How Dark the World Becomes (15 page)

My worries were unfounded, as it turned out, and I wouldn’t even have mentioned all of this except it’s important for you to remember that, even when nothing bad was happening, we were always on edge, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Constant tension can wear you down after a while. That, I suppose, is the edge that a professional has. 

Well, “professional” sounds kind of pretentious, doesn’t it? Let’s say that it’s something you learn from experience, that this is going to go on a long time, and that if you let yourself get lulled into a sense of routine by the constancy of danger, you are asking to get killed. My staying alert, staying constantly attuned to the smallest changes in the environment, would make a real difference later in our journey, and save lives—just not as many as I’d have liked. 

*   *   *

One of the first things I did when we got settled on the
K’Pook
was strike up an acquaintance with the chief purser, Walter Wu. Walter was an interesting guy. He was trained as a quantum physicist and here he was, chief purser on a C-lighter, making sure meals got served on time and everybody had clean linen. Father Bill taught me that you can learn something interesting from almost anybody, and that you can’t always anticipate what that might be. I figured I might learn something about physics from Walter; instead, I learned about intellectual property law.

That’s okay. A guy in my line of work can never know too much about the law.

I made it a point to introduce myself to Walter because I needed a favor. Not a big favor, at least in terms of what
he
had to put out, but it could make a big difference to
us
. I’m getting ahead of myself, but since the favor ended up not being that important, I’ll satisfy your curiosity and then we can move on. 

Communication is at the speed of travel or the speed of light, whichever is faster. You can jump objects with their own J-field generators between stars, and that beats light speed, so every ship has a burst transmitter, and when it jumps into a new system, it executes a data dump that updates the local databases. The point is, there’s no way to “phone ahead,” so when you get to where you have to make a travel connection, seats are first come, first served. The C-lighter we’d be connecting to in the Seewauk system was called
Brukata
, and there was no way of knowing how many berths would be open. 

So when the time came, I wanted to be able to suggest to my friend Walter that when we emerged from J-space in the Seewauk system, he transmit our request for reservations, then go have a cup of tea, come back, and transmit everyone else’s. Nothing really illegal about it, just a favor for a friend. I’d even buy the tea for him—slip him a hundred-chip and expect him to keep the change. 

That would come later, and it did, and he was happy to do it. But in the meantime, I got to know the story of a physicist who had become the manager of a moving hotel. That’s how Walter said it, and in terms of a skill set, that was pretty much it in a nutshell, but it was more than just that, wasn’t it? It was physics, and it was happening all around him.

Walter got his education at the High-Energy Physics Institute in Beijing, which is in China back on Earth. He did a spell at a lab in Switzerland, too, but his project funding got cut, and he was out of a job. You’d think a guy trained in quantum physics could get a job busting up atoms almost anywhere, especially since all communication and most macro-commerce in the
Cottohazz
relies on space travel. Turns out, you’d be wrong. There’s actually very little demand—on Earth—for experimental physicists.

“How can that be?” I asked after I’d known him a couple days. “I mean, damned near everything relies on moving stuff from world to world, and—correct me if I’m wrong on this—physics is kinda important to that, isn’t it?”

He’d laughed. We were down on the observation deck, which was a lot like the O-deck on the shuttle—but with a lower ceiling and generally not as nice, at least to my eye.
K’Pook
was Varoki-designed, top to bottom, and it was already making me a little jumpy. Marfoglia and the kids were with us, but Barraki and Tweezaa were over by the clear rear wall, looking back along the length of the ship at the sparkling J-field generator. The Newton tug had already cut us loose, and we were coasting to the jump point. Marfoglia was sitting with Walter and me, but reading—her preferred way of avoiding the need to interact with me.

“Yes, physics is important,” Walter answered. “But you can’t count electrons in your backyard. That takes money, and it’s hard to spend money if you can’t make money in return.

“Back when Terra joined the
Cottohazz
, the price for membership was to buy into its IP—intellectual property—covenants. We figured it would get us access to an amazing body of knowledge—and it did, but it turns out we can look, but we can’t touch. All the J-space physics is intellectual property of the people that came up with it—or rather the big mercantile houses that own it, since the patents have all been bought up. Even the early quantum tunneling research we Humans had already done—the precursor work to J-space physics—was covered, since the Varoki had done it earlier.
Cottohazz
IP laws don’t recognize coincidental discovery, and there’s no expiration date when it becomes public domain. 

“It’s all called ‘foundation knowledge,’ and any outgrowth of proprietary foundation knowledge becomes the property of the underlying patent holder.”

“So, if you come up with a better mousetrap,” I said, “the guy already making mousetraps owns it?” 

He nodded. 

“Well, that sucks!”

He nodded again, and looked out the observation port at the stars twinkling in the distance. What was it I’d thought looking up at the stars back on Peezgtaan? A diamond necklace hopelessly out of reach? But Walter could actually have reached out and grabbed hold of it—except it was against the rules. So he went to work on a C-lighter, because it was as close as he could come to touching those stars.

And sometimes I think I’ve got it hard.

Later that day, when we were getting close to the jump point, I had a funny thought, and I looked Walter up again. 

“Walter, all this J-space ‘foundation knowledge’ stuff—who owns it?”

“Varoki trading houses—the big families,
e-Varokiim
,” he answered, and shrugged.

“Yeah, but which ones? Do you know?”

He scratched his head and frowned in thought.

“Well, it’s a bit complicated,” he started, “since there were parallel research lines and different discoveries that seemed unrelated at first but ended up as converging research paths. As I understand it, it’s all rolled into a big patent cluster that’s jointly owned by seven or eight Varoki merchant houses.”

“Are the e-Traak one of them?” I asked, and I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice.

“Of course. Simki-Traak’s one of the main interstellar players, based mostly on the patents owned by the e-Traak.”

“What if those patents somehow got into Human hands?” I asked. “Ownership, I mean?”

He just looked at me for a couple seconds, and then shrugged.

“I have no idea. I mean, I can’t imagine it happening, unless they sold them, and . . . they’d
never
do that. I don’t know how the law would shake out on it, but it would change everything,” he said. Then his eyes wandered a bit, thinking about it, and he repeated “everything,” but more softly. 

Yeah.
Everything.
 

*   *   *

We made the jump to the Seewauk system without incident. Well, there are no real opportunities for “incidents” in J-space; you just fall into a sparkling well of light, and then you come out the other end. You feel a little sick, you break out in a sweat, the ship warms up a bit, but that’s it. No time passes in the ship; one moment you’re one place, the next moment you’re someplace else. Walter says they know that no time passes—as opposed to us just being asleep or something—because of some radioactive decay stuff that’s over my head, but I trust him on that. 

Time passes outside the ship, though—a few hours, a few days, depending on how far you’re jumping and whether you’re jumping across the axis of galactic movement or along it—and with or against the “current.” Why different times? I don’t know. Walter doesn’t know, and he’s honest enough to admit it. I’ve asked other rocket-science guys, and some of them start mumbling about relativistic effects and the elasticity of time, but I can tell bullshit when I hear it. Bottom line is nobody really knows why. 

Do you find that kind of spooky? I sure do. 

That’s one of the reasons—maybe the big reason, the jumps are to and from the outer parts of stellar systems. Given the fact that time gets a little variable in jump, and interstellar astrogation is as much art as science, you don’t want to be coming out anywhere near an inhabited world—if you’re off a bit, you can make life real ugly real quick for a whole lot of people. You also don’t want to come out in the middle of any drifting space junk. Since about ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the matter in a star system is concentrated on the plain of the ecliptic, you always come out above or below it. Even so, there’s always a trace residue of molecular hydrogen in the space you suddenly occupy; that’s why everything—including you—heats up a little. 

They say it’s safer that taking an auto cab. Sure. What did you expect them to say?

The astrogator must have been pretty good, because we came out in spectacular visual range of Rakanka, the system’s gas giant, and with a residual vector pretty close to right on the money. Looking at Rakanka’s pink and blue and green atmosphere reminded me of one of Arrie’s tie-dyed tee shirts, and I felt a sharp pang of loneliness. 

I might never see Arrie again. June and Father Bill were gone forever, and I might never see Henry or Big Meg or Phil the Gil, or anybody else I’d ever cared about, ever again. There was a whole big galaxy out there—at least what the
Cottohazz
had explored of it—and I guess it was full of great stuff, you know? But I wondered if I’d ever again eat an omelet at H’Tank’s, hanging out over the river rapids 150 meters below. 

There have got to be places a whole lot better than the Crack, but there can’t be any place quite like it, and I was missing it. 

I guess I was still thinking hard about the Crack when Marfoglia came up beside me, because I didn’t notice her until she cleared her throat.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Thinking about old friends.”

She nodded. 

“I just wanted to say how sorry I was about . . . your friend. And what I said afterward,” she said.

“Water under the bridge,” I answered. “‘Grieve—but live.’ That’s what Father Bill would have said—did say quite a few times. You never knew Father Bill.”

“He started the soup kitchen at St. Michael’s, didn’t he? There’s a privately funded bronze bust of him at the Municipal Center,” she said, and then she looked at me, brow compressed in thought. “Did . . .
you
fund that bust?”

“Yup. Bill saw something in me . . . something nobody else did.”

“What?” 

“Value.” 

She looked at me oddly for a moment, thinking that over. “How did he die?” she asked.

“Rapid Onset ATZL.” 

“The degenerative nerve disease? You know, they have a new drug that’s supposed to do wonders on those nerve diseases. Maybe you haven’t heard about it out here.”

“Neurocine,” I said. 

She looked surprised, but nodded. 

“It was in trial stage when he started showing symptoms. I found out about it. It took some doing, but I got some. Cost a fortune, but I didn’t mind. I’d have paid anything to keep him around. The son of a bitch wouldn’t take it. Know why? It cost too much for just one man, that’s what he said. He said, ‘Sasha, if you care about me, you’ll take the money for this medicine and spend it for everyone else down here, to make them healthy.’”

Her eyes got wide for a moment as the pieces fell into place.

“The clinic?” she asked. I nodded. She thought about that for a while.

“He must have been quite a man,” she said. 

“Oh, he was that. I never heard him raise his voice once, all the years I knew him. Never saw him even mildly irritated. I saw him sad a few times, but mostly he was . . . blissful. Even right at the very end.”

“Like St. Francis,” she said. 

I laughed.

“Yeah. Except Bill really
could
fly.” 

She looked at me, confused.

“Before he was a priest, he was a mike trooper,” I explained. “Five combat jumps from orbit! Step out of a ship with nothing between you and reentry burn-up but a couple meters of composite foam, some stupid little guidance rocket, and a parasail. You know what that takes? If you do, you’re one up on me. I can’t even imagine it.
Five
jump stars! No idea how many training descents he made. He told me once, as he was getting ready for a descent he noticed he kept looking up instead of down, and he figured that was a sign he was supposed to get into a different line of work.

“So, yeah, quite a guy. But not
exactly
like St. Francis, was he?”

*   *   *

An hour later I was still looking at that big tie-dyed soccer ball floating in space when Walter found me, his face a mixture of excitement and fear.

“What’s up, pal?” I asked.

He looked around to make sure nobody was in hearing range and then leaned close to whisper in my ear.

“You’re going to have a longer layover at Rakanka Highstation than you thought.”

“What? The
Brukata
’s already booked?” I asked.

He shook his head and wiped perspiration from his forehead with a trembling hand.

“No.
Brukata
’s been blown up.”

THIRTEEN

Eighteen hours later, the Newton tug docked with us. Eighteen hours is a long time when you know something pretty bad has happened, but you don’t know exactly what or why. Eventually Walter got the go-ahead to tell the rest of the passengers, but from the way the crew was acting—all jumpy and weird—they’d already figured out that something was up. The word was that
Brukata
had sustained major damage (he didn’t use the expression “blown up” this time) and that it appeared to be the result of sabotage.