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Authors: Ken MacLeod

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‘Oh,’ I said, ‘they got it from the Outwarder macros.’
Malley stared. ‘The Outwarders
gave
it to them?’
I spread my hands. ‘One, or several, of them did. We don’t know if it was a deal they had arranged all along as a payment for the operator of the bonded-labour company—a man called Dave Reid, a very nasty piece of work who’s probably still top dog on New Mars—or if the daughter-wormhole was set up by the Outwarders for other purposes, and Reid and company just managed to extract the information as the Outwarder macros were degenerating.’
‘Ah,’ said Malley. ‘It has occurred to me that we could do the same ourselves. We could just ask.’
I really had not thought of that.
 
 
Tatsuro was sitting at the head of the long table, doodling on a pad and combing his receding hair with his fingers. Committee members stood or sat around, talking and drinking coffee. Another contact session had just been completed, virus-scanned, and relayed to the rest of the Division. Clarity was elbow-deep in a display of the state of current opinion about the talks so far: shifting, by the look of it.
Malley and I walked up to Tatsuro.
‘We have a problem,’ I told him. ‘And a possible solution.’
As he listened, I watched his expressions; almost undetectable, under the smooth surface of his skin. Alarm, disappointment, anger, doubt, and a faint glimmer of hope.
‘I suppose it’s worth a try,’ he said at last. ‘But it does let them know we’re going through.’
‘They’d find out as soon as we did go through,’ I said. ‘At least, we have to assume that they could.’
Tatsuro nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps. Although I must say, observational astronomy from inside the Jovian atmosphere is probably a bit tricky, even for them. Anyway, if we ask them for the path, we need to do so without getting them worried about our intentions.’
I shrugged. ‘Surely we have an understandable interest in another human society—’
‘Aha!’ said Malley. ‘How about this? The Jovians may still have some, ah, bones to pick with the mutineers, yes? And so do you, I would imagine. Didn’t the labour-force operator conscript some of your people into his labour gangs?’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I said sourly. It was something I’d thought over before—that the responsibility for those long-ago raids and deaths might rest more with Reid’s company than with his clients, the Outwarders. Not that it mattered.
‘So tell them that,’ Malley said. ‘Tell them you want to extract some retribution for what was done. The Jovians might well consider that a
very
understandable motivation.’
‘Especially if they think it gets them off the hook,’ said Tatsuro. ‘OK, we’ll do it on the next contact.’
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘just who are we in contact with? Do we know that they’re in any way representative?’
‘Like us, you mean?’ Tatsuro asked dryly. ‘Rather more so, I would say. We’ve had evidence that the contact is being monitored throughout the Jovian population. The “man” we see is a construct, presenting a consensus or majority view.’
‘Sum over histories,’ said Malley.
The preparations for contact were gone through once more. It was becoming a routine, as was the contact itself. Again the face appeared. The first few exchanges concerned matters arising from earlier sessions, which I hadn’t seen. Then Tatsuro broached the subject of the wormhole and the path to New Mars.
For the first time, the Jovian speaker hesitated. ‘One moment, please,’ he said. His face suddenly became abstracted, the resolution fading until it looked like a hollow mask. The flitting shapes of the individual Jovians in
the sky around him went through agitated transformations, spinning into girandoles, stretching into long columns, building themselves into dark edifices …
‘This might not have been such a good idea,’ someone whispered.
Shut up, I didn’t say. My lips were dry.
The Jovian speaker’s colour and texture returned like a flush.
‘Sorry about that, folks,’ he said. ‘The information you asked for was buried quite deep in our archived memories. Also, some of us weren’t too keen on giving you it.’ He smiled. ‘But the rest of us won them over, so here it is.’
Tatsuro’s fingers scrabbled on the control panel as a line of pulsing light along the bottom of the screen indicated a raw-data transmission. It was over in less than five seconds.
‘That’s all you need,’ said the Jovian. ‘Give our regards to our former employees, and please assure them that we bear them no ill-will for having baled out when they did. Goodbye for now.’
The image blinked off.
‘Wow, fuck,’ said Malley. ‘These things are sharp.’
I tried to laugh. People were looking at the empty screen, looking at us.
‘You stirred up something there,’ said Clarity.
‘That’s the first indication we’ve had of dissension among them,’ said Tatsuro. ‘I suggest you give the data we just received a
very
thorough virusscan. ’
I called up Yeng and asked her to come along. Together with Joe and Clarity, she combed through the data with everything she’d got. It checked out clean. Malley loaded it into his workspace, and found that it meshed with his own incomplete calculations.
By this time it was well into the evening. Yeng, Suze and I were seated around Malley. Behind us, other work was going on. When Malley leaned back and nodded silently, we all let out a whoop that caused some distraction.
‘We test it first,’ I said.
I dialled up a drone and downloaded the data into its navigational computer. I patched in a view on Malley’s screen, and we watched the whole mission, from the tiny rocket’s launch to its carefully angled insertion in the wormhole. That took about an hour. We’d warned the patrol fighters, hanging in orbit in front of the Gate. Even so, the probe’s re-emergence put them on full alert. I could imagine the jangled nerves.
The probe had nothing on board but a telescopic camera—photographic film, not television. One of the fighter-bombers scooped up the probe and ran the film for us, past one of their own telemetry cameras.
We looked at the grainy images of an unfamiliar starfield, and the spectrum
of an unknown yellow sun, and at the distant red globe with its tracery of canals.
‘Fucking amazing,’ said Malley. ‘Just seeing this. I wonder if I ever really believed it before.’
I slung my arms around the shoulders of Malley, Yeng and Suze. ‘Believe it,’ I said. ‘We’re going there. Tomorrow.’
Tilted, Jupiter’s ring cut a white segment into the forward view. Ten miles ahead, also at an angle, hung the vastly smaller ellipse of the Malley Mile. At this distance the boosters and attitude jets clamped to its circular rim showed as tiny black beads spaced out around its rainbow ring. A fighter-bomber, the
Turing Tester
, stood by beside us, ready to move into our exact present position shortly after we’d vacated it.
The
Terrible Beauty
, with the currently uncrewed fighter-bomber
Carbon Conscience
clinging to its side like a black fly squatting on a white egg, was about to make its final thrust towards the wormhole Gate. The whole crew was on board, along with Malley and Suze. Malley, despite protests from Tatsuro and others, had insisted that he was certainly not going to stay behind. Whose goddam theory was it, anyway, he wanted to know? Whose name was on the thing, eh? Suze’s equivalent insistence had more logic behind it: we actually needed her, because she was the only one who seemed to have a feel for how New-Martian society worked.
‘Angle of approach 1.274066 radians,’ said Jaime.
‘Course confirmed,’ said Andrea. ‘Distance nine point seven five miles, relative speed one hundred and twenty miles per hour.’
‘Check.’
It was all down to them now; them and the onboard computer, which was really flying the ship. But, moved by an impulse that goes all the way back to Vostok and Mercury, when people are in a ship they like to have the
final say. Maybe it’s an illusion, maybe it would be better to let the machines handle it all, but when you start thinking like that, where do you stop? You don’t, is what, and you end up with all machines and no people. Come to think of it (I thought, floating in my straps, an inch above my acceleration couch and trying not to think too much) you end up with exactly what we were fighting against.
‘Eight miles.’
Right now, as I watched the Malley Mile expand in the screen overhead, I didn’t have much sense of control. We were falling into a hole in the sky, and there was nothing I could do about it any more.
‘Six miles.’
‘Ready for the burn,’ Andrea sang out. ‘Three minutes.’
We had to go through under acceleration, Malley had told us. He had tried to tell us why, but lost most of us by the fourth equation, and that was keeping it simple. I glanced over at him. He was lying on a couch next to me. As far as I could see, he had his eyes tight shut. His lips were moving. He turned over, and opened his eyes.
‘Ah,’ he whispered, ‘you caught me at it.’
‘At what?’
He closed his eyes again for a second, then opened them and smiled. ‘Praying.’
‘I didn’t know you were a believer.’
‘Not as such,’ Malley said. He stared fixedly at our looming goal on the screen above us. ‘But I understand God listens whether you’re a believer or not.’
This was no time for philosophical debate. ‘Yes,’ I whispered back. ‘That’s what Andrea says about her St Christopher medal.’
‘I heard that,’ said Andrea. ‘Don’t you believe it. I may be sentimental, but I’m not superstitious.’
Malley smiled and seemed to relax somewhat.
‘I’ve seen God,’ Boris contributed, from the couch to my left. ‘In the sky outside Brno.’
‘You mean you got caught in smart rain from an obsolete Hanseatic psychochemical munition,’ I said. ‘Don’t confuse things.’
‘I know what done it to me,’ Boris said placidly. ‘And I know what I seen.’
‘Pipe down, you back there,’ said Andrea. ‘Boosting in ten seconds, nine, eight …’
This time the acceleration was gentle, building up slowly to a half gee; but the wormhole gate came at us in a rush. Before I could think, before I could wonder, before Malley could pray again, the screens flared briefly blue, and then went black.
‘Cutting the drive,’ said Andrea. The small weight went away.
Jaime’s voice rose above the sudden silence.
‘Is that
it
?’
Andrea flicked though screen images, stabilizing on the red crescent of the planet we’d seen the day before, sixty-two thousand miles away and dead ahead.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s it. We’re through.’
Jaime was checking the starfield against an astonomical atlas in the navigational computer. The babbages ran for a few seconds, the fixels flickered and laboured; the catalogued 3D picture incremented the proper motions of the stars, and after several iterations meshed with the outside scene. Jaime examined the tank’s readout.
‘Ten thousand light years from home, and just over ten thousand years in the future, at a rough guess,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the Sagittarius Arm.’
‘Wow,’ said Suze.
‘I think you spoke for all of us,’ I said. ‘Stay strapped in, everybody. Yeng, would you please run us a scan?’
Yeng complied quickly, hauling her interface down from the clustered banks of computers and checking that it was isolated from the rest, then cautiously sweeping the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and sample-scanning apparent messages into her anti-virus software.
‘It’s busy,’ she said.
‘Take your time,’ I said.
‘It’s
really
busy. I’ve never seen anything like it. There are signals at
every possible
wavelength! Scanning them all for viruses would take forever.’ She waved a hand helplessly at the screen, down which a string of samples was propagating. ‘Nothing there, but that’s just the beginning, just a tiny fraction.’
‘Try a random sample right across the spectrum,’ I suggested.
That took about an hour, during which time we drifted further from the daughter-wormhole Gate and closer to the planet. We put this time to good use. First, we rotated the ship and decelerated, so that we could flee straight back through the wormhole if Yeng’s investigations turned up anything nasty. Next, we placed a small communications satellite in a fixed position relative to the wormhole, a position it was programmed to hold. It was also programmed to point a communications laser at the correct angle for the beam to get through to the
Turing Tester
on the other side. (Light, having no mass, could get through without acceleration, which would of course have been impossible in any case; Malley’s further explanation of how only coherent light could do it was, I’m afraid, lost on me.)
I tested the link, nervously, with Malley at my shoulder.
‘
Terrible Beauty
to
Turing Tester
, are you receiving me?’
Seconds passed.
‘
Turing Tester
to
Terrible Beauty
, receiving you loud and clear. Are you in the right place?’
‘Yes, we are,’ I said. ‘Ten thousand light years from home, according to Jaime.’
Another short delay.
‘Just passed on your message to the Command Committee. Tatsuro’s coming through now.’
The voice changed. ‘Congratulations, comrades, you just made history. Small step, giant leap and all that.’
One small step for the Jovians, one giant leap for us.
‘Thank you,’ I said. After a few more exchanges, mainly technical, we signed off.
Next we spun out a mirror and set it up in front of the ship and a little to one side, so that we could make visual observations through
Terrible Beauty
’s forward telescope. By sheer good luck we’d arrived just at the time when the planet’s major settlement, Ship City, was coming around the middle of the crescent limb and turning to the night. The lights of smaller settlements were sprinkled across the dark side, and shortly the five-armed shape of the city joined them, a bright neon star. There were more settlements than Wilde had told us about, and the city seemed bigger and brighter than he’d described.
‘Looks human enough to me,’ said Tony.
‘Well, it ain’t,’ I said. ‘According to Wilde, four of those arms are inhabited, if that’s the word, by robots running wild.’
‘The lights are on, but nobody’s home?’ Malley said mischievously.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘So let’s not make assumptions, OK?’
‘Looks like somebody’s making assumptions about us,’ remarked Boris.
‘What?’
‘No challenges,’ he said mildly. ‘They must assume we’re friendly.’
‘Thank you for sharing that,’ said Tony. ‘I’ve always thought the null hypothesis didn’t get its fair share of publicity.’
‘Stop bitching, comrades,’ I said.
‘Who’s bitching?’
They continued in this vein for some time.
‘
When
you’ve all
quite
finished,’ said Yeng. She pushed the apparatus away from her, and the spring-loaded boom lifted it back to the cluster. ‘You might like to hear my preliminary report on a random sample of radio signals.’
‘We’re listening,’ I said.
‘They’re clean,’ she said. ‘A lot of encrypted stuff, but nothing that does nasty things to anything I’ve thrown it at. Definitely just dead data, not live programs. So, would you all like to hear a little of what goes on in a system
where humans have the spectrum to themselves and don’t have to worry about—’ deep doomy voice ‘—“parasite programs from monster minds” shorting their circuits and eating their brains?’
‘Yes, go ahead,’ I said.
We all sat up a little on our couches—or rather, pushed ourselves away with our elbows—to listen to what people without Jovian jamming to worry about had to say. Yeng, with an impish smile, reached up for a switch and fiddled with a dial. The command-deck speakers filled the level with the most doleful music I’d ever heard. A sad, throaty voice was singing along, with lyrics I had to search my most distant memories to make sense of: the themes included unemployment, alcohol abuse, desertion, betrayal, sexual frustration, jealousy, religion …
‘That’s
terrible
,’ said Tony, after a couple of minutes of open-mouthed listening. ‘It must be hell down there.’
Suze laughed. ‘Not hell—capitalism.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ I said. ‘But what sort of music
is
that?’
‘Country,’ said Malley. ‘Or maybe western.’
‘Give us something else,’ Boris pleaded. ‘Anything.’
‘Sure thing,’ Yeng drawled. (The infection was already getting to her.) She turned the dial through a couple of banshee howls, and settled on a wavelength just as a voice announced: ‘—and I’d like to welcome you all to the Black Wave, Ship City’s first and best blues and soul station, here to help you make it through the night …’
 
 
To be fair, not all the music beamed out by the local radio stations was an incitement to suicide: some of it was definitely a provocation to murder. This fitted right in with what we saw on broadcast television, which at first sight indicated a society where murder was commonplace; but Suze and Malley assured us that Wilde had been right in his descriptions of this in his original interrogation—it was just faked, staged, pretended violence for entertainment. Most of it was, anyway. Lethal combat was a legal spectatar sport, as Wilde had told us and as we now soon confirmed. We floated about, watching the screen with an appalled fascination.
‘This is
sick
, man,’ said Boris. ‘Hey, I’ve seen more killings in the last half-hour than I ever saw in the Hundred Years’ War.’
‘You did most of your killing at long range, as I recall,’ I said. ‘What you saw is one thing, what you did is another. Anyway,’ I added, pointing at a losing player being dragged out of a stadium, to cheers, ‘he’ll be back on his feet—well, when they find them—in a few days.’
‘Nasty head wound,’ said Yeng.
‘They all take back-ups just before they go on, so all he’ll lose is the memory of the fight. That’s how they see it.’
‘But not you?’ Malley asked.
I shook my head, emphatically. ‘Death is death, and I don’t see the comfort in knowing that a clone with your memories is going to exist in the future.’
Malley pushed himself away from the wall he was about to collide with, and immediately drifted off in a direction other than the one he’d intended.
‘I think,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘that we’ve just encountered yet another of your incorrigible ideas, Ellen. It’s right up there with this “machines aren’t conscious” bug in your mental program.’ He grabbed at a plant through whose fronds he was moving, and succeeded only in breaking off a leaf.
‘“Consciousness is an emergent property of carbon”,’ Yeng quoted gleefully. ‘So stop hurting our plants.’
 
 
We’d needed this interlude of slacking-off, to recover somewhat from the tension we’d all felt about going through the wormhole—greater, to me anyway, than that of any other manoeuvre I’d experienced; at least since dropping in on the battle of Lisbon, which was a long time ago. To cross that space-time gulf was scarier than landing a shuttle through flak, and in retrospect it was no less troubling. I turned my mind resolutely from reflecting on it. It would be some time before the awe at what we’d done struck home to us, and I wanted to be safely home before it did. The radio and television broadcasts, misleading though they possibly were about the texture of daily life, had also been useful in mentally preparing us for arriving in a very alien society.

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