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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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‘Well,’ said Tatsuro when I’d finished, ‘this is certainly a complication. I would prefer that you had not said to Reid that his side’s ships could come through. Is that not rather a matter for the Solar Council, or at least for its delegate?’
‘Oh,’ I said. I’d almost forgotten that little matter. The Solar Council delegate had—or represented, rather—the ultimate power over us. For all the Division’s immense, concentrated power, it could not prevail against the will of Earth and the Inner System Earth Defence forces—not in the long run, not with attrition to consider.
‘Her fusion-clipper has just gone into orbit around Callisto,’ Tatsuro continued. ‘With a few Inner System fighters attached. Can we wait for the hour or so it will take for the delegate to arrive?’
‘The decision can’t wait,’ I said. ‘Reid is selling the coordinates to the merchant fleet at this moment.’
Tatsuro shook his head reprovingly, but with a glint of wry amusement in his eye as he said: ‘You might have tried to argue for a delay of … a little over a week!’
‘We could still do that,’ I said.
Suze raised her hand and spoke up. ‘If I may, neighbours … comrades. I don’t think that would work. We’re dealing with capitalists here. They’ll
expect
us to stall, and suspect us of stitching them up—that is, of doing our own deal with the Jovians and cutting their side out of it.’
‘Which might not be a bad idea,’ said Clarity, frowning at us across light years and millennia.
‘Oh, it would!’ Suze said. ‘If I know anything about these people, they’d just batter on through. Race each other to be first to cut a deal. Their whole way of life is based on taking high risks for high returns.’
‘And not much risk, at that,’ I said sourly. ‘They’ve probably all taken back-ups, and they’ll all try different approaches and keep on trying until one succeeds.’
‘Or until the Jovians infect them all and turn them into puppets,’ said Yeng. ‘Puppets who can fight us in space.’
Tatsuro made a chopping gesture with his hand. ‘Whatever. I move that we let them through. I agree with Ellen’s analysis. If what Yeng fears does happen, we are still in a better position to fight if our own forces are intact. However, I think we should insist that some of our own fighters go through the wormhole and take up positions on the New-Martian side.’
‘Opposed,’ said Joe Lutterloh. ‘We shouldn’t open the Solar Union to the bankers, and we shouldn’t let them trade with the Jovians, who are still a danger to us.’
After a few more minutes of discussion the vote was taken on letting the traders through. Eight in favour, four against.
Tatsuro didn’t pause for a second. ‘Carried,’ he said, as the hands went down. ‘So, comrades, go and tell Reid his traders and fighters can come through, on the condition that our fighters can do the same. Let us know if he agrees or not. Obviously you should make every effort to return to your ships. I appreciate why you had to leave them, but don’t leave them for too long. Get your ships back into space, if you can, and stand by for a bombing run—by yourselves, or the other fighters—on the place where the fast-folk templates are stored. And meanwhile’—he looked around at the Command Committee, a slow, sly smile forming on his face—‘we’ll work out how we’re going to explain all this to the Solar Council delegate. Goodbye for now.’
I waved to the Committee, more bravely than I felt. Yeng switched out the link. Malley and Suze’s voices were yelling in my ears. Tatsuro’s passing comment was the first they’d heard about our real plans for the fast-folk templates. I waved my arms frantically for silence.
‘It’s only a contingency plan!’ I shouted on the override. ‘Only if Reid does something crazy with them! Don’t look at me like that! We still can’t trust them.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Malley said grimly. ‘I don’t much care what happens to the templates, they’re not conscious anyway. You can trust me not to tell.’
‘And me,’ said Suze. ‘I just wish you had sooner.’
Her voice was thick with disillusion. I looked around at Malley, Suze, and the comrades, and as my glance slid helplessly from one blank bubble to the next, I realized that I couldn’t tell which was which.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Now let’s go and talk Reid into letting us do it.’
Before the world commonwealth was established, one objection to it that always came up was
But who will do the dirty work
?
I always used to answer
me
, and I was right.
One after another, the ugly, bristling, articulated fighter-bombers came out of the wormhole; a whole squadron of them, their names heroic, ironic, or plain daft:
Gai Phong, Debug Mode, Virus Alert, Luddite Tendencies, X Calibre, Acquisitor, General Arnaldo Ochoa, Codebreaker
, and
Necessary Evil But Still Cool
. And one after another, the slow, laden freighters of the merchants and the fast, sharp fighters of their mercenaries went in. Even on the screen in the aerospace port, with the news-child’s prattling commentary jamming the silence, the sight remained awesome and uncanny: ship after ship vanishing in a flash of blue light, as if annihilated.
The same thought must have struck Andrea. ‘What happened to the law of mass-energy conservation?’ she asked. ‘Did it just go away, with those ships?’
Malley leaned over from the bench beside me. ‘Good point,’ he said, jabbing his pipe-stem, like a lecturer’s pointer, at the screen. ‘The answer is that the mass of the wormhole at this end increases, and at the other end decreases, by the same amount as has gone through.’
We were sitting, with Reid and Dee, in the same quiet area of the port where Boris and Jaime had waited. I watched the screen with silent satisfaction as our fighters took up positions around the wormhole and deployed a scatter of attitude-control booster drones which clamped themselves around its perimeter. Reid had conceded this degree of control over the gate to us. I wasn’t sure whether I’d convinced him it was the only way to get the
people on our side to agree to his side’s ships coming through, or whether his confidence in the superiority of capitalist technology made the entire concession irrelevant to whatever
his
longer-term plans might be.
I was listening intently to the conversation, and trying hard not to show it; Andrea was still puzzling over Malley’s answer.
‘So,’ she asked, ‘does that mean one side of the wormhole would just fade away to nothing if enough mass came through from the other?’
‘In lay terms,’ said Malley cautiously, ‘yes. But bear in mind that the mass can go
negative
.’
I leaned back, hands behind my head, gazing up through the roof, and tuned my tone to idle curiosity.
‘What does that mean, in physical terms?’
Malley laughed. ‘I don’t know, to be honest. The rest of the wormhole—the main wormhole—can balance a negative mass, and thus keep the original gate open, up to a certain point.’
‘How much, though?’ Andrea sounded worried.
Malley shrugged. ‘Depends on its total virtual mass, which I don’t know. A lot more than those ships, anyway.’
‘The gate on the other side masses oh point nine five seven million tonnes,’ Dee said, unexpectedly. ‘On this side, a lot less: only about a hundred thousand. If we keep up the traffic, we’ll have to ensure that it balances. Unless we want to find out what negative mass means, in physical terms.’
‘We’re safe enough for now,’ said Reid. ‘The ships that went through probably don’t mass more than a thousand tonnes each.’
‘I don’t see our side sending twenty-odd thousand tonnes the other way,’ I said, with now-easy flippancy.
‘Ours are coming back.’ Reid glanced over at me and grinned, as though challenging me to deny it. ‘Aren’t they?’
I returned him an equally unfriendly grin. ‘Of course.’
The entire port was much quieter than it had been when we’d first arrived. The welcoming crowds had gone, and the heavy lifting had all been done. Only a few passengers, for the outlying settlements I guessed, wandered or hastened through. Even the news remotes, with an appropriately gnatlike attention span, had drifted off. For the New Martians it was the middle of the night; for us, early afternoon. Discarded disposable plates and the remains of likewise disposable food littered our surroundings. Now we were waiting for the auto-piloted arrival of the
Terrible Beauty
, and for the refuelling of the
Carbon Conscience
to be completed. There was a certain amount of tension in the air, and a lot of smoke. Malley was puffing his pipe, Dee and Reid chain-smoking cigarettes. The habit seemed common in capitalist societies; if we had to wait much longer, I’d be tempted to take it up myself.
‘What do you intend to sell, and to buy?’ Suze asked.
‘If I knew that,’ Reid said, ‘I’d probably be doing it myself. The folks who’re going through have given it a lot more thought than I have.’ He spread his hands. ‘Information, I guess.’
‘They may get more information than they bargained for,’ Yeng told him, darkly. ‘And you’ll get it, too.’ She stood up and paced forward and pointed at the screen. One of the defence-agency fighters had hung back from going through, and was deploying a relay drogue, much larger than ours, on the same alignment. ‘I can’t
believe
your complacency. I hope we get off this place before the Jovian viruses come down the line, straight into your heads!’
Dee laughed.
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said. ‘We do have open systems, yes, and we are personally vulnerable—I more than most, I should say—to mind-hacking. That’s exactly why we’re not worried about it. We’ve
had
to develop countermeasures, very good ones, so we can protect ourselves from business competitors, criminals—or bloody kids!’
Yeng shrugged. ‘Maybe so,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But if you’re up against conscious—well, supposedly conscious—entities with processing-power vastly greater than yours, I can’t see it doing much good.’
‘But we—’ Dee began. She looked at Reid. He shrugged.
‘Oh, tell them,’ he said. ‘They’ll figure it out for themselves eventually.’
‘All right,’ Dee said. She stood up and faced us all, as Yeng returned to her seat. ‘I’ll tell you.’ Her tone, and her expression, altered slightly, as though some different personality were in control. ‘Consciousness—or the emulation of consciousness, if you insist’—she smiled, her usual self flashing momentarily back—‘
costs
. Selfhood has a very high cost in processing-power, and that cost increases with the amount of information it has to integrate. It’s not something that just
drops out
of increased complexity, as some people used to think. It has to be actively
designed in
, either consciously by us or unconsciously by natural selection. So it’s quite possible to build hardware more powerful, and software more complex, than any brain or mind in existence: computing machines that don’t even act
as if
they’re conscious, that don’t have
interests
, and that don’t object when they’re used as tools.’
Her possession passed, her self-possession returned. She stepped over to one of the long seats, and expertly flicked the fluttery hem of her skirt under the crook of her knees as she sat down. I smiled at her. She, and Reid, had been right: no matter what I thought, in the innermost depths of my mind, about the innermost depths of
her
mind, it was impossible to be with her, to converse with her, and not give her the benefit of the doubt, not act
as if
her mind
had
innermost depths, and not to quite simply
like
her.
She smiled back.
‘And these tools,’ Reid added, ‘we have. That’s why we’re confident we can deal on equal terms with beings greater than ourselves. We have ways of amplifying our power to more than equal theirs. Golems to stand up for us against the gods.’ He crushed his cigarette and stood up. ‘Products of good old capitalist competition. You should try it, sometime.’
I found myself thinking of the great analytical engines of our socialist planning, whose spare capacities had increased over decades of stability in which more and more decisions had come to be made locally, and only the most general, those concerning the most widely used resources, had to be made globally or even regionally. I thought of our smart-matter suits, and our domestic cybernetics. Perhaps we’d all along had gods—or golems—on our side, whose aid it had never crossed our minds to invoke.
About to say something of this, I looked at Reid, and then tracked his gaze to a falling spark visible through the concourse’s transparent roof.
‘Your ship’s coming in,’ he said. ‘Time to go.’
 
 
Free at last; free fall at last! It had taken hours—hours of shifting the ships and coupling them together, an awkward job in one gravity; half an hour of negotiation between Suze and one of Reid’s employees over our debt to Mutual Protection, and another half hour with the port company, over services they’d allegedly rendered and definitely wanted paying for—and finally a painful five minutes of boost, to get ourselves quickly into this orbit. Reid’s last words to me had been: ‘I hope I see you again.’
‘Me too,’ I’d said, sincere only in my hope that I never did.
I unclipped my webbing, pushed myself away from the couch and executed a joyous somersault, ending up just in front of the forward view.
I hauled the gross-focus bars of the display screen, rotated the fine-focus handles. Although the wormhole was still a long way off on our slowly closing trajectory, the forward telescope’s field—transmitted through lenses, mirrors and fibre-optic cables—showed our destination clear and sharp: the rainbow ring of the daughter wormhole—like its parent, a mile across—and the glittering clutter of the surrounding ships. Our ten fighters and Reid’s one; our relay drogue small, theirs large.
I fiddled with the controls and swung in another view, an enhanced night-time image of Ship City and its environs.
‘OK comrades!’ I called out, rolling around again. They’d all unstrapped and were flying around the command deck, enjoying not only the free fall but the respite between getting out from under capitalism and having to face a bit of democratic accountability from our distant socialism. I grinned at them all and gave them a big thumbs-up.
‘Mission accomplished—so far!’ I announced.
‘Yeah?’ said Malley. ‘And what did we accomplish?’
‘A lot,’ I said. ‘We’ve confirmed that the New Martians are just what they seem to be: real people, even if they do have funny ideas about what counts as people. We know for sure they’re at risk of losing that, if Reid or someone else gets too cocky about reviving his fast folk again. And from what that nice anarchist comrade Tamara told me, we have good reason to think the fast-folk templates are still where Reid originally stashed them—up in the range of hills called the Madreporite Mountains.’
I pointed it out, and paused as a much more vivid marker made the point: a long bolide-trail in the atmosphere, and the flash of its impact. Another followed, and another.
‘That’s it,’ I said above the sound of indrawn breaths. ‘There, near where they direct their comet fragments, at the source of that long channel leading into the city. We got the exact coordinates years ago, out of the artificial woman’s—Meg’s—data-files. So if we or any of the other fighters gets the go-call, we can lob a nuke into the cave-mouth and blast them and the whole mountain to blazes.’
‘You’ve got
nukes
on this thing?’ Malley asked indignantly.
‘On
Carbon Conscience
,’ Boris said. ‘That bird’s got a fifty-megaton egg, man. Nice clean laser-fusion job, in case you’re worried.’
‘Consider me reassured,’ said Malley. ‘No doubt a few fifty-megaton city-busters will come in real handy if the New Martians should have the bad luck to fall short of your definitions of what counts as people.’
‘There is that,’ Boris said thoughtfully.
‘No!’ I said, shocked. ‘We’re not going to do that!’
‘Why ever not?’ Malley floated up, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘According to you, you wouldn’t be killing
people
.’
‘Too dangerous,’ I explained. ‘Wouldn’t be like Jupiter, with vulnerable entities at the bottom of a gravity well. It’d be a massive breakout, with millions of ex-human puppets and a space-going capability. If there’s another Singularity here, we cut and run.’
‘Run where?’ asked Andrea.
‘Through the wormhole, if possible,’ I said.
‘And if not?’ Malley hung in front of me, hanging on my words. I waved a hand airily in his face.
‘We keep boosting until we use half the reaction-mass, back ourselves up if we absolutely have to, and at the first likely looking clump of matter the ship finds, we download and spend the rest of the reaction-mass decelerating. And then, well …’ I smiled at his frown. ‘We have the makings of a nice little galactic empire of our own right here. With your beauty and my brains, neighbour …’
Malley’s anxiety dissolved in a guffaw.
‘And I shall call you … Eve!’
‘Mitochondrial Eve,’ Suze said firmly, catching Malley’s hand.
‘Plenty of good genes in the cold-stores,’ said Boris.
I turned away before Malley could suspect there was even a sliver of a chance we were serious. (But it was part of the standard kit of a fusion-clipper, even so: the haunting fear of a runaway torch, or of everything going wrong in our cold war with the Jovians, was the real reason the ships relied on recycling rather than supplies, and stored the frozen seeds of a viable population and the smart-matter blueprints for its infrastructure and technology in their vaults.)

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