Cosmonaut Keep (25 page)

Lemieux was shaking his head. "I know that's what you'd like to think, Colin," he said, "but you know it would be disputed by every scientist on this station, and by me too." He moved his teeth as though nibbling at his lower lip. "Is it not time we -- explained the situation?"

"Ah, I guess so," said Driver, and suddenly looked much more cheerful. "It's that or stick them in the brig, and I don't want to do that. The publicity might be bad." He grinned at us. " 'U.S. hostages in orbital commie hell,' sort of thing."

We laughed, with nervous politeness.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Have you any idea about, you know, whether we're going to
build
this thing? Because that's why we came here."

Driver disengaged himself from the desk and reached for the door.

"First things first," he said. "Time to meet the aliens."

"He means, the scientists," said Lemieux, on the way out. Driver heard him.

"Same thing," he grunted.

The scientist took off his spex and blinked at us. In a literally laid-back position -- and pose -- he hung across the end of a small corridor or long cubbyhole, surrounded by more cables than an intensive-care patient. Some of them were fiber-optic, others insulated metal; most, however, had the fibrous, quasi-organic look of new tech. None of them, as far as I could see, actually went into his body, but many of them terminated in the equipment slung around it. His faded sweatpants and baggy T-shirt barely contained his beer gut, and his hair and beard looked as wild and coiled as the cabling.

He waved, in an airy, notional handshake all around.

"Hi, guys. My name's Armen Avakian. And your names have been all around the ship's intranet. Welcome aboard. Have our two politicos here clued you in yet?"

"We decided to let you do that," said Driver. "Including about the
politics.
So far we've only discussed security issues."

"So I'm not on the hook, whatever they were," said Avakian. He let out a laugh that made me want to cover my ears. "Great! So -- you got spex? Right, sure, okay. Now just a moment while I tune in to them and call up a consensus space ... "

Blankness surrounded us, a shadowless, pearly light. Avakian's voice murmured, somewhere behind us:

"Ready?"

It was somehow obvious, and disturbing, that the question was not addressed to any of us.

The bright monochrome bubble burst, throwing us into color and complexity. More color, more complexity than I'd ever seen or imagined or dreamed. The pictures shown of it in the newsfeeds were a quite inadequate preparation for the real thing. We hung in a vast interior space. Distance and perspective were impossible to judge, the shapes difficult to cohere in the eye. At one moment it made sense as the interior of a vastly magnified, non-human brain; the next, as the view of a city from a height; or a cathedral, made entirely of stained glass; then again, as some multifarious botanic garden in whose gargantuan greenhouse we were as fruit flies.

For a long time the only possible response was silence. The place filled the mind, and the eye, and the mind's eye.

My entranced, meditative moment was shattered by Avakian's laugh. The view collapsed, back into white light, like waking to a dash of freezing water after some warm and vivid dream.

"So much for the big picture," he said. "The actual interface has a bit less bandwidth."

I hung in the air, shivering, blinking away tears behind the spex.

"Just as well," Avakian went on, "because the interface is addictive enough as it is. If we were working in the big picture we'd do nothing but hang around with our mouths open."

He laughed again, the sound even more manic and hideous than before, and even as I resented it and shrank -- no,
cringed
from it -- I realized that he was doing it deliberately, and in our interests: Without that iconoclasm we would be lost in idolatry. Or worse -- our adoration of this celestial city might be the closest any of us would ever come to devotion to real gods.

With an audible
click
the interface appeared -- a wide, wraparound screen this time rather than a full-immersion view. If we hadn't seen the latter we'd have been almost as stunned by the former, crowded as it was with still and moving images, depth, and
text.

"It's what you might call 'feature-rich,' " Avakian said dryly. "This is what all of us -- the scientists -- are hanging out in, every moment we can."

The image vanished and we became again four people hanging in the recycled air of a smelly, confined, and cluttered space.

"So," he said, "what can I do for you?"

I was about to tell him when Lemieux interrupted.

"No, no!" he said. "First, you will please tell them what you and the other scientists have found, and what your consensus is as to what is to be done -- the politics, if you will."

"Oh, yeah, that," said Avakian. He ran his hands through his springy hair, making no discernible difference to its condition. "Well, this place here is unique, right, but it's not
alone.
You know, when Big Uncle made the announcement? That was a bit of an understatement, comrades and friends; old Yefrimovich was a tad economical with the truth."

His fingers rampaged across his head again.

"The truth is there are
billions
of the fuckers. In the asteroid belt and the Kuiper and the Oort. There are more ... communities ... like this around the Solar System than there are people on Earth. And each of them contains more separate minds than, than -- "

" -- a Galactic Empire," said Lemieux.

"Yes! Yes! Exactly!" Avakian beamed.

"How do you know this?" Camila asked.

Avakian hand-waved behind his shoulder.

"The aliens told us, and told us where to look for their communications. Their EM emissions are very faint, but they're there, all right, and the sources fill the sky like the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang."

"Sure it ain't just part of that?"

"Nah, it's comms, all right." Avakian sucked at his lower lip. "The point to bear in mind is that our cometary cloud's outer shells intersect those of the Centauran System, and, well -- "

"They're everywhere?"

He shrugged. "Around a lot of stars, yeah, quite possibly. Trafficking, communicating, maybe even traveling. They have conscious control over their own outgassings, they have computing power to die for, and it only takes a nudge to change their orbits. It might take millions of years between stars, sure, but these guys have a
long
attention span."

"And what do they actually do?"

"From the point of view of us busy little primates, they don't do much. Hang out and take in the view. Travel around the sun every few million years. Maybe travel to another sun and go around that a few times. Boring." He put on a whining, childish voice. " 'Are we
there
yet? He's
hitting
me. I want to go to the
toilet.'
"

He laughed, a genuine and humorous laugh this time, and continued briskly: "But from their point of view, they are having fun. Endless, absorbing, ecstatic, and for all I know,
orgasmic
fun. Discourse, intercourse -- at their level it's probably the same fucking thing." He underlined the obvious with a giggle. "They're like gods, man, and they're literally in heaven. And in all their infinite -- well, okay,
unbounded
-- diversity they have, we understand, a pretty much unanimous view on one thing. They don't like spam."

He looked at three puzzled faces, and at mine.

"Spam," he said. "Tell these good people about spam."

I flailed, literally and metaphorically. It was an obscure issue, difficult to explain to people outside the biz. But I tried.

"Spam is, um, sort of mindlessly repeated advertisements and shit. Junk mail. Some of it comes from start-ups and scams, some of it's generated by programs called spambots, which got loose in the system about fifty years ago and which have been beavering away ever since. You hardly notice it, because so little gets through that you might think it's just a legit advertisement. But that's because way down at the bottom level, we have programs to clean out the junk, and they work away at it too." I shrugged. "Spam and anti-spam waste resources, it's the ultimate zero-sum game, but what can you do? You gotta live with it. Anti-spam's like an immune system. You don't have to know about it, but you'd die without it. There's a whole war going on that's totally irrelevant to what you really want to do."

"Exactamundo,"
said Avakian. "That's how the ETs feel about it too. And as far as they're concerned, we are great lumbering spambots, corrupted servers, liable at any moment or any megayear to start turning out millions of pointless, slightly varied replicas of ourselves. Most of what we're likely to want to do if we expanded seriously into space is spam. Space industries -- spam. Moravec uploads -- spam on a plate. Von Neumann machines -- spam and chips. Space settlements -- spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam."

"How about asteroid mining and comet farming?" I couldn't keep my face straight, but Avakian looked grim.

"Don't even
think
about it," he said. "Um ... Where this all gets political is that it didn't take long for us to realize that the ultimate engine of spam is capitalism. Endless expansion is the great capitalist wet dream, and it's totally incompatible with the way the universe really is. It's certainly incompatible with what the overwhelmingly dominant form of intelligent life in the universe is willing to accept. Quite frankly, I'm no Party hack myself but the fact of the matter is that the Party's aim of a steady-state society with a bit of sustainable, careful, non-invasive space exploration is the only kind of society that the aliens are likely to be happy with." He made an ironically sad face at Camila. "The dream you guys have of treating the Solar System as raw material for orbital mobile homes, guns, and beer cans is
right out."

"And what," Camila asked, "are they going to do about it?"

Avakian's thick eyebrows twitched. "With control over cometary and asteroid orbits, you can, oh, engineer mass-extinction events." He spread his hands. "Just a thought."

"Now wait a minute!" Camila exclaimed. "With that kind of threat from outer space, hell, we could all pull together. There'd be real backing for the big stuff -- lasers, nukes, battle stations, a proper space-defense system at last! Hey, we could even pull in the commies, once they understood what we're really up against. And with the political will, we could get the heavy stuff in orbit real fast! These aliens of yours couldn't react in time to stop us. And if they tried, they'd find a few extinction level events coming
their
way. Shit -- did these guys ever pick on the wrong species to keep cooped up in a keg."

Avakian looked away from her and at me and Lemieux and Driver, who were listening to this little rant with expressions of amusement and disbelief.

"Ah," he said. "You begin to see the problem."

"Don't patronize
me,"
Camila said, shoving her face in front of his and forcing his attention back to her. "Anyway, if the aliens don't want us to go into space, why the hell have they given us the plans for a flying saucer and a space-drive?"

Avakian blinked slowly. "Tell me more," he said.

13

____________

Gravity Skiff

Gregor glared after the departing airship, his fists clenched in acute frustration and annoyance. He turned to Elizabeth and Salasso, who like him were leaning dangerously out over the platform's parapet, as though that would help.

"Can't we ask the tower to call it back?"

"No chance."

"So why the hell didn't you -- "

"Listen," said Salasso patiently, "I did not at all expect the people we are looking for to be in New Lisbon. The last I heard, they were rumored to be somewhere else." He waved up at other airships drifting in to dock. "Somewhere reachable by one of those flights. I only sought out my old teacher for confirmation, and for more detail as to the location. If I had thought for a moment they might be in New Lisbon, we would not have walked."

Their stroll along the city floor and their encounter with the saur child now seemed like a futile waste of time, something to recall with regret instead of delight. At the same moment, the mention of New Lisbon made Gregor's heart jump. Lydia would be there.

"Wait a minute," said Elizabeth. "You said New Lisbon's where the gravity skiffs are right now? They can't be working
all
the time. Why not call in and see if any pilot is willing to nip up here and nip straight back, with us?"

"That is a -- " The saur's tongue flickered along his lips. "That is a very good idea. I should have thought of it myself."

Gregor dropped his bag and flung an arm around Elizabeth's shoulders.

"Yes!" he shouted. "Brilliant!"

"You anticipate," said Salasso. "Let us see."

They followed him again into the circular room. He marched up to a flat gray plate on the wall and started poking at some small rectangles outlined along its lower border. After a moment the plate glowed dimly, and Salasso began an animated, gesticulating conversation. Gregor watched from one side with a feeling of vague resentment. Television, or the lack of it, was something of a sore point.

Saur display-screens worked outside the human visual spectrum, and even when corrected for that, they didn't make much sense, most of the picture being lost in a blizzard of additional information which the saur optical system filtered quite differently from the human brain. Mingulay's industrial capacity didn't extend to mass production of cathode-ray tube monitors -- let alone anything more advanced -- and this deficiency was one which the saurs seemed in no hurry to supply from their manufacturing plant.

What made this a sore point was the distinct impression their traders gave that this was entirely to the humans' benefit.