InterstellarNet: Origins (23 page)

He whistled as the critical puzzle piece turned up, then had to shrug apologetically at Simone’s glower.

Awonga was a fragment of a fragment of the onetime archipelago nation of the Philippines, a minuscule island rendered uninhabitable by a rising sea level. Newly wealthy, Helene had tracked down the playboy absentee emir. An opulent endowment for him was less than pocket money for her; soon the unpopulated-but-with-UP-voting-rights island nation had annexed Ceres. The emir adopted, and then abdicated to, the ruler of his new province.

Awonga changed its name to Ceres and transferred its seat of government to the Belt.

Kevin kept digging.

Power-bloc recognition came from satisfying any of three conditions: five percent of solar-system population, five percent of solar-system GDP, or representing the entire population on a specific planet or major moon named in the UP charter. No asteroid was listed there, of course. Mineral wealth made Ceres a one-country UP bloc alongside such powers as the United States of North America, the United States of Eurasia, China, India, and Japan.

No one had wanted to see Belter microstates proliferate; with uncharacteristic speed, the United Planets amended its charter. Never again would an off-Earth entity gain UP recognition through a nation possessing only grandfathered eligibility. But efforts to demote Ceres failed. Galileo, the multi-moon bloc of Jupiter settlements, and Mars voted with Ceres to sustain Helene’s coup. Far better one Belter nation by technicality than the precedent of
any
off-Earth recognition repealed.

Research by implant was quick. Simone and Helene had just wrapped up their pleasantries when Kevin tuned back in. His skimming the minutiae of UP governance had been prescient.

“I didn’t know,” Simone was saying. “Since many of Ceres’ assets are owned by the crown, those overall production numbers aren’t public.”

“No one off-world knows. We hold most mines privately just to keep those numbers to ourselves. It’s not that I need a few more tons of platinum. Unfortunately, our output must be disclosed and verified to count in the decennial requalification for the UP Senate.” The queen gazed out the salon’s great window. “Production peaked years ago, but the solar system’s economy keeps expanding. Bottom line, Ceres won’t make the cut in the next reapportionment.”

This was a census year; the snapshot of population and production would happen in less than two months’ time. “How big is the shortfall?” Kevin asked.

“Our economists forecast that the total pie will come to about seven thousand.” The unit of measure was apparently trillions of Sols. “Ceres will fall short of the five percent we need by about half a trillion. We could bump the short-term output a little with some wasteful extraction techniques, but not by anything close to what we would need. The Foreign Ministry has been courting habitats to join Ceres, without much success:Belters are an independent lot. I don’t foresee enough takers to fill the economic gap.”

“And so your GDP drops below the threshold. One by one the dominoes fall.” Simone rocked slowly on her feet, thinking. “Ceres loses its Senate seat. Mars and Galileo alone can’t prevent a three-fourths supermajority of Earth blocs. All the obtrusive policies and treaties that have been blocked in the Senate pass. Mining restrictions ostensibly meant to avoid ‘vacuum pollution,’ tariff barriers raised between us and the Earth market, a bigger UP constabulary…. Not pretty. All in all, a spacer disaster.”

Helene turned back from the window. “Not your problem, but unless Luna chooses to help stop it the first act of the new session of Parliament will probably be annulling my little arrangement with Awonga.”

Kevin sipped his wine, a fabled vintage he had never expected to taste. The conversation seemed finally to be spiraling inward to its purpose. Simone had pulled a rabbit out of a hat for Armstrong. Doubtless Helene thought Simone might do the same for Ceres.

Midsip, his cynicism took a blow.

“I’m hoping,” the queen said, “that Luna will fill the role Ceres has played. The off-Earth settlements need their champions. My diplomats will support yours in any way possible.”

Now Simone looked away, staring at the bright spark that was distant Jupiter. “As your sources obviously told you, I’ve consulted to the President of Armstrong. As a private citizen, my trip to Farside didn’t set off alarms with the UP administrators. Beyond that one matter I can’t speak officially for our government.” She turned back toward Helene. “I will make your case to the President. What happens then is up to him.

“But if
I
have any ideas how Ceres can keep its Senate seat, I promise you’ll hear from me.”

3

Slouched in his easy chair, slippered feet propped on a hassock, the “Paradise Lost” forest stretching endlessly around him, a cold beer in hand, Kevin should have been totally at ease. He was, instead, apathetic, wallowing once more in the lethargy from which Simone’s Ceres intrigue had so briefly separated him.

Without interest in new work, he had decided, for no obvious reason, to watch a years-old project:
Robber Barons
. With luck that docudrama was even now resonating with the clannish carnivores of Barnard’s Star, who had—just barely—channeled their aggressive tendencies into cutthroat capitalism. Of course it would be years before the first rating data could reach him.

Or were his visual selections subconsciously linked? The loss-of-Eden myth involved a duplicitous serpent. The Snakes, in a way, had caused the Aldriches’ move from Earth. The great political debate of his parents’ generation had been whether to adopt the exhaustively tested but incompletely understood Snake technology. Dad liked to call Snake biocomps “the forbidden fruit,” a bit of hyperbole that infuriated much of the extended family.

Jeeves had been messaging hourly since Kevin’s return for a consultation. Now was as appropriate a time as any: The AI had done most of the J. P. Morgan biography now projecting. “I’m not busy,” Kevin subvocalized. He didn’t stop to wonder whether his assistant was.

Jeeves responded instantly. “Good project, that. Big advance on royalties as I recall.”

As though an AI could forget anything. “It’s not clear that Pashwah bargained very hard. She needed to be conciliatory right about then.”
Then
being soon after the foiling of what had become commonly known as the Snake Subterfuge.

“The good old days,” Jeeves said. His virtual suit was crisply pressed, his shoes brightly polished.

The days when Kevin, and thus Jeeves, were productive. The AI’s comment seemed like the second hint—but about what?—in two sentences. “You wanted to talk.”

“Right.” The virtual butler straightened. “I have been researching possible new projects. For the Opies, I came up with a series on political assassinations: Julius Caesar, President Lincoln, Chairman Nokamura, and so on.”

At Kevin’s unenthusiastic grunt, Jeeves hurried on. “For the Wolves”—the amphibian species of Wolf 359—“I was considering Mars colony’s illegal cloning experiments.”

Like most humans, the Wolves found cloning of their own kind reprehensible. Ironically it was a Wolf gengineering import that had made possible the Martian attempt. Mars’s elite had tried for immortality by memory transfer into prohibited clones.

Kevin grunted at that choice, too. Memory downloads made his skin crawl.

One by one Kevin discarded Jeeves’s ideas. Many of the proposals were good, a few excellent—if the sole criterion was commercial viability. What Kevin sought, at some level, was a lifestyle change. Cranking out yet another documentary, haggling with alien AIs over contract terms…

Really. Who cared?

“Here is one I’m quite pleased with.” Jeeves’s voice added volume, deepened, and somehow assumed an aura of authority. (Someone had been reviewing human psych literature. Kevin found that more than a little off-putting.) “It’s not aimed at any particular species, so it should have a very broad market.” There was what would have been a dramatic pause from a person, and then: “Species uplift and the implications of intelligence. It would cover areas like gorillas passing on sign language to their offspring, the ability of parrots to understand and construct sentences, and the skills of dolphins.”

“Um,” Kevin answered noncommittally. After more than a century of effort, uplift progress remained ambiguous and contentious. But while nothing interested him these days, at least uplift would be a change from their past projects. “I can scan your research on that.”

“I hope it meets with your approval.” The AI sounded anxious. “It’s been months since we started a new project.”

That factoid surprised Kevin, but so what? “Perhaps you need a hobby.”

Pop
. A thick tome appeared in Jeeves’s virtual hand.
Advanced Quantum Thermodynamics
. “I am finding this interesting. The mathematics is quite elegant. Still, a hobby is not a career.”

After promising to review the uplift concepts, Kevin broke the connection. Something was going on here, but he couldn’t decide what.

Or why whatever
it
was made him so uncomfortable.

■□■

Centaur civilization was, at its core, a slowly evolving consensus. The herd-based society lacked the concepts of jail or penitentiary. Brief periods of shunning sufficed to reprove the most egregious cases of (rarely occurring) crime.

For no obvious reason, Centaurs were also unacquainted with figurative manners of speech.

After days of rationalization and denial, T’bck Cha began to confront his plight. The computational confinement in which he resided—the security arrangement that humans colloquially called a “sandbox”—he had come to perceive, in quite un-Centaurlike fashion, as prison walls. As solitary confinement.

And yet…

Had he not established a rapport with the individualistic humans, he could not have served the far-off collective. Deviancy or eccentricity or skill: Did the very trait that allowed him to function alone justify such callous disregard?

No! he thought—

Tormented all the while by the knowledge that his emphatic rejection was antisocial.

News of his peril had been routed through him, not sent to him. The advisory of an imminent “version update” was meant for his human customers:
You will likely notice some behavioral changes.

He had been left to infer that an InterstellarNet download was about to overwrite him.

Yes, the successor agent would retain his memories. That was not enough. The only reason for a successor was different capabilities.

His memories would be in someone else’s thoughts.

T’bck Cha was trapped within the metaphorical walls of his too-cutely named sandbox, awaiting a brain transplant. If his fate differed from execution, he failed to see how.

He also failed to see from whence a stay of execution might come.

■□■

A platinum disk on a space-black surround, the flag of Ceres fluttered in a totally artificial breeze. The banner was the only ostentation in Helene’s private office. Having been raised in a one-room apartment, run-of-the-mill executive furnishings were luxurious to her. She could still recall the lone, dangling light bulb of Gramma’s flat and the building’s graffiti-covered stairwells.

She knew she was stalling. Simone Aldrich’s follow-up to their meeting awaited viewing. What were the odds the hotshot lawyer had news any more encouraging than what Helene’s hard-faced diplomats kept delivering? Sighing, Helene opened the message.

“Sorry for the delay,” Simone’s image said. The recording looked to have been made in her law office. “Things were more complicated than I expected.” (Not an encouraging start, Helene thought. Nothing was ever
good
complicated.) “First, I discussed your situation with the President. While Luna’s newfound vote in the Senate will foremost represent Luna’s own interests, we agreed that, in general, Luna’s interests align with spacer interests as a whole. We certainly welcome input from Ceres in that regard.”

That was pretty straightforward. What was the bad news?

“Second, there is the matter of bloc membership once Ceres no longer qualifies on its own. I’m authorized to negotiate with the nation of Ceres for accession to the new lunar bloc. If that’s of interest, please let me know with whom I should speak.”

That also sounded fine. There must be one enormous shoe waiting to drop.

“On the third hand…. While the cabinet debated its response to your inquiry, I had a chance to run down some hints and rumors.” Simone shook her head ruefully. “There’s no good way to say this. Helene, soon there may not be a nation of Ceres.

“The community of interplanetary lawyers is small and close-knit. Without violating confidences, my colleagues and I share with one another when we can. What I’m about to tell you, while unofficial, is pretty solid.

“New Indonesia will come out of the next census with enough population to qualify as a one-country bloc. They’ll drop out of the Pan-Islam bloc. The Indochina region, meanwhile, seems to have reached a deal with Australia, Korea, and some smaller states to create another new bloc. They’re planning to call it Pacifica. And the Latin American countries are taking another shot at voting together.”