2 why not suck our data while you’re at it.”

  I give up.

  He turned and headed back to the exit. He felt Sengupta shift in the couch behind him.

  “I hate that fucking vampire she moves all wrong.”

  It was nice to know that basic predator-aversion subroutines survived the augments, Brüks reflected.

  “And I wouldn’t trust Colonel Carnage either,” Sengupta added. “No matter how much he cozies up to you.”

  He looked back. The pilot floated against the loose restraints of her couch, unmoving, staring straight ahead.

  “Why’s that?” Brüks asked.

  “Trust him then do what you want. I don’t give a shit.”

  He waited a moment longer. Sengupta sat as still as a stick insect.

  “Thanks,” he said at last, and dropped through the floor.

  So that’s what I am, then. A parasite.

  He descended into the Lab.

  Some half-dead fossil, scooped up in passing from the battlefield. Patched together for no better reason than the firing of a few mirror neurons, some vestigial itch we might have once called pity.

  The equipment wasn’t his, but the workbench provided some degree of plastic comfort: a bit of surrogate familiarity in a ship too full of long bones and strange creatures.

  Worse than ballast: I suck their O2 and eat their supplies and take up precious airspace millions of klicks from the nearest real atmosphere. Less than a pet: they don’t want my company, feel no urge to scritch my ears, aren’t interested in any tricks I might know except staying invisible and playing dead.

  Sequence/splicer, universal incubator, optoelectron nanoscope with a respectable thirty-picometer threshold. All reassuringly familiar in a world where he’d half expected the very dust to be built out of miracles and magic crystals. Maybe that was deliberate: a security blanket for strays who’d missed the Singularity.

  Okay, then. I’m a parasite. Parasites are not destroyed by the powerful: parasites feed on them. Parasites use the powerful to their own ends.

  The lower level was empty except for a short stack of folded chairs and half-dozen cargo cubes (fab-matter stockpiles, according to the manifest). Brüks unslung the tent and spread it across the deck against a curve of bulkhead.

  A tapeworm may not be as smart as its host but that doesn’t stop it from scamming shelter and nourishment and a place to breed. Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once. All invisible in the shadow of vaster beings. Now their hosts can’t live without them.

  The structure inflated into a kind of bulbous lozenge. It swelled igloolike toward the center of the compartment, molded itself against the walls and flooring behind. It wasn’t too different from his abandoned tent back in the desert; the piezoelectricity that buttressed the structure also powered the GUI sheathing its inner surface. Brüks ran an index finger down the center of the door. Its membranous halves snapped gently apart like a sheet of mesentery split down the middle.

  Some go even farther. Some get the upper hand, dig down, and change the wiring right at the synapse. Dicrocoelium, Sacculina, Toxoplasma. Brainless things, all of them. Mindless creatures that turn inconceivably greater intellects into puppets.

  He dropped to his knees and crawled inside. The built-in hammock clung to the inner surface of the tent, ready to peel free and inflate at a touch. The default config only provided enough headroom for a crouch but Brüks couldn’t be bothered to dial up the headroom. Besides, the tight confines were strangely comforting down here at the very bottom of the spoke, just a few layers of alloy and insulation from the whole starry drum of the heavens rolling past beneath his feet.

  So I’m a parasite? Fine. It is an honorable title.

  Down here, nestled in this warm and self-regulating little structure, he was as heavy as the Crown would let him be. He felt almost stable, almost rooted. And while he wouldn’t quite call it safety, he almost managed not to notice how like a burrow his quarters were: how deep in the earth, how far removed from other inhabitants of this pocket ecosystem. And how Daniel Brüks huddled against the deck like a mouse squeezed into the farthest corner of a great glass terrarium full of cobras, the lights turned up as bright as they would go.

  EVERY HAB STARTED out like every other: same stand-alone life support, same snap-and-stretch frame guides to subdivide the living space to personal preference. Same basic bulkhead galley panel with a toilet on the other side. They all came with the same emergency hibe hookups, compatible with most popular pressure suits and long-distance coffins (not included). It was Boeing’s most generic all-purpose personarium, plucked off the shelf, bought in bulk, stuck on the ends of the Crown’s spokes on short notice. In the almost inconceivable event that one of those spokes should snap and send a hab tumbling off on its own, corporate guarantees ensured that the bodies therein would keep fresh and breathing (if inert) for up to a year or until atmospheric reentry, whichever came first.

  Which was not to say that custom features were out of the question. The fabber in Commons could whip up food with actual taste.

  Moore was the only other warm body in evidence when Brüks climbed down for breakfast. The Colonel didn’t return the other man’s smile at first—Brüks recognized the thousand-meter stare of the ConSensused—but the sound of Brüks’s feet on the deck brought him back to the impoverished world of mere meatspace.

  “Daniel,” he said.

  “Didn’t mean to disturb you,” Brüks said, which was a lie. He’d waited until the sparse constellations arrayed across the Crown’s intercom had aligned just so—Lianna or Moore in the Commons, Valerie anywhere else—before venturing forth in search of forage.

  Moore waved the apology away. “I could do with a break anyway.”

  Brüks told the fabber to print him up a plate of French toast and bacon. “Break from what?”

  “Theseus telemetry,” Moore told him. “What little there is of it. Brushing up for the main event.”

  “There’s a main event? For us?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Brüks one-handed his meal to the Commons table (petroleum accents faintly adulterated the aroma of syrup and butter rising from the plate) and sat down. “Dwarves among giants, right? I didn’t get the sense there’d be any kind of active role for mere baselines.”

  He tried a strip of bacon. Not bad.

  “They have their reasons for being here,” Moore said mildly. “I have mine.” In a tone that said, And they’re not for sharing.

  “You deal with these guys a lot,” Brüks guessed.

  “These guys?”

  “Bicams. Post-Humans.”

  “They’re not post-Human. Not yet.”

  “How can you tell?” It was only half a joke.

  “Because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to talk to them at all.”

  Brüks swallowed a bolus of faux French toast. “They could talk to us. Some of them, anyway.”

  “Why would they bother? We’re on the verge of losing them as it is. And—do you have children, Daniel?”

  He shook his head. “You?”

  “A son. Siri’s not exactly baseline himself, actually. Nowhere near the far shore, but even so it’s been difficult to—connect, sometimes. And maybe this comparison won’t mean much to you, but—they’re all our children, Humanity’s children, and even now we can barely keep their interest. Once they tip over that edge...” He shrugged. “How long would it take you to decide you had better things to do
than talk to a bunch of capuchins?”

  “They’re not gods,” Brüks reminded him softly.

  “Not yet.”

  “Not ever.”

  “That’s denial.”

  “Better than genuflection.”

  Moore smiled, a bit ruefully. “Come on, Daniel. You know how powerful science can be. A thousand years to climb from ghosts and magic to technology; a day and a half from technology back up to ghosts and magic.”

  “I thought they didn’t use science,” Brüks said. “I thought that was the whole point.”

  Moore granted it with a small nod. “Either way, you put baselines against Bicamerals and the Bicamerals are going to be a hundred steps ahead every time.”

  “And you’re comfortable with that.”

  “My comfort doesn’t enter into it. Just the way it is.”

  “You seem so—fatalistic about it all.” Brüks pushed his empty plate aside. “The far shore, the gulf between giants and capuchins.”

  “Not fatalism,” Moore corrected him. “Faith.”

  Brüks glanced sharply across the table, trying to decide if Moore was yanking his chain. The soldier stared back impassively.

  “The fact that something shot us,” Brüks continued deliberately. “And you yourself said they’re probably Tran.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” Moore seemed to find that amusing. “Fortunately we’ve got a pretty good team of those in our own corner. Honestly, I wouldn’t worry.”

  “You trust them too much,” Brüks said quietly.

  “So you keep saying. You don’t know them the way I do.”

  “You think you know them? You’re the one who called them giants. We don’t know their agendas any more than we know what those smart clouds are up to. At least smart clouds don’t open up your brain and dig around like, like...”

  Moore didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Lianna.”

  “You know what they did to her?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “That’s exactly my point. No one does. Lianna doesn’t know. They shut her off for four days, and when she woke up she was some kind of Chinese Room savant. Who knows what they did to her brain? Who knows if she’s the same person?”