The New Space Opera 2 (40 page)

Think, she told herself. Find a way to stop him.

Everywhere she turned she foresaw terrible consequences, not just for herself but for the Guild of the Great Ships as well. The Grand Masters had no conception of what a concerted assault on the Structure might cost them. An indestructible resistance would be much worse than an agent or two armed with bombs. In such a battle, the full weight of the universe's laws would be on the Structure's side—just as they were arrayed against her now. Losing such a war would cause deeper instabilities than mere internal discontent.

She stood up and raised a hand to her temple, feeling light-headed. She saw now that she would blow the charges, exactly as Kindred had asked, but not out of sympathy with him and the terrorists of Terminus, or out of fear of the consequences of breaking the time-loop. She had all the free will she ever had. The choice was entirely hers, now she saw what it needed to be.

Being silent wasn't enough to save the Guild from harm. Averting open conflict with the Structure had to become her first priority, which meant closing the only remaining exit in the Guild's territory, on Hakham. If the Grand Masters still wanted to tackle the Structure, they would have to find the entrance at Oza and win a very different conflict with the Decretians first. That could take decades, perhaps centuries—in which time, new technologies might evolve to tackle the time-looping menace.

She would save the Guild by betraying it—and herself.

“The Structure makes you do that,” Kindred had once said. “It's unavoidable.”

He had been talking about speaking gibberish, but the thought held in both contexts. She was in two places simultaneously, caught in a loop, as he had been, and she had no choice but to turn her back on everything she held dear. But a perverse hope remained that she might redeem herself. Kindred would have prepared an escape route; she was sure of that, for he had displayed none of the characteristics of a suicide bomber. Now that her indestructibility was assured, who knew what she could learn before fate brought her inevitably back? She could only take the opportunity given to her, and try, as Kindred had, to make everything right.

The corpse's cold, blue eyes were still open, staring up at an invisible sky.

“Stars,” he had said, and she wondered if he had meant it as a warning or an entreaty.

Pausing only to close his eyelids, she headed up the tunnel in pursuit of Kindred's earlier self—the young man who had given her far more than she had wanted, and taken an equal amount in return.

One of the most powerful and innovative talents to enter SF in the past few decades, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976. By the end of the eighties, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic “Shaper/Mechanist” future, with novels such as the complex and Stapledonian
Schismatrix
and
Islands in the Net
(as well as with his editing of the influential anthology
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
and the infamous critical magazine
Cheap Truth
), as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary cyberpunk movement in science fiction. His other books include a critically acclaimed nonfiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking,
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
; the novels
The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Distraction, Zeitgeist, The Zenith Angle
; a novel in collaboration with William Gibson,
The Difference Engine
; a nonfiction study of the future,
Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years
; and the landmark collections
Crystal Express, Globalhead, Schismatrix Plus, A Good Old-fashioned Future
, and
Visionary in Residence
. His most recent books are a massive retrospective collection
Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling
, and a new novel
Caryatids
. His story “Bicycle Repairman” earned him a long-overdue Hugo in 1997, and he won another Hugo in 1997 for his story “Taklamakan.”

Here he tells the story of a reluctant space hero who ends up becoming a witness to an event of historic importance and heroic scale, even if it is taking place in a junkyard.

T
hose crescent dunes were rolling curves of granulated ice. That winding river was a peaceful ripple of liquid methane. That unplumbed lake, always gently bubbling, mirrored endless tumbling streaks in the clotted orange sky. In the mellow distance rose the slopes of the ice volcano.

There was nothing like being there. Joe Kipps would never be there. That was why he loved this place.

These landscapes were rich with intricate detail. Such compelling textures. Titan flourished like frost on a windowpane. A moon whose slithering mineral existences came into their being in temperatures that froze ammonia. Cryo-volcanic. Aqua-tectonic.

Kipps treasured every moment he could spend with these landscapes. Since he was a space hero, though, Kipps didn't have many moments.

Liftoff was the worst part of spaceflight. Kipps was trapped and crushed inside the penthouse of a metal silo full of chemical fuel. Most victims of manned spaceflight died during these launch moments.

Kipps counted his own heartbeats until the smashed feeling left his lungs. Then Kipps was able to breathe, and to stir in his webbing chair, to access his screen again.

Off on the distant moon of Saturn, the game little robot had rolled a few closely calculated centimeters. This was how alien worlds were explored, and this was one noble little robot. It crawled methodically across icy sand at the bottom of a dismal murk so metaphysically cold that it rained components of gasoline. The scientists running this robot were not space heroes, because nobody had ever heard of them.

Here came the monster clatter of explosive bolts. The lift stage—that
cluster of sky-busting torches—broke loose from the cabin. The racket and roar ceased to pester him.

Here they came, those true, eerie sounds of genuine spaceflight: uneasy, creepy, skin-crawling little noises that never got any press. The sounds of raw sunlight attacking raw metal.

The naked sun baked the port side as icy vacuum froze the starboard. So the spaceship popped and knuckle-rapped, and moaned its steely distress. Like a beer can flung from a speeding car, slowly tumbling toward the side of the road.

A space tourist floated toward Kipps. Kipps was startled. He'd forgotten to tell the passengers that they could leave their seats.

With a hasty swat at his touch screen, Kipps banished the surface of Titan. His pilot's screen coughed up dials and needles; altimeters and rheostats; switches, gauges, and guards.

These instruments were entirely redundant, since the flight was run from ground control in Arizona.

However, every space tourist treasured a folk notion of what a space captain's console ought to look like. Spaceship dashboards should look complex, impressive, and demanding. So they did.

The boisterous Indian millionaires were cartwheeling from their acceleration couches, hooting and tumbling. Puffy-faced from free fall, they clowned around like kids.

These eight moguls had each paid thousands of rupees per second for this out-of-this-world experience. They were determined to enjoy it.

Gouts of liquid floated through the chamber; violently fizzing spheres that spattered the bulkheads. These blobs looked crazily alive, like space-invading amoebas. They were loose champagne.

The missile, which entirely lacked portholes, was upholstered with touch screens. They were American military surveillance screens, so they could pick out rifle flashes from low orbit.

The Indian thrill-seekers gazed with wonder at the cloudy Earth beyond their floating feet. Cheerily inept, they pawed at the obedient screens. They froze images of the wheeling Earth, and stored them, and mailed them down to Earth.

It was never much fun to be in outer space unless you were famous for doing it. So these space tourists were all websurfing. They were recording their thrill-ride, and annotating the highlights, and sending them to their people on the ground. Their employees, their shareholders.
Their extended Indian families. Anyone who might be properly impressed.

Kipps flicked a fizzing glob of champagne from his Navy dress whites. He kept his face dignified, and he stayed firmly belted to the Captain's chair. He wasn't in control here, but he knew how to look that way.

Human beings in outer space were playactors. Actors in a space opera. Though he'd endured orbit four times, astronautics was a role for Kipps. He played it as his duty.

Nobody loved the gaudy opera of manned spaceflight quite like the people of India. Their appetite for astronautics was colossal and melodramatic, much like their country.

Space opera was what Indians liked best about Americans.

Americans rocketed to the high frontier, and they left the management of Earth to Indians. It was the great alliance of eagles and spinning wheels. The American-Indian democratic-secular alliance was the spinning axis of the world. It followed that an American space hero like Captain Joe Kipps had to exist. Otherwise, the State Department would have to invent some other guy.

Kipps massaged his lurching stomach, which bloated in free fall like a water balloon. He keenly regretted that lavish bon-voyage lunch of shrimp-and-coconut curry. Free fall always seemed to last for ages.

Kipps folded his uniformed arms, which had a distressing habit of floating aimlessly above his head.

The aristocrats cavorted eagerly in their metal barn. Their cash had made a playground from this huge American weapon. The missile had been designed to carry an almighty, city-crushing payload: mostly, lethal bundles of crystalline hypervelocity crowbars. They could sleet out of a clear sky and needle their way a mile deep into the crust of the earth.

Not nuclear weapons, of course. “Conventional” weapons. Nuclear weapons were strictly for evil terrorists. After Houston, Los Angeles, and Washington, America had slammed together fifty of these rocket super-fortresses. They'd been used in practical circumstances exactly twice.

In these much quieter times of secular democracy, there was nothing much to do with these one-shot dinosaurs. Except to tart them up, refit their interiors in high Indian style, and milk them for space prestige.

Much the same transition had happened to Joe Kipps. In the heat of war, he'd been a modest Navy Aviation Systems Warfare rating, patiently peering at Pakistan through his targeting screens. Nowadays, he was Cap
tain Kipps of the U.S. Space Navy, which was basically an arm of the State Department.

One of the Indian billionaires heaved, wobbled, and trudgeon-kicked his way over. The tourist was bright-eyed and respectful. He wore a nice safari-style adventure suit with Velcro pockets and a hot-pink silk ascot. He was meeting a celebrity. This precious moment meant a lot to him.

“May I interrupt you, Captain Kipps? Are your navigation duties pressing?”

“This has been a textbook launch,” Kipps recited, unfolding his arms. “All systems go! We're A-OK!”

“It's a great honor to share my first spaceflight with you,” said the mogul.

Kipps took a deep breath. “The greatest honor of my life was serving on the ground with the fine officers of the Army of the Republic of India.”

The Indian billionaire looked properly impressed.

“I so wish my wife could hear you say that, Captain Kipps. My wife is your great admirer. She follows all your triumphs. On the web.”

What kind of a woman, thought Kipps, married a spacey billionaire like this clown? Some buried memory nagged at Kipps, and it came up in a juicy rush. Brigadier Karwal. Brigadier Karwal, grinning and mustached and tougher than brass nails. “No Indian girl ever marries for money, Joe! She's always careful to fall in love with it first!” Karwal had said that, and winked, and grinned about it, in the endless heat and dust and blood and terror of feral Karachi.

Kipps rubbed under his jacket's collar: the heat off the bulkhead had him sweating. He had to find something cordial to say to the billionaire. “We Americans can learn a lot from the strong bonds of Indian family life.”

The Indian mogul, floating haphazardly, hooked his fingers through the mesh of the Captain's chair. “My wife and I always follow the discoveries you make on Titan. That moon of Saturn looks just like the deserts of Rajasthan. Although Rajasthan has life.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kipps.

“We can see,” said the Indian, “a world that has real weather. A world with soil and skies. Where the rivers run. There are lakes.”

“I'm hunting for methane geysers,” said Kipps.

This brought an eager smile. “Of course you are still hunting, Captain Kipps!”

“We mapped the surface in fine detail from orbit. But the surface is volatile. So we have our robot crawlers. Three of them.”

“Titan has ice volcanoes,” the mogul persisted. “The crust of Titan rotates on a deep inner ocean of water. So geysers must burst up. Perhaps they will carry fish! Or great blind alien sea monsters!”

This character was quite the fan. Kipps cleared his throat. “Have we met, sir? Do I know you?”

“You may have heard of ‘GPS'—‘Gupta Positional Services.'”

“You're not that Rene Louis Gupta, are you? You don't look very French.”

“I hope you haven't heard anything bad about my little Paris start-up,” smiled Gupta. He bumped into the bulkhead and winced.

Kipps grabbed his elbow and steadied him. “I'm one of your customers. I got your guidance system in my car. I own a Tata.”

“Captain Kipps, do you have just one little moment to tour our data center?” said Gupta. “It would mean so much to my staffers!”

“I can check on that with my embassy,” said Kipps. This was what they had trained him to say.

 

The tourists had been entirely thrilled in free fall, but splashdown made them miserably seasick. The missile was helpless at sea, just a hollow metal tube that rolled and wallowed uncontrollably in the churning Bay of Bengal.

The Indian Navy had a lot of trouble snagging its slippery hull.

As the Captain, Kipps was the last man off the washing spacecraft. It would have been his duty to sink with it.

The scale of the Indian aircraft carrier was completely absurd. The Indians had thrown a dead Arab skyscraper onto its side, hollowed it out, and transformed it into a heavily armed naval bazaar. There was a flat sun-baked tabletop where the drones landed, slow-moving war birds with lethal stings. Killer drones were keenly familiar to Kipps, but the rest of the craft was a crazy hive: watertight cargo-containers welded together, cardboard antimissile barriers. Cut and paste. Mix and match.

Indian civilians swarmed all over this urban aircraft carrier. They had the Indian Navy personnel outnumbered three to one. Maybe the carrier was simply too big to leave to the military. The people had pulled political strings; they'd privatized the place, turned it into a floating suburb.

Private helicopters arrived to greet his passengers. The helicopters were candy-colored Indian dragonflies, and they disgorged whole eager retinues of secretaries and escorts and girlfriends and masseurs and spiritual
advisers. They fell on the heroic space tourists with glad cries of glee and flung flowered garlands over their necks.

Kipps had to pose for ritual pictures with his tourists: alone, in small groups, as an entire group. In front of a green screen, without any green screen. With and without a huge, gardenia-reeking flower garland around his neck. Kipps recited his talking points, including memorized slogans in Hindi.

An American consular official emerged from the chaos of cots, valises, crates, and power cables. She had a big satellite phone for Kipps, along with a broad-brimmed hat, a tube of sunscreen, and cold mineral water.

This woman was a psy-ops creature, a civilian spook, but it was nice to see her thinking about his needs.

“We're going to Bombay,” she told him. “Your big show had a change of plans.”

“Mumbai? But I was briefed for Dubai,” said Kipps. They'd scheduled him for another tour of Dubai, which was a very proper, ultra-futuristic, space-hero kind of town. Kipps had been to Dubai twice. Dubai always seemed like an interesting place, though he'd never once escaped its colossal hotels.

“Please don't call Bombay ‘Mumbai,' Captain. They don't do that here anymore.”

“Okay. Sure.”

State Department Girl told him that her name was Sarah something. “If they use the name ‘Bomb-Dub,' that's bad. It means they're claiming Dubai as a suburb of Bombay. Those guys are the crazy, Hindu, culture-war, saffron-and-trident crowd. You don't want to mess with them.”

“I heard about them. Right.”

“Do you think there's any life on Titan?” said Sarah.

“What?”

“Life. Life on Titan. Do you think life evolved on there? Do you believe in evolution? You believe in dinosaurs.”

“There might be some life
inside
Titan,” Kipps said with care. “There's water in there, an ocean. But it's eighty miles deep and it's locked deep in solid ice. So there's no danger. They can't get out and hurt us.”

“You hunt for geysers so you can find some fossils of life on Titan.”

“I always look for fossils,” said Kipps. “I've been looking for fossils since I was a kid. Nothing special about that. North Dakota's crawling with fossils.”

“Despite your private convictions, I don't think you ought to men
tion the prospect of life inside Titan,” said Sarah. “Too controversial. In Dubai, maybe, but Bombay's got swamis, and gurus, and guys who talk to UFOs, and people who believe in life in outer space—and they're all fun-dies. Okay? They'll act real friendly to you, but you shouldn't go there.”

“I'm strictly secular,” said Kipps.

Sarah squinted at a departing chopper. “We should never have gone to Bombay…” It looked like Sarah had had a long war. Some people had never gotten over Houston, and Washington, and Los Angeles. Something had turned into ice inside of them, after that. They were not going to loosen up again.