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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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‘What about the clothes we’ve got on?’ Malley asked.
‘They will be assimilated,’ I assured him. ‘The suit can reprocess just about anything.’
Suze looked around, rather wildly, as the smart-matter crawled up her arms.
‘What about going to the toilet?’ she said.
‘There’s a place called the head, over there—oh, you mean if you’re outside in the suit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like I said,’ I reiterated patiently, ‘the suit can reprocess just about anything. ’
At this point she gave the suit an opportunity to demonstrate this ability and several others, including that of catching projectile droplets. I left them to it.
 
 
An hour later we had replaced the reaction-mass and fuel used up in the
Terrible Beauty
’s unscheduled planetary surface excursion, and were accelerating at a steady one gravity in a more-or-less straight line across the plane of the ecliptic to Jupiter—or rather, to where Jupiter would be in ten days’ time. After five days, we’d turn off the engine, swing the ship around, and decelerate at one gravity the rest of the way. This, as anyone will tell you, is not the most fuel-efficient way to get around. Most of the transport in the
Solar System hardly used any fuel at all, and was pretty fast even so; with a big enough light sail you can get from Earth orbit to Mars orbit in weeks, Jupiter in months. We had no compunction about using fusion-clippers, on the minority of journeys for which we didn’t have weeks or months to play with.
(As it happens, fuel efficiency, or even reaction-mass, wasn’t the limiting factor. With the laser-fusion drive and the practically inexhaustible amounts of ice available, we could have used clippers for everything. The limiting factor was the availability of ships.)
The return to weight made Malley and Suze a lot more cheerful, and the rest of us a little less. We made our way down the stairwell from the command deck to the commissary. It was a slightly smaller room, also circular, with several small tables and one big round table, more than adequate for all of us. In the centre of that table was the serving lift, and at each setting was a menu mat. I sat down with Malley on one side and Suze on the other.
‘You can dial up quite a wide range of foods and drinks,’ I explained, ‘but for obvious reasons anything made with boiling water is a speciality of the house.’ I scrolled the menu. ‘May I recommend the Thames salmon, freshly caught?’
Most of us made the same choice, tapping the appropriate lines on the menu, and the steaming, almond-flaked dishes rose from the centre of the table and were passed eagerly around. Now that it had the template, the kitchen could carbon-copy ‘freshly caught’ Thames salmon till the drive went out, but the real thing did have a thrill. It’s subjective, but as Malley (slightly drunk on Tranquilitatis 2296, and high on the first buzz from the swallowed surgeries) tried to tell us, value was all subjective anyway. He seemed to think he was making a point, and we politely deferred to this misconception.
We finished eating and shoved the plates back into the middle. The lift silently sank away with them. Malley fished in his pocket (his suit had based its initial form on what he’d been wearing, and had a quaint tweedy appearance) and pulled out his pipe and tobacco.
‘Is it OK to smoke on the ship?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘We’re sitting sixty feet above a fusion torch, man. Fire is the least of our worries.’ I hoped he’d give it a rest when the addiction passed, though. Various comrades unthinkingly wrinkled their noses, until someone tapped a command on their mat to increase the ventilation.
By the time we reached the coffee I had introduced everybody: Andrea, Jaime, Boris, Tony and Yeng. Suze looked at me when I’d finished and said: ‘But Ellen—who are you?’
We all laughed. ‘Ellen May Ngwethu,’ I said. ‘I was born in 2041, in a Lagrange space settlement, so I’m almost as old as Malley—I mean, Sam! Fought in the initial split between the Earth Tendency and the Outwarders,
and on Earth during the dark century. I worked on Earth Defence for a long time, then moved out to Jupiter. I’ve been in the Cassini Division for the past, let me see, seventy-odd years, and right now I’m on the Division’s Command Committee, and I’m the liaison on the Jovian Anomaly Research Committee. That’s a non-military, scientific body which is responsible to the Solar Council and has the next-to-final say in what the Division gets up to. The Solar Council has the final say.’ I smiled around the table. ‘In theory. In practice, the Division does what it pleases.’
Suze looked slightly shocked, Malley smug.
‘I know the theory,’ Malley said. ‘In theory, everyone does what they damn well please. “The free development of each is the condition of the war of all against all”, or some such nonsense.’
Yeng frowned at this comment; Malley turned up his hands. ‘Screw the politics—I gather from what you’ve just said, Ellen May Ngwethu, that you are what in a more openly hierarchical arrangement would be called a member of the General Staff. A top military officer and politician. So—what the fuck are you doing getting your hands dirty, rolling about in the mud on the kulak reservation, all just to lift an old physicist?’
‘Good question,’ I said. Malley looked me in the eye and began fiddling with his pipe; I wished I had something equally distracting with which to occupy my hands. ‘One part of the answer is that we don’t work the way you think—our committees may look like a hierarchy if you draw them out on a schematic, but that’s all. It genuinely isn’t some kind of concealed top-down structure. So if the Command Committee wants certain kinds of job done, it doesn’t have some poor minion down below to send off and do it. We’re elected to do a job, and I was the best for this one.
‘The other part of the answer is that we need to keep what we’re doing secret. Apart from the Division’s Command Committee, the only people who know that we’re planning an assault through the wormhole are those of us on this ship.’ I looked around. ‘We’re it, we’re the team, and you’re in! If you don’t like what we’re doing, you’re both free to pull out, but not to leave the Division’s space until it’s all over.’
Malley and Suze both looked troubled and about to speak. Suze said it first: ‘But who are you keeping all this a secret
from
?’
‘From the Jovians,’ Tony said.
‘But—but—’ Malley was almost stuttering, as his synapses misfired with excited articulation. ‘The Jovians, the Outwarders, they’re, they’re just mad, they’re trapped in their own virtual realities!’
I glanced around the team, and caught minute nods and shrugs.
‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘But it’s a long story, and we’ve all had a long day. Tomorrow for that. Let me show you around the ship.’
One thing that distinguishes a fusion-clipper from most spacecraft is that its internal layout has a definite ‘up’ and ‘down’; and because this one was only carrying the crew there was plenty of room in which to show Malley and Suze around. After dinner I used my remaining energy to climb up and down stairways all over the ship and explain all that could be explained.
The fusion-clipper’s hull is like a somewhat pear-shaped egg, two hundred feet long and seventy across at its widest diameter, which is occupied by the commissary and the command deck. The narrow end tapers to the jet, and contains the fusion torch, the main water tanks, and the life-support systems. Above, or forward, from the command deck are the sleeping-quarters—cramped, but festooned with climbing plants and recycling tubes (hard to distinguish, in practice) which give it a more open feel. Above that, clustered around the big glass eye of the heat shield, are the active-defence laser cannon, for dealing with any wandering space junk which (at the sort of velocities a fusion-clipper can reach)
all
has to be dealt with.
Our tour ended in the sleeping gallery which, typically for this class of ship, was deliberately designed to resemble a cliff-face of caves overlooking the central air well, whose bottom was the transparent mid deck roof and whose top was the transparent forward heat shield, through which a a distorted but distinct pattern of stars could be seen. The erratic, silent flaring of incoming dust and meteoroids, vaporized by the reflex lasers of the ship’s active-defence system, provided a soothing analogue of the shooting stars in a natural sky.
Malley leaned over a guardrail and looked up and down.
‘Why the recyling plant?’ he asked. ‘The journey times are days or weeks. Why not just carry supplies?’
‘Not all the journeys are so short, and they don’t all end at ports,’ I said.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Colonizing.’
‘Well,’ I shrugged, ‘there’s the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort.’
‘And New Mars?’ Suze asked mischievously.
‘We plan ahead,’ I agreed. They both laughed.
Malley stretched and yawned. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Time for bed. Now where did I leave my bag?’
I retrieved their luggage, such as it was, then showed them their cabins and crawled into mine. With just enough room to stand up and to lie down in, its rounded walls veined with translucent tubes ferrying swirling swarms of engineered noctilucent protozoa, it was like an undersea cave, with the sand-coloured foam rectangle of the bed its only furnishing. I let the outer garment of the spacesuit change into a thick quilt and pillow; and discovered that for the inner layers the suit had extended its range of textures to fluffy knitted wool and brushed silk tricot, and its range of colours to ecru,
beige, and several shades of peach. It was all very cosy. I unfastened a few bows, pulled the quilt over my head, and went to sleep.
 
‘You want to live in a dream world!’ I accuse.
I’m clinging by my left big toe to a hole in an angled aluminium bracket, floating at right angles to the kid I’m arguing with, and squirting jets of hash beer into my mouth from a nozzled plastic bottle that once contained something quite different (whose taste lingers) in the crowded recreationdeck (or, inevitably: ‘wreck-deck’) of an Earth Defence battlesat abandoned to squatters and orbital decay and it’s 2062 and I just know it can’t be, and I’m dreaming. So the accusation doesn’t carry much conviction.
The kid is about nineteen and must be a recent arrival: he’s fat, and nobody gets—or stays—fat in free fall (it’s that great weight-loss diet we have). His face, dotted with more eruptions than Io, calls to mind all the pizzas he must’ve stuffed in it. His eyes tend to bulge: the modern equivalent of pebble lenses, due to several corrective cornea ops for reading-induced myopia. Disdaining the hops and hemp as unhealthy, he’s sucking some vile cocktail of smart drugs, spiked with euphorics. He knows everything.
‘You’re the dreamer,’ he says. He waves a hand at the window, thirty feet away on the other side of the wreck-deck. Through the mass of drifting drinkers, through clouds of smoke and stray droplets, the image of a brickred surface crawls past. Madagascar, I’d know it anywhere. ‘You’re still stuck in commie altruism. You want to help people who’re beyond help. They’re doomed. “Earth—the Third World”, ha-ha. Time to grow up and get with the programme, Ellen. Time to move it out. There’s a big universe out there.’
‘My point exactly.’ I gesture, too, at what’s now the Indian Ocean. ‘And Earth is part of it. You want to live in a virtual reality.’
‘Not entirely.’ He smiles, showing bad teeth. ‘We’ll pay a lot of attention to the outside—we’ll have to, if we’re gonna turn all that dumb mass into smart-matter. Matter that thinks, and dreams. A world of wonders, where you can be anything you like, not what chance and your genes have made you.’
‘I don’t want to turn the universe into a big computer running virtual realities, ’ I tell him. ‘And don’t call me a “commie altruist”, by the way. It’s just ordinary human concern. I just don’t like to see people suffer, so it would be very
unselfish
of me to ignore ten billion people blundering into the dark.’
‘You won’t have to see them suffer,’ he tells me, with insufferable assurance. ‘You can just
edit them out
. Anyway, their problems are
their
problem. Why make them yours?’
‘Because I care about them, and if that sounds altruistic, just think of it this way: I’m selfish enough to want to be, oh, the princess of the Galaxy!
OK—at a pinch, I’d be happy just to live forever in a Galactic Empire. I
personally want
to see a universe crowded with people having a good time.’
I wave expansively at the wreck-deck, to illustrate.
‘People!’ He snorts. ‘Where’s your ambition? We can do better than that.’
‘You want to be machines.’ I knock back a shot of the drink. ‘I don’t.’
He shrugs. ‘If you want to live in space, you’re better off as a machine than as a bag of sea water. The human body’s design spec is: a spacesuit for a fish. Machines are at home in the universe.’
I give him a grin so wide and delighted that he thinks I like him, and I come back with a quote from a dated dystopia that had a huge resonance for me when I was a kid:
This Perfect Day
by Ira Levin. (Not that we were in any danger of that perfect day, or any other, but the book spoke to me.)
‘“Machines are at home in the universe. People are aliens.” ’

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