House of Suns (35 page)

‘There has been an important development, Abigail.’

My heart lifted. ‘My mother?’

Embarrassment creased her face. ‘Not exactly. It’s more to do with the family business. Although you have not been privy to the finer details, I do not think it is any great secret that we have been struggling since the armistice. The Golden Hour has little need of clones, not when there are machines clever enough to be our slaves instead. We’ve stayed afloat, but only because of a dwindling handful of loyal clients in the Lesser Worlds. Frankly, the omens have been inauspicious for several years. And with the continued expense of the works on the house, not to mention your mother’s care, our reserves have been draining steadily away.’ She raised a finger before I had a chance to speak. ‘I’ll be blunt: for many years, it was thought that our salvation might lie in the union of two trading concerns. The little boy you used to play with ... it was hoped, by certain parties, that a marriage, a corporate alliance, might come from your friendship.’ By her tone, I was left in no doubt that those certain parties had never included Madame Kleinfelter. ‘That won’t happen now. They have gone with another combine, leaving us out in the cold. I am afraid you won’t be seeing your friend again, Abigail - not until you are old enough to make up your own mind about such things.’

At last I had been told the reason for the sudden curtailing of our adversarial, spite-laden friendship. I suppose I should not have mourned it greatly, but it was not as if I had a hundred other friendships to turn to.

I said nothing, for I sensed Madame Kleinfelter had more on her mind.

‘But, as I said, there has been a development - and a potentially very fruitful one. Have you heard of a woman named Ludmilla Marcellin, Abigail?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Generally speaking, that’s to your credit. Ludmilla Marcellin is the heiress of one of the richest families in the Golden Hour. Unlike the Gentians, however, her familial wealth was not founded on any expertise in the natural arts. They simply made a lot of money by trading in financial instruments during the Conflagration. Not that there isn’t a skill there, but it’s nothing compared with our knowledge of cloning. And cloning is very much the issue here.’

I don’t understand.’

‘Ludmilla Marcellin has decided to embark on a project. It’s an ambitious one, and it will make her many enemies - not that that’s ever stopped her. She’s going to venture beyond the solar system and explore the known universe. Ever since the armistice, the Marcellin combine has been gathering the wisdom and materials to make this happen. Now the final piece must be put in place, which is precisely where we come in. Ludmilla Marcellin needs Gentian wisdom. She needs clones.’

‘Our clones?’

‘Exactly, Abigail. And she’s prepared to pay for our services. This is the lifeline we’ve been waiting for; a chance to set our finances on an even keel. Ludmilla Marcellin is a trendsetter - where she leads, others will follow. But we must demonstrate our sincerity and commitment. The board of governors thinks it would be a good thing for you to meet with this woman, so that she can see for herself that the Gentians have a future.’

‘Will she come here?’

‘No, we must go to her.’

‘I have never left the house.’

‘There’s a first time for everyone,’ Madame Kleinfelter said, before dismissing me.

 

Not long afterwards, I was escorted to the shuttle pad and I left my home for the first time. As we pulled away from the planetoid, I saw the house for what it truly was: a kind of rampant architectural fungus, spreading from horizon to horizon. It had not been the entirety of my world, for it had also contained the world-within-a-world of Palatial. But as it fell behind us, hazed in the wake of the shuttle’s exhaust, I realised how pitifully small and limiting it had really been.

The shuttle took me through the thick core of the Golden Hour, where the sky was dappled with the false stars and transient constellations of close-packed Lesser Worlds. By the time of my journey I had read all I could about Ludmilla Marcellin, but even though the story-cube was more forthcoming than it had been when I was younger, it still had nothing to say about her plans for exploring the universe. I kept thinking back to what the little boy had said to me during one of our visits - how one day humanity would burst forth from the Golden Hour, into the wider galaxy. It had been his father speaking, but he had believed the words. I had countered by pointing out that there was nothing out there worth seeing, that probes and telescopes had told us all we could ever wish to know about the planets around other suns. Now I wondered what Ludmilla Marcellin knew that I did not.

Before my audience with the heiress herself, I was taken to see her shipyard. The shuttle passed through a Marcellin security cordon into the private airspace around a large, spherical asteroid. Gathered around the asteroid were dozens of huge, ugly-looking ships, each of which was larger than anything I had ever read or heard about. There were traceries of construction scaffolding around some of the ships, the occasional flicker of a welding torch or laser, a handful of spacesuited workers, but to my untrained eye there did not appear to be much more to do. I counted thirty-five ships, then noticed a thirty-sixth slowly emerging from the asteroid.

The rock had been lanced through the middle, like an apple on a spit. With our shuttle under remote control, we passed into the opening. We came very close to the emerging ship, its hull sliding by only metres from the shuttle’s windows. It was the same as the ones outside, except that the flower-like intake on the front had not been folded open. There would not be room until the spike-nosed craft had cleared the asteroid.

The ships, I was informed, were ramscoops - vessels of a type that had been dreamed up a thousand years earlier but never built until now. The only previous interstellar expedition had reached a mere fifth of the speed of light, but these ships would go much faster than that. By the time they stopped accelerating - when the friction from their intake fields equalled the thrust that was being generated - the ramscoops would be travelling at eight-tenths of the speed of light. They would be able to make round-trip journeys to the nearest stars while only a decade or so passed back home.

But that was not what Ludmilla Marcellin had in mind. She was going to go much further out than that. She had no intention of returning to the Golden Hour.

We passed into the core of the construction asteroid. It was being eaten from the inside out. A spherical cavity had been excavated in the middle, slowly widening as material was gouged away and transformed into ships. The hulls of partly formed vessels - some of which were close to being finished, while others were little more than skeletons - formed a forest of spikes pointing inwards. There were hundreds of them, but there would be hundreds more by the time Ludmilla Marcellin was done. The asteroid would be nearly depleted; little remaining except a gauzy husk, like the papery corpse left behind when a spider has digested an insect.

In the middle of the open sphere was a free-floating station, to which a dozen or so shuttles and runabouts were already docked. We joined them and disembarked, and were met by Marcellin representatives. We were given food and drink, shown presentations and models and made to feel suitably important. A great many adults made a point of talking to me, most of them struggling to tread a path between condescension and plain speaking. They all knew I was thirty-five years old, but it was difficult for them to remember that when dealing with someone who looked and sounded like a twelve year old. Slowly, however, I got the gist of what Ludmilla Marcellin was intending to do.

There would be a thousand ships when she was finished. They would be launched into interstellar space on separate trajectories, each with a different solar system as its first objective. Some of the ships would have to fly only a dozen or so light-years before arriving at their first port of call. Others would travel for twenty or thirty, or even further.

And each and every ship would carry Ludmilla Marcellin.

Or rather, each and every ship would carry a duplicate of Ludmilla Marcellin: a clone, with the same personality and memories as the real woman. She was going to shatter herself into a thousand facets and scatter them into interstellar space.

Eventually she made an appearance, arriving on a shuttle from an inspection visit to one of the new ships. She was tall and glamorous, with a charisma that lit up the room as if she was the only source of light. She had a deep, commanding voice. It gave one the utmost confidence that she would follow through with her plans, no matter how outlandish they appeared.

‘I have faith in the human spirit,’ Ludmilla Marcellin said. ‘Faith that says we won’t stay here for ever, in this little campfire huddle around an undistinguished yellow star. We’ve been in space for a thousand years, long enough that the Golden Hour has been in existence for much longer than any living human. It’s easy to think that it will last for ever; that this stable arrangement will suffice for our needs until the sun peters out. It won’t. Against the future that lies ahead of us, this thousand years will be just a moment, a drawing of breath, before the beginning of the real adventure. I have faith that that adventure is about to begin. I also intend to be one of the first participants. Soon I will have my ships - my fleet of a thousand beautiful ramscoops. The clones that I will make of myself - the shatterlings, if you will - will each ride one of those vessels. The ships will take care of them - there need be no crews beyond a single copy of myself. My clones will be frozen until they reach their initial destinations, whereupon they will be thawed. They will make observations. They will leave their ships and travel down to new worlds and moons. They will look on things that no other human being has ever seen. When they have seen enough, they will continue their journeys. Each ship will make three predetermined ports of call, heading further and further out into the galaxy. After the third, the shatterlings will be entering territory for which we now lack hard data - visiting systems where the worlds are too far away to be resolved by our telescopes, and which are beyond the range of our robot probes. The shatterlings will have to make their own minds up about where to travel next, factoring in the knowledge they will already have gained since leaving the Golden Hour. Then they will lay in new courses and push further out. By this time they will have been gone from the Golden Hour for more than a century. Many of you will be dead and buried, but I will just be getting into my stride. The shatterlings will visit more stars, taste the air and soil of worlds that have never known a single strand of human DNA. They will swim in alien seas, adding to their store of memories. And then - four or five hundred years from this day, somewhere around the middle of the present millennium - they will turn their great ships around and set course for home.’

Ludmilla Marcellin paused. She regarded us all with a forbidding demeanour before continuing, ‘But that home will not be ours. The Golden Hour may still exist in five hundred or a thousand years, but I’m not counting on that. My shatterlings will convene in another system, around a world for which as yet we have no name. It is my conviction that by this time, humanity will have begun a migration into interstellar space. Perhaps my example will even spur it into action. On the long leg of their return journey, my thousand ships - or however many remain by then - will revisit some of the worlds they explored out the outward leg. They may find that those worlds have been settled since they left. If that is the case, then they will be strange visitors indeed - fugitives from the past, envoys to the future. Because even then I will only just be beginning. After this circuit of a few hundred light-years, a thousand human years, my shatterlings will convene again. They will meet, and exchange memories of what they have experienced. And then they will get back into their ships and head out again. This time they will surf ahead of the expansion wave, not stopping until they are hundreds of light-years out. They will visit more worlds. At the limit of their circuit - longer, this time - they will be nearly a thousand lights from the Golden Hour. By then, they will be in range of some of the anomalous structures we have begun to detect in deep interstellar space. My shatterlings will be the first people to reach out and touch those dark forms. They will be the first to know for certain whether others came before us; whether we are the first species to claim the galaxy as our own, or not. Or perhaps other people will get there first, riding similar ships - I am talking about a thousand years from now, after all. But you see my point. Someone must take this first step. It might as well be me.’

‘How many circuits?’ someone asked.

She shrugged as if the question had never really occurred to her. ‘As many as it takes, until it stops being fun. Each will be larger than the last, until my ships are looping around the Milky Way. By then, there will have been time for humanity to spread to every inhabitable system in the galaxy. I don’t think it can fail to be an interesting place to be a tourist. Why not stay awhile and see what happens?’

Ludmilla Marcellin answered our questions one at a time, demolishing every objection or quibble anyone had the brazen temerity to raise. The technology for freezing and thawing clones? No one had frozen and revived a human being since the dawn of the space age. No matter: a crash course in technology-resurrection would give the Marcellins the tools they needed. The ships would not have to wait until it was perfected; they could leave with the clones still awake and beam the necessary science out to them once they were under way.

The technology for merging memories from a thousand individual experiences? A question beneath contempt. It was already there, in embryonic form. I only had to think of the way Palatial had meddled with my own memories to know she was right about that. In a thousand years, it would not even be worth remembering it as a problem. With similar inevitability, her shatterlings could expect to gain the tools to manage those combined memories across massively extended lifespans. Ludmilla Marcellin was not going to go to all this trouble and have her clones die of senescence after only two or three circuits. The human race might be content with its current life expectancy, but nothing less than physical immortality would do for shatterlings. They must be able to live for thousands of years (or at least be able to have their memories and personalities transplanted intact into new receptacle bodies) or the whole enterprise would be for nothing.