Cosmonaut Keep (5 page)

"What?"

She's jammed in beside me in a corner bench, and she looks like it's only our mutually awkward position that's stopping her from slapping me. "Yeah, yeah," she says impatiently, "giant leap and all that, but -- "

In one section of screen the Russkis' prettiest newscaster is twittering brightly about "our heroic ESA cosmonauts" and "brilliant scientists"; in another, much smaller window, a reporter outside the European Parliament drones on about a new scandal, some Trot MEP exposed as taking a bigger wage from Washington, or possibly Langley. Any other time, it'd be the hottest item; now it just seems trivial and tawdry, literally mundane. Why are they running it at all?

"Will you fucking
listen
to me?" Jadey hisses. I blink and shake my gaze loose from the screen's hypnotic virtual grip, and focus on her face, tense and pale in the warm light.

"Okay. Sorry." Jesus. I can feel the urge to look back at the screen, like gravity.

"Matt, that ESA station, it's the one you got a job from today."

"Yes!" I say. "That's what's got me so gobsmacked, apart from the ... uh," -- I replay her cynical words -- "
'giant leap'
stuff."

" 'Comrades, this is no accident,' " she flips back. She gives a quick, disdainful glance at the screen; I take this as permission to do the same. In the bottom corner there's a mug shot of Weber, then a clip of him being bundled into a black maria in Brussels, then a quick vox-pop with a shocked constituent on some street where sunshine glares on tin shacks and high-rises and palm trees.

"Where's that?" Jadey asks.

"French Guiana," I answer, unthinking.

"As in, famous for Kourou? That place where they have the
other
ESA launch-site?"

"Yeah, he had a big constituency with the space workers -- "

I stare at her, with a wild surmise.

"Another non-coincidence," she says.

We both gaze soberly at the follow-up, an interview with an understandably defensive cadre of Weber's party, the
Ligue Prolétarienne Révolutionnaire.
It's almost drowned out by one of the old programmers.

"Think low-temperature physics, think Bose-Einstein condensates, think quantum computing," he explains at the top of his voice. "Say good-bye to crypto, say hello to the panoptic society. Shake hands with America's missile launch-codes and open the door to the Fourth World War. And that's not the end of it. That's just what the
Russkis
could be doing. What are the
aliens
up to?"

He's a solidly-built man perched on a stool and sprouting curly black hair all over like a burst mattress. He sees us, and a widening circle of others, listening, waves his hands and continues enthusiastically: "That ESA station is a node on the Internet, guys! Who knows what they might have hacked into by now? Hey, if they've been here that long, we can't even trust ourselves, they could've put trapdoors in our fucking DNA back in the Pre-Cambrian ... "

And somebody else says, "Karl H. Marx on a bicycle, Charlie, aren't aliens
enough!"
and everybody laughs again.

I'll say this for those guys, they adapt to the end of the world we've always known faster than I do. They've seen a lot in their time: the Fall of the Wall, the Millennium Slump, the Century Boom, the Unix rollover, the War, the revolution ... By the time Jadey and I have got ready to leave they're talking about how aliens that old must have some
really
old legacy systems, and that they must be needing contractors, and wondering what their day rate would be ... Bastards.

3

____________

Bat Songs

Esias de Tenebre, Magnate and Registered Member of the Electorate of the Republic of Nova Babylonia, exhaled the smoke from his joint and gave a modest and not entirely coincidental cough as he passed the rather insalubrious object to the lady at his left.

"My own small knowledge of terrestriology," he said to the high lord at his right, "is of course" -- he waved a hand, as much to clear the resinous air in front of his mouth as to emphasize his point -- "strictly that of a dilettante." (This was, strictly, a lie. His interest in news from the home planet was obsessive, and profitable.) "However, I can assure you that as of approximately one hundred years ago -- or earlier today, as far as I'm concerned ... " (Great Zeus, this stuff was making him verbose; he'd have to watch that!) " ... no travelers or indeed, ah, involuntary arrivals have turned up claiming a later departure date than your own."

He wondered if this information would have been worth holding back. Probably not -- and difficult to do in any case, if he wanted to trade information at all. This local lord was shrewd; a stocky, tough-looking man with a battered Roman nose, every plane of his face and neck converging to the flat, brush-cut top of his bullet head. His native speech was a dialect of English, grammatically degenerate compared to those Tenebre had heard before, on Croatan. Even the unfamiliar scientific words in its vocabulary could often be interpreted by deduction from the classical roots. But for this occasion he, like most people present, was speaking in Trade Latin, the de facto lingua franca of the Second Sphere.

Hal Driver's broad shoulders slumped slightly, and his features hardened after a passing moment of what Tenebre interpreted as sadness, perhaps disappointment.

"None after 2049, eh? Oh well, I suppose there are two ways of looking at that." He pushed his blue silk shirtsleeves back, planted his bare elbows on the drink-slopped surface of the long hardwood table, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted for more brandy. Some girl got up from the table and hurried to a distant cupboard.

"Either we've blown ourselves to hell back there," he continued, fixing Tenebre with a blearily jovial gaze, "or we're expanding into a different sphere -- a Second Sphere of our own, a
First
Sphere! -- closer to the home sun."

"That could well be," said the merchant. He diplomatically did not point out that there were several other possibilities, none of them particularly cheering even compared to
all-out nuclear war,
a procedure which he'd gathered was a faint approximation to the much worse disasters that might by now have been visited upon the Earth.

"But for the present," Tenebre went on, "there's no doubt that you're the most recent representatives of Earth to have arrived in the Second Sphere. So, naturally, we're very interested in doing business with you."

He sounded too eager, but he didn't care. The right strategy for this particular opportunity wasn't to dicker down the locals, play it cool, keep his cards to his chest -- it was to get his hands on as much technology and knowledge as possible before any of his competitors turned up.

One of the lord Driver's advisers, the one they called the Navigator -- the lord Cairns, a pushy character who'd tried his patience earlier with persistent and barely comprehensible questions about, of all things,
calculating-machines
-- leaned into the conversation from a couple of spaces to the high lord's right, vulgarly waving a fork on which a morsel of scallop was impaled. Though evidently old, his cheeks frosted with white stubble, he was vigorous and alert; a lean, muscular man with a bald pate, behind which white hair hung down to his back.

"What I'm still not too clear about," he said, in heavily accented English, "is where you would place Nova Babylonia compared with what you now know of Earth as it was when our ancestors left it. In terms of, you know, knowledge and technology and so forth. Standards of living of the masses, and all that." He popped the fork in his mouth, closed his eyes ecstatically, chewed and swallowed, then brandished the fork again. "According to our records and reminiscences, your dozen or so predecessors over the last couple of hundred years have
babbled"
-- he giggled momentarily at the feeble pun -- "about great shining cities, beautiful parks, spectacular wildernesses, and, you know, moon-drenched seas ... " Another self-amused chuckle. " ... and so on and so forth, and the justice and stability of the mighty and ancient Republic. All very well and good, but they've been as closemouthed as any saur about stuff like, well, what machinery you command, the standard of living of the masses and so forth."

He apparently realized he was beginning to sound repetitive, because at this point he mercifully shut up. But he still looked steadfastly at Tenebre, eyebrows raised in polite inquiry, while absently spearing another marine organism and devouring it with lascivious relish.

"Ah," said Tenebre, feeling that he was on firmer ground, "I can explain that." He glanced around, gratefully accepting the distraction of a refill of brandy and a cigar, which he devoutly hoped was pure tobacco -- he needed a clear head. This particular hastily prepared dinner was being held not in the castle's banqueting-hall, but in the servants' refectory, and the servants were joining in eating the various dishes as soon as they'd finished serving them. The table at which he sat held about a score of placings and, like the others, was occupied by a mixture of men and women, masters and servants, guests and hosts. The whole room held a couple hundred people, counting the saurs, most of whom were well out of it by now, gazing vacantly into whatever mental spaces the hemp opened for them. The din of conversation, what with the crowd and the acoustics of the low, raftered ceiling and all the pots and pans still hooked to the walls, was tremendous.

At the table across the aisle he could see a gaggle of women including his first and third wives, a few servant women, and two of the castle's ladies, one of them Margaret Cairns, who was apparently the lord Cairns's number one and only wife. They all seemed to be talking at the same time except when they all screamed together with laughter. This kind of information interchange was one of which Tenebre did not entirely approve, but could hardly prevent. And sometimes, by talking freely, his wives found out things he could never have discovered for himself.

He nodded his thanks to the girl who'd brought the brandy. She handed on the bottle casually to Driver and pulled up a stool, looking at Tenebre all agog. He had an uneasy suspicion that at any moment she might, like some ignorant peasant child, reach out and touch his hair.

"You were saying?" Driver prompted.

"Ah yes, our predecessors. It's very simple. They didn't know about your presence here, weren't expecting it at all, and naturally enough were privately somewhat perturbed by it. A human-crewed ship from Earth is quite unprecedented, and could have foreshadowed all kinds of trouble."

"It could have been the spearhead of an invasion from Earth, you mean," said Driver. The thought evidently amused him.

Tenebre nodded sharply. "That's it, in so many words."

"Now, wait a minute," said James Cairns, scratching a diagram on the table with the tip of a short knife. "We've had ships in from Nova Babylonia via nearer colonies who definitely
had
heard of us, and they were just as closemouthed as ... Oh, right." He stabbed the knife into the table. "I see now. The point is that Nova Babylonia hadn't yet heard of us when they set out, and whatever response it had come up with in the meantime hadn't had time to reach them ... "

"Precisely," said Tenebre. "And therefore the Electorate had not had a chance to discuss it. Now that we have, I'll be quite happy to answer your questions ... "

It was a folding lock-knife, the words
Opinel
and
France
still legible on its blade, but long since abraded from its plastic imitation-wood handle. James Cairns fiddled with its locking ring and doodled gloomily with the tip of the blade. Did France still exist? Even as a physical place? How much of French culture could a sufficiently advanced intelligence reconstruct from contemplation of this simple tool's elegant design?

Cairns wrenched his attention away from this futile but seductive line of thought and back to the present. With one part of his mind he began to keep track of the magnate's answers to the questions that flew at him from all sides of the table; with another, he examined the long-sided triangles he'd scored on the table, matching years past to light-years away.

Nova Babylonia, on the planet Nova Terra around the predictably named Nova Sol, was about a hundred light-years distant from Mingulay. The
Bright Star
had arrived off Mingulay around two centuries ago, and the first merchant starship to drop by had been a couple of years after that, so ...

News of the
Bright Star's
arrival had undoubtedly reached Croatan, five light-years away, within less than six years, and the more-distant colonies with a proportionate delay. But a ship en route couldn't receive or transmit information -- traveling at lightspeed, a starship participated in the timeless, massless eternity of the photon, making the journey subjectively instantaneous. So ships originally from Nova Babylonia, but visiting various ports of call along their trade-route, would come to know of Mingulay's new settlers long before Nova Babylonia -- or any ships sent from it directly -- did.

This family Tenebre were thus the first merchants from Nova Babylonia to have some idea of what to expect when they arrived on Mingulay. Interesting. He wondered what they wanted, and what they had to offer in return.

Cairns sometimes felt that, deep down in the most adolescent recesses of his seventy-year-old brain, he harbored a personal grudge against the universe for not having turned out the way his ancestors had expected. He could have
lived with
a universe whose interstellar gulfs could be crossed only with generation ships, cold-sleep, or ramscoops. He'd have been absolutely fucking
delighted
with one that could be traversed with some kind of warp-drive or jump-gates or wormholes or similar fanciful mechanism. In much the same way, he could have been quite metaphysically satisfied with a godless universe; or, if he'd ever come across a convincing apologetic, happy to affirm that this one was the work of God.