Galactic North (16 page)

“First time in Cadmus-Asterius?” asked the bearded man ahead of him, iridophores in his plum-coloured jacket projecting Boolean propositions from Sirikit’s
Machine Ethics in the Transenlightenment.

“First time on Europa, actually. First time Circum-Jove, you want the full story.”

“Down-system?”

“Mars.”

The man nodded gravely. “Hear it’s tough.”

“You’re not kidding.” And he wasn’t. Since the sun had dimmed—the second Maunder Minimum, repeating the behaviour the sun had exhibited in the seventeenth century—the entire balance of power in the First System had altered. The economies of the inner worlds had found it difficult to adjust; agriculture and power-generation handicapped, with concomitant social upheaval. But the outer planets had never had the luxury of solar energy in the first place. Now Circum-Jove was the benchmark of First System economic power, with Circum-Saturn trailing behind. Because of this, the two primary Circum-Jove superpowers—the Demarchy, which controlled Europa and Io, and Gilgamesh Isis, which controlled Ganymede and parts of Callisto—were vying for dominance.

The man smiled keenly. “Here for anything special?”

“Surgery,” Vargovic said, hoping to curtail the conversation at the earliest juncture. “Very extensive anatomical surgery.”

They hadn’t told him much.

“Her name is Cholok,” Control had said, after Vargovic had skimmed the dossiers back in the caverns that housed the Covert Operations section of Gilgamesh Isis security, deep in Ganymede. “We recruited her ten years ago, when she was on Phobos.”

“And now she’s Demarchy?”

Control had nodded. “She was swept up in the brain-drain, once Maunder Two began to bite. The smartest got out while they could. The Demarchy—and us, of course— snapped up the brightest.”

“And also one of our sleepers.” Vargovic glanced down at the portrait of the woman, striped by video lines. She looked mousy to him, with a permanent bone-deep severity of expression.

“Cheer up,” Control said. “I’m asking you to contact her, not sleep with her.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just tell me her background.”

“Biotech.” Control nodded at the dossier. “On Phobos she led one of the teams working in aquatic transform work—modifying the human form for submarine operations. ”

Vargovic nodded diligently. “Go on.”

“Phobos wanted to sell their know-how to the Martians, before their oceans froze. Of course, the Demarchy also appreciated her talents. Cholok took her team to Cadmus-Asterius, one of their hanging cities.”

“Mm.” Vargovic was getting the thread now. “By which time we’d already recruited her.”

“Right,” Control said, “except we had no obvious use for her.”

“Then why this conversation?”

Control smiled. Control always smiled when Vargovic pushed the envelope of subservience. “We’re having it because our sleeper won’t lie down.” Then Control reached over and touched the image of Cholok, making her speak. What Vargovic was seeing was an intercept: something Gilgamesh had captured, riddled with edits and jump-cuts.

She appeared to be sending a verbal message to an old friend in Isis. She was talking rapidly from a white room, inert medical servitors behind her. Shelves displayed flasks of colour-coded medichines. A cruciform bed resembled an autopsy slab with ceramic drainage sluices.

“Cholok contacted us a month ago,” Control said. “The room’s part of her clinic.”

“She’s using Phrase-Embedded Three,” Vargovic said, listening to her speech patterns, siphoning content from otherwise normal Canasian.

“Last code we taught her.”

“All right. What’s her angle?”

Control chose his words—skating around the information excised from Cholok’s message. “She wants to give us something,” he said. “Something valuable. She’s acquired it accidentally. Someone good has to smuggle it out.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, Control.”

The muzak rose to a carefully timed crescendo as the elevator plunged through the final layer of ice. The view around and below was literally dizzying, and Vargovic registered exactly as much awe as befitted his Martian guise. He knew the Demarchy’s history, of course—how the hanging cities had begun as points of entry into the ocean; air-filled observation cupolas linked to the surface by narrow access shafts sunk through the kilometre-thick crustal ice. Scientists had studied the unusual smoothness of the crust, noting that its fracture patterns echoed those on Earth’s ice shelves, implying the presence of a water ocean. Europa was further from the sun than Earth, but something other than solar energy maintained the ocean’s liquidity. Instead, the moon’s orbit around Jupiter created stresses that flexed the moon’s silicate core, tectonic heat bleeding into the ocean via hydrothermal vents.

Descending into the city was a little like entering an amphitheatre—except that there was no stage; merely an endless succession of steeply tiered lower balconies. They converged towards a light-filled infinity, seven or eight kilometres below, where the city’s conic shape constricted to a point. The opposite side was half a kilometre away, levels rising like geologic strata. A wide glass tower threaded the atrium from top to bottom, aglow with smoky-green ocean and a mass of kelp-like flora, cultured by gilly swimmers. Artificial sun lamps burned in the kelp like Christmas tree lights. Above, the tower branched, peristaltic feeds reaching out to the ocean proper. Offices, shops, restaurants and residential units were stacked atop each other, or teetered into the abyss on elegant balconies, spun from lustrous sheets of bulk-chitin polymer, the Demarchy ’s major construction material. Gossamer bridges arced across the atrium space, dodging banners, projections and vast translucent sculptures moulded from a silky variant of the same chitin polymer. Every visible surface was overlaid by neon, holographics and entoptics. People were everywhere, and in every face Vargovic detected a slight absence, as if their minds were not entirely focused on the here and now. No wonder: all citizens had an implant that constantly interrogated them, eliciting their opinions on every aspect of Demarchy life, both within Cadmus-Asterius and beyond. Eventually, it was said, the implant’s nagging presence faded from consciousness, until the act of democratic participation became near-involuntary.

It revolted Vargovic as much as it intrigued him.

“Obviously,” Control said, with judicial deliberation, “what Cholok has to offer isn’t merely a nugget—or she’d have given it via PE3.”

Vargovic leaned forward. “She hasn’t told you what it is?”

“Only that it could endanger the hanging cities.”

“You trust her?”

Vargovic felt one of Control’s momentary indiscretions coming on. “She may have been sleeping, but she hasn’t been completely valueless. She’s assisted in defections . . . like the Maunciple job—remember that?”

“If you’re calling that a success, perhaps it’s time I defected. ”

“Actually, it was Cholok’s information that persuaded us to get Maunciple out via the ocean rather than the front door. If Demarchy security had taken Maunciple alive they’d have learned ten years of tradecraft.”

“Whereas instead Maunciple got a harpoon in his back.”

“So the operation had its flaws.” Control shrugged. “But if you’re thinking all this points to Cholok having been compromised . . . Naturally, the thought entered our heads. But if Maunciple had acted otherwise it would have been worse.” Control folded his arms. “And of course, he might have made it, in which case even you’d have to admit Cholok’s safe.”

“Until proven otherwise.”

Control brightened. “So you’ll do it?”

“Like I have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice, Vargovic.”

Yes, Vargovic thought. There was always a choice, between doing whatever Gilgamesh Isis asked of him and being deprogrammed, cyborgised and sent to work in the sulphur projects around the slopes of Ra Patera. It just wasn’t a particularly good one.

“One other thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“When I’ve got whatever Cholok has—”

Control half-smiled, the two of them sharing a private joke that did not need illumination. “I’m sure the usual will suffice.”

The elevator slowed into immigration.

Demarchy guards hefted big guns, but no one took any interest in him. His story about coming from Mars was accepted; he was subjected to only the usual spectrum of invasive procedures: neural and genetic patterns scanned for pathologies, body bathed in eight forms of exotic radiation. The final formality consisted of drinking a thimble of chocolate. The beverage consisted of billions of medichines which infiltrated his body, searching for concealed drugs, weapons and illegal biomodifications. He knew that they would find nothing, but was still relieved when they reached his bladder and requested to be urinated back into the Demarchy.

The entire procedure lasted six minutes. Outside, Vargovic followed a slitherwalk to the city zoo, and then barged through crowds of schoolchildren until he arrived at the aquarium where Cholok was meant to meet him. The exhibits were devoted to Europan biota, most of which depended on the ecological niches of the hydrothermal vents, carefully reproduced here. There was nothing very exciting to look at, since most Europan predators looked marginally less fierce than hat stands or lampshades. The commonest were called ventlings: large and structurally simple animals whose metabolisms hinged on symbiosis. They were pulpy, funnelled bags planted on a tripod of orange stilts, moving with such torpor that Vargovic almost nodded off before Cholok arrived at his side.

She wore an olive-green coat and tight emerald trousers, projecting a haze of medicinal entoptics. Her clenched jaw accentuated the dourness he had gleaned from the intercept.

They kissed.

“Good to see you Marius. It’s been—what?”

“Nine years, thereabouts.”

“How’s Phobos these days?”

“Still orbiting Mars.” He deployed a smile. “Still a dive.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“Nor you.”

At a loss for words, Vargovic found his gaze returning to the informational read-out accompanying the ventling exhibit. Only half-attentively, he read that the ventlings, motile in their juvenile phase, gradually became sessile in adulthood, stilts thickening with deposited sulphur until they were rooted to the ground like stalagmites. When they died, their soft bodies dispersed into the ocean, but the tripods remained; eerily regular clusters of orange spines concentrated around active vents.

“Nervous, Marius?”

“In your hands? Not likely.”

“That’s the spirit.”

They bought two mugs of mocha from a nearby servitor, then returned to the ventling display, making what sounded like small talk. During indoctrination, Cholok had been taught Phrase-Embedded Three. The code allowed the insertion of secondary information into a primary conversation by means of careful deployment of word order, hesitation and sentence structure.

“What have you got?” Vargovic asked.

“A sample,” Cholok answered, one of the easy, pre-set words that did not need to be laboriously conveyed. But what followed took nearly five minutes to put over, freighted via a series of rambling reminiscences of the Phobos years. “A small shard of hyperdiamond.”

Vargovic nodded. He knew what hyperdiamond was: a topologically complex interweave of tubular fullerene; structurally similar to cellulose or bulk chitin but thousands of times stronger; its rigidity artificially maintained by some piezoelectric trick that Gilgamesh lacked.

“Interesting,” Vargovic said. “But unfortunately not interesting enough.”

She ordered another mocha and downed it, replying, “Use your imagination. Only the Demarchy knows how to synthesise it.”

“It’s also useless as a weapon.”

“Depends. There’s an application you should know about.”

“What?”

“Keeping this city afloat—and no, I’m not talking about economic solvency. Do you know about Buckminster Fuller? He lived about four hundred years ago; believed absolute democracy could be achieved through technological means.”

“The fool.”

“Maybe. But Fuller also invented the geodesic lattice that determines the structure of the buckyball: the closed allotrope of tubular fullerene. The city owes him on two counts.”

“Save the lecture. How does the hyperdiamond come into it?”

“Flotation bubbles,” she said. “Around the outside of the city. Each one is a hundred-metre-wide sphere of hyperdiamond, holding vacuum. A hundred-metre-wide molecule, in fact, since each sphere is composed of one endless strand of tubular fullerene. Think of that, Marius: a molecule you could park a ship inside.”

While he absorbed that, another part of his mind continued to read the ventling caption: how their biochemistry had many similarities with the gutless tube worms that lived around Earth’s ocean vents. The ventlings drank hydrogen sulphide through their funnels, circulating it via a modified form of haemoglobin, passing it through a bacteria-saturated organ in the lower part of their bags. The bacteria split and oxidised the hydrogen sulphide, manufacturing a molecule similar to glucose. The glucose-analogue nourished the ventling, enabling it to keep living and occasionally make slow perambulations to other parts of the vent, or even to swim between vents, until the adult phase rooted it to the ground. Vargovic read this, and then read it again, because he had just remembered something: a puzzling intercept passed to him from cryptanalysis several months earlier; something about Demarchy plans to incorporate ventling biochemistry into a larger animal. For a moment he was tempted to ask Cholok about it directly, but he decided to force the subject from his mind until a more suitable time.