Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  So he sat there, doing active-listening nods while the shuttle detached from the ship and took off in the direct vertical path which was the only authorised flight path – no shuttle tours of the planet, not yet. But shuttles had been leaving the ship since early that morning, many of them heading to the site which had been chosen for a shoreleave dome.

  For this trip, though, they were first footing. Experienced and confident first-footers were allowed to be dropped off alone if they wished and quite a few of the Venturi’s crew were taking the rare opportunity to be by themselves. Others, though, preferred to go in groups and for Mister, since this was his first time, being part of an escorted group was his only option.

  They had made such a big deal of that, he thought, the first-footing thing, like it was a tremendous, life-changing experience. He’d been told it was fine if he cried, most people did.

  Actually, he thought it was dull. They landed the shuttle and made something of a fuss about him being the first person to get out of it, urging him on so that he started to suspect they were going to shove him through the airlock and take off, leaving him there. He only got out, then, because he didn’t want them to mistake his reluctance for cowardice.

  And when he was outside, it hardly lived up to the hype.

  It was quite pretty, he supposed, in its way. They’d brought him to a moon around that hot gas giant blitzing in tight orbit around the two stars. The moon was on the outer side of the planet and they would only have a maximum four hours here before it came into the full, searing blaze of the larger star. The temperature here right now was a chilly -164C. With both suns on it, the temperature would rocket to 462C and the surface which was frozen solid now would be semi-molten.

  And the view was, okay, quite something. The surface of the moon was stark, rocky, with what looked like frozen ponds at the bottom of its craters. It was dark, but the starlight here was dramatic, with half the sky covered by that vibrant, brilliantly coloured nebula.

  The other half of the sky was dominated by the massive bulk of the gas giant, ominously close, with one thin arc of light at its edge, like the first glimmer of a passing eclipse.

  Mister walked a few steps from the shuttle, stood there, looked around and watched as the rest of the group came out of the shuttle. He was completely unmoved, either by the view or by the knowledge that his had been the first human feet to set foot here. So what, he thought. Big deal. There were a billion billion rocks out there that no human had ever stood on, for the good and sufficient reason that there was nothing there that any of them wanted.

  As for the view, he knew well enough that there was absolutely nothing magical about viewing dawns or eclipses or any other phenomenon in a solar system where you could pick your viewpoint.

  The whole thing, in fact, was reminding him of all the outings he’d been forced to take with his grandparents as a child. They would drive to a scenic point somewhere on the planet at just the right time to watch the sunset and then marvel at it. And they would drag him along, too, on the kind of bus tours he was embarrassed about by the time he was ten. They were always the same; mostly older people going ooh and ahh as the bus took them in apparently daring sweeps around the planets. And there was always a point, too, where the bus came to a place, at just the right angle and distance for a planet to be very nearly the same apparent size as the sun and moving across it in eclipse. There would be breathless expectation as they waited for the coronal ring to appear and his grandparents would grab him for the obligatory family snap with the eclipse behind them.

  It was all on screens, of course. You could get the same experience, far more cheaply and conveniently, on your own holovision at home. There was no way to tell, even, whether the buses even bothered taking off at all, as there were stories that operators had been known to cheat people with hull vibrators and a recording, faking the flight. But for his grandparents, the fact that they were out there on a bus and seeing things, as they insisted ‘with their own eyes’ made it a marvellous experience, a treat which they were keen to share with their grandson. Other kids loved it, after all. There were always one or two of the nerdy geeks, spouting astronomy and asking if they could see the flight deck.

  Mister suspected that most of the people on the Venturi had been those nerdy geeks as kids and he was right, they had. But it had always been a bore to him as a child and it was no more enthralling for him as an adult.

  Is this it, he wondered. Is this what they were going on about as essential training for dealing with huge overwhelming events?

  There was, he decided, absolutely nothing overwhelming about this. There wasn’t even anywhere to get a cup of tea.

  ‘Phew!’ After half an hour or so of wandering about, they got back on the shuttle and Jermane Taerling dropped back next to him. ‘Tremendous, isn’t it?’ he asked and fortunately didn’t wait for a response. ‘Always get a bit edgy, first footing, myself,’ he went on, with the air of a man prepared to unburden himself now that the ordeal was over. ‘I was stuck in a survival dome for three weeks by myself, once – perfectly safe, of course, they left me with everything I’d need and promised someone would be along to pick me up. But there’s something about being marooned, you know, the only human being in the solar system, gets to you. And the ice, where they’d put the dome, kept subliming in the dawn, the wisps of it getting closer and closer to the dome every day. I was in a right state by the time the Fourth arrived!’ he laughed and seeing the way Mister was staring at him, ‘It’s okay, I don’t have post-trauma or anything, they gave me treatment for that. Even Rangi says it’s not unreasonable to get a bit nervous first-footing after what I went through. And I do enjoy it, obviously, always amazing.’

  ‘The Fourth,’ Mister said, with an incredulous stare, ‘marooned you in a survival dome, by yourself?’

  What he was really asking was will they do that to me?

  ‘No, no, they didn’t even know I was coming,’ Jermane assured him. ‘I’m a linguist, you know – I was on the Embassy III. Backroom, strictly backroom, linguistic analysis, clerical officer, just an office bod. But I’d done some work on the few words believed to be Samartian so I was sent out to work with the Fourth when they were going out there. I was dropped off at a system with some crates of supplies they were picking up there and left in a survival dome. I knew I’d be fine, really, but nobody had told me who was picking me up or what they wanted me for, so it was all a bit stressful and that thing with the ice getting closer and closer every day kind of got to me. Started imagining it was alive and coming after me!’ He laughed. ‘But I’m fine, now – spent a year living in a dome at Samart. Different there, obviously, was with other people and on live comms the whole time, never any shortage of people to talk to.’

  It occurred to Mister that the man he’d dismissed as a blah bureaucrat and annoying chatterbox might, in fact, have hidden depths. Might, even, be something of a hero.

  ‘They made you do that, though?’ he queried.

  ‘No – oh, no.’ Jermane chuckled. ‘My Ambassador on the Embassy III told me I shouldn’t go, when the courier arrived to get me – I could have refused, then or any time. They wouldn’t have left me at the dome if I’d said I didn’t want to stay. But honestly, who could turn down an adventure like that? Even if I’d known how scary it would get, I’d still have done it. And Samart, that was my idea, I asked the skipper if I could stay to help them get to grips with linguistics. He took some convincing that I’d be fine and he wouldn’t leave me there on my own, so two others volunteered to stay too.’

  Okay, Mister thought. Definitely a hero. And with his opinion of the chatty little man very different, now, he asked about his experience at Samart and this time, actually listened.

  Alex saw the way that they were talking as they came back to the ship and was satisfied that the LIA agent had at least got on terms with someone he could have a conversation with. But he knew, too, that Mister had remained unmoved by the first footing experience. And anyone wh
o could be unmoved by that view, from this system so far beyond human exploration, just had no capacity for awe and wonder at all.

  But of course, he knew that already. The LIA did not tend to recruit agents inclined to spiritual reflection on the cosmos and their place in it. They wanted hard-brained authoritarian types – soldiers, not dreamers.

  The lecture that evening annoyed the LIA man, too, who was inclined to take it personally.

  The topic today was bio-implants, starting with an explanation of the artificial immune system they would be fitting for Chamlorn Lady Ursele. The medical aspects of it explained, Alex went on to say that the psychological aspect would be extremely challenging for Lady Ursele and handed over to Shion to explain that.

  ‘I have advised them in my messages home,’ Shion said, ‘that the AIS works very well at keeping you safe and that you do get accustomed to it, over time. But at first, when you wake up and feel it operating inside you, the feeling is so horrible then it really makes you think, if this is it, if the choice is between this and death, then death would be better. It is the worst, the hardest thing that I have ever had to deal with. And I am so grateful to Davie, who helped me through the hardest times. It still makes me shudder when the antibody pump kicks off, like the shiver you might get if someone dropped ice-cold slime down the back of your neck. The anti-virals make me nauseous, too, always a couple of minutes after they kick in that I feel I’m going to vomit. I’m not complaining, the gear means I can have a normal life here and the occasional discomfort is a small price to have to pay for that – for me, anyway, because I want this life so much that I’m prepared to put up with it, just as you endure the discomfort of full decontam.’

  There was wry agreement with that. They had all gone through full decontam before they arrived at the rendezvous point, just in case the Chethari might come aboard in physical form. And they would do it again before they went to Pirrell, sterilising the ship and going to full decontam protocols until they were sure that their guests were safe. Full decontam was a horrible experience, involving skin-scouring chemicals, gargles that made you choke and gag, stinging sprays squirted in every orifice, full eyeball lenses squeezed in and anti-pathogen filters inserted in the nose, throat, anus and other intimate orifices. Finally, you’d be squirted all over with a substance which made your skin feel like you’d been coated in plastic. And then you’d put on clothing sterilised to clean-room standard and a survival suit.

  ‘Chamlorn Lady Ursele,’ Shion said, ‘has obviously decided that it is worth the discomfort, too, if it enables her to achieve her goal. But you should not underestimate how hard that will be for her, both in terms of the physical discomfort and of the horror we feel at our bodies being taken over by machinery like that.’

  She handed back to Alex with that and he made the point that humanity, too, had issues with how far they were prepared to allow technology into their bodies.

  ‘Exactly what tech is considered acceptable varies considerably across cultures and over time,’ he said. ‘Our own laws in the League forbid any kind of tech implant which enhances function beyond natural and the nearest we’re allowed to a tech interface is a comms clip…’ he touched his right ear, where a micro-clip was fastened, with the hair-thin wire projecting holoscreens in front of his eyes when required. ‘Most people,’ he observed, ‘think that we have such an abhorrence of implants because of the Marfikians – they are cyborgs, they are monsters, we will not allow any kind of cyborg implants. Makes sense, seems reasonable. But in fact humans have had this abhorrence of tech implants throughout our history and it turns out, we are not alone in that. Quarians,’ he smiled briefly at Silvie, watching from the aquadeck, ‘are the most highly bioengineered people we know and they routinely install a finger-tip interface…’ he held up the forefinger of his right hand, ‘which you see them use all the time, just…’ he moved his finger in a line, ‘sweep in the air, down drops a screen. We could develop the same kind of system, it isn’t beyond us. But that is not a technology we’re asking them for and not one that would get any funding or permission for research, either. We draw the line below that. And quarians draw a line, too – tech interface, fine. Implants to enable people to swim faster or deeper than their biology permits, no. That, for them, is a step too far.’

  He paused for a moment. ‘So the question,’ he said, ‘obviously, is what is a step too far?’ He looked around enquiringly. ‘Anyone remember the Zenox scandal?’ He saw that some did, but went on anyway, putting up a series of images from news footage. It was old – more than four hundred years old – but the images were as clear as if they had been taken just last week. ‘The secret lab,’ said Alex, ‘the illegal experiments, the public outcry when it was discovered they’d been doing brain transplants… old brains into cloned young bodies, actually hoping to market it – very discreetly, of course! – as immortality for the super-rich.’ He looked at Davie, who obliged with the big fat pvvvv that merited. ‘And if you haven’t read about it,’ Alex added, ‘you may well have seen the movies…’

  He put a flow of movie posters up, starting slow and getting faster and faster until they were a blur. The word zombie appeared in quite a few of them and there were some uncomfortable glances, at that, in the direction of Ali Jezno.

  ‘Our own Mr Jezno,’ Alex smiled at the petty officer, ‘has had to contend with a whole load of stupid ideas generated by movies like that.’

  Ali Jezno grinned back. He’d made medical history as the patient who’d had more than the legally permitted amount of cloned brain matter used to repair catastrophic damage… and had recovered. It had been a long, slow process, particularly in re-acquiring all the qualifications he’d lost with the loss of so much of his memory, but he was back up to speed now and working for his next promotion.

  ‘My name is Ali,’ he said, ‘And I am a zombie.’

  People relaxed, at that and there were some grins for him. Alex grinned too, giving him a nod.

  ‘But that illustrates the point,’ he said. ‘At what point does intervention mean we stop being the people we were before? And at what point do we say no, that is not allowed? We could debate that for hours, obviously. But there is an absolute line, a universal morality shared by every sentient species. So, make yourselves comfortable…’ he beckoned to Ali. ‘Mr Jezno?’

  There was a ruffle of anticipation as the petty officer came up and settled at the podium. Ali Jezno had a reputation, not just throughout the Fleet but throughout the spacer community, as one of the finest story-tellers around. When Ali hopped up on a bar to tell a yarn, everyone would gather round to listen.

  He settled himself then, not on a bar but hitching onto a high seat behind the podium, adjusting the lights so that the rest of the venue went into shadow and a spotlight was on him, then held out his right hand.

  Alex handed him a zero-alcohol beer, which caused a burst of laughter – a spacer tradition, that, for anyone telling a tale to be handed a beer at the start.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Ali, taking a sip and addressing the audience with the ease of an accomplished speaker, ‘I’m not going to talk about myself,’ he said. ‘But I am going to tell you a story… a true one. They say it’s one of the oldest stories in the galaxy, so who knows how old and how often it’s been told, too, on worlds beyond our imagining. It is a story the Perithin sing as a mourning song and a story the Gider dance to teach their children. It is a story of life and a story of death.’

  He had them. It wasn’t just the words – anyone could have said the same words and many could have scripted a better story, too. But Ali spoke with a rhythm which made you feel somehow that you were listening to a tribal elder, a shaman, chanting legends by the light of a flickering fire. And as he dropped his voice, everyone was very still and quiet, enjoying the sense of being drawn in to the slightly spooky atmosphere.

  ‘It is a story,’ he said, ‘of immortals.’ He paused and lowered the lights even more, angling the spotlight so that he was dramatically sh
adowed.

  ‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘when the galaxy was young, there was a people legend calls the Remembered. They were not that different from us, perhaps – explorers, adventurers, people who sought for the answers to questions. What is the cosmos? Is there a purpose to life, beyond life itself? They are the same questions we ask. But these people, they were like gods – so advanced, so powerful, they lived for thousands of years, living their lives as beings of radiant beauty. Only, for them, even this was not enough, not enough to satisfy them. They started asking questions like ‘Why should we die? Why should all this knowledge and experience we’ve gained just fade away again upon our deaths?’ And, like the Zenox lab, they started to experiment with ways to prolong their lives beyond even their ten-thousand-year lifespan. And they did. They found a way to transfer their minds into forms which would sustain them for millions of years, billions, potentially to the end of the galaxy itself. They were the immortals and now they truly were as gods. They had conquered death and stood, now, above the dominion of nature.

  ‘But nature rules. Entropy rules. All things die, even the universe. And death, as even we little human creatures understand, is essential for life. Everything, all life, all matter, moves in cycles of creation and destruction. Stop that cycle and you stop life itself. Without death, there is no renewal, no change. And while the body may be immortal and the mind persist, the spirit grows old… so old, so very old, so weary, so tired of the unending days and years and centuries of nothing, endless existence without change, without meaning, without hope. And they were things of horror, those immortals… an abhorrence, a thing of shuddering horror to all the other races. They had broken the most fundamental law there is, stepped out of nature, become anti-life. And in the end, they themselves could not bear what they had become, the death of spirit while the mind still lived. They took their own lives, all of them, rather than endure immortality. But they live on, still, through stories which have been told across space and time, a thing of grief and horror, a warning from the dawn of history. Seek not for immortality…’