The New Space Opera 2 (14 page)

Brother Pramha was the first to greet me. He looked at me with shock. “Who is this?” he asked.

“This is a friend, a soldier, Nahid. Quickly. She needs care.”

Together we took her to the clinic. Pramha ran off to inform the Mas
ter. Our physician, Brother Nastricht, sealed her throat wound, and gave her new blood. I held her hand. She did not regain consciousness.

Soon, one of the novices arrived to summon me to Master Darius's chambers. Although I was exhausted, I hurried after him through the warren of corridors, up the tower steps. I unbelted my blaster and handed it to the novice—he seemed distressed to hold the destructive device—and entered the room.

Beyond the broad window that formed the far wall of the chamber, dawn stained the sky pink. Master Darius held out his arms. I approached him, humbly bowed my head, and he embraced me. The warmth of his large body enfolding me was an inexpressible comfort. He smelled of cinnamon. He let me go, held me at arm's length, and smiled. The kosode he wore I recognized as one I had sewn myself. “I cannot tell you how good it is to see you, Adlan.”

“I have the plays,” I announced.

“The behavior of our Caslonian masters has been proof enough of that,” he replied. His broad, plain face was somber as he told me of the massacre in Radnapuja, where the colonial government had held six thousand citizens hostage, demanding the bodily presentation, alive, of the foul villain, the man without honor or soul, the sacrilegious terrorist who had stolen the Foundational Plays.

“Six thousand dead?”

“They won't be the last,” the Master said. “The plays have been used as a weapon, as a means of controlling us. The beliefs which they embody work within the minds and souls of every person on this planet. They work even on those who are unbelievers.”

“Nahid is an unbeliever.”

“Nahid? She is this soldier whom you brought here?”

“The Republican Guard you sent with me. She doesn't believe, but she has played her role in bringing me here.”

Master Darius poured me a glass of fortifying spirits and handed it to me as if he were a novice and I the master. He sat in his great chair, had me sit in the chair opposite, and bade me recount every detail of the mission. I did so.

“It is indeed miraculous that you have come back alive,” Master Darius mused. “Had you died, the plays would have been lost forever.”

“The gods would not allow such a sacrilege.”

“Perhaps. You carry the only copies in your mind?”

“Indeed. I have even quoted them to Nahid.”

“Not at any length, I hope.”

I laughed at his jest. “But now we can free Helvetica,” I said. “Before any further innocents are killed, you must contact the Caslonian colonial government and tell them we have the plays. Tell them they must stop or we will destroy them.”

Master Darius held up his hand and looked at me piercingly—I had seen this gesture many times in his tutoring of me. “First, let me ask you some questions about your tale. This is what my mentor, the great Master Malrubius, called a ‘teaching moment.' You tell me that, when you first came to consciousness after stealing the plays in the Imperial City, a god told you to run. Yet to run in the Caslonian capital is only to attract unwelcome attention.”

“Yes. The god must have wanted to hurry my escape.”

“But when you reached the port bazaar, the god told you to stop and enter the restaurant. You run to attract attention, and dawdle long enough to allow time for you to be caught. Does this make sense?”

My fatigue made it difficult for me to think. What point was the Master trying to make? “Perhaps I was not supposed to stop,” I replied. “It was my own weakness. I was hungry.”

“Then, later, you tell me that when the commandos boarded your ship, you escaped by following Nahid's lead, not the word of the gods.”

“The gods led us out of the engine room. I think this is a matter of my misinterpreting—”

“And this metal man you encountered in the ancient city. Did he in fact say that the gods would have seen Nahid dead?”

“The statue said many mad things.”

“Yet the device he gave you was the agent of her salvation?”

“I used it for that.” Out of shame, I had not told Master Darius that I had disobeyed the command of the god who told me to flee.

“Many paradoxes.” The Master took a sip from his own glass. “So, if we give the plays back, what will happen then?”

“Then Helvetica will be free.”

“And after that?”

“After that, we can do as we wish. The Caslonians would not dare to violate a holy vow. The gods would punish them. They know that. They are believers, as are we.”

“Yes, they are believers. They would obey any compact they made, for
fear of the wrath of the gods. They believe what you hold contained in your mind, Adlan, is true. So, as you say, you must give them to me now, and I will see to their disposition.”

“Their disposition? How will you see to their disposition?”

“That is not something for you to worry about, my son. You have done well, and you deserve all our thanks. Brother Ishmael will see to unburdening you of the great weight you carry.”

A silence ensued. I knew it was a sign of my dismissal. I must go to Brother Ishmael. But I did not rise. “What will you do with them?”

Master Darius's brown eyes lay steady on me, and quiet. “You have always been my favorite. I think perhaps you know what I intend.”

I pondered our conversation. “You—you're going to destroy them.”

“Perhaps I was wrong not to have you destroy them the minute you gained access to the archives. But at that time I had not come to these conclusions.”

“But the wrath of the Caslonians will know no limit! We will be exterminated!”

“We may be exterminated, and Helvetica remain in chains, but once these plays are destroyed, never to be recovered, then
humanity
will begin to be truly free. This metal man, you say, told you the gods left the better part of themselves behind. That is profoundly true. Yet there is no moment when they cease to gaze over our shoulders. Indeed, if we are ever to be free human beings, and not puppets jerked about by unseen forces—which may or may not exist—the gods must go. And the beginning of that process is the destruction of the Foundational Plays.”

I did not know how to react. In my naiveté I said, “This does not seem right.”

“I assure you, my son, that it is.”

“If we destroy the plays, it will be the last thing we ever do.”

“Of course not. Time will not stop.”

“Time may not stop,” I said, “but it might as well. Any things that happen after the loss of the gods will have no meaning.”

Master Darius rose from his chair and moved toward his desk. “You are tired, and very young,” he said, his back to me. “I have lived in the shadow of the gods far longer than you have.” He reached over his desk, opened a drawer, took something out, and straightened.

He is lying
. I stood. I felt surpassing weariness, but I moved silently. In my boot, I still carried the force knife I had stolen from the restaurant on
Caslon. I drew out the hilt, switched on the blade, and approached the Master just as he began to turn.

When he faced me, he had a blaster in his hands. He was surprised to find me so close to him. His eyes went wide as I slipped the blade into his belly below his lowest rib.

The Caslonian government capitulated within a week after we contacted them. Once they began to withdraw their forces from the planet and a provisional government for the Helvetican Republic was reestablished in Astara, I underwent the delicate process of downloading the foundational dramas from my mind.
The Abandonment
was once again embodied in a crystal, which was presented to the Caslonian legate in a formal ceremony on the anniversary of the rebirth of man.

The ceremony took place on a bright day in midsummer in that city of a thousand spires. Sunlight flooded the streets, where citizens in vibrantly colored robes danced and sang to the music of bagpipes. Pennants in purple and green flew from those spires; children hung out of second-story school windows, shaking snowstorms of confetti on the parades. The smell of incense wafted down from the great temple, and across the sky flyers drew intricate patterns with lines of colored smoke.

Nahid and I were there on that day, though I did not take a leading role in the ceremony, preferring to withdraw to my proper station. In truth, I am not a significant individual. I have only served the gods.

I left the Order as soon as the negotiations were completed. At first the brothers were appalled by my murder of Master Darius. I explained to them that he had gone mad and intended to kill me in order to destroy the plays. There was considerable doubt. But when I insisted that we follow through with the plan as the Master had presented it to the brothers before sending me on my mission, they seemed to take my word about his actions. The success of our thieving enterprise overshadowed the loss of the great leader, and indeed has contributed to his legend, making of him a tragic figure. A drama has been written of his life and death, and the liberation of Helvetica.

Last night, Nahid and I, with our children and grandchildren, watched it performed in the square of the town where we set up the tailor's shop that has been the center of our lives for the last forty years. Seeing the events of my youth played out on the platform, in their comedy and tragedy, hazard and fortune, calls again to my mind the question of whether I have deserved the blessings that have fallen to me ever since that day. I have not heard the voices of the gods since I slipped the knife into the belly of the man who taught me all that I knew of grace.

The rapid decline of the Caslonian Empire, and the Helvetican renaissance that has led to our current prosperity, all date from that moment in his chambers when I ended his plan to free men from belief and duty. The people, joyous on their knees in the temples of twelve planets, give praise to the gods for their deliverance, listen, hear, and obey.

Soon I will rest beneath the earth, like the metal man who traduced the gods, though less likely than he ever to walk again. If I have done wrong, it is not for me to judge. I rest, my lover's hand in mine, in the expectation of no final word.

Here's a sly tale of the collision of the Old and the New—
one
of which is going to have to give way to the other…

Cory Doctorow is the coeditor of the popular
Boing Boing
website (boingboing.net), a cofounder of the Internet search-engine company OpenCola.com, and until recently was the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). In 2001, he won the John W. Campbell Award as the year's Best New Writer. His stories have appeared in
Asimov's Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, The Infinite Matrix, On Spec, Salon
, and elsewhere, and were collected in
A Place So Foreign and Eight More
. His well-received first novel,
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
, won the Locus Award as Best First Novel, and was followed shortly by a second novel,
Eastern Standard Tribe
, then by
Someone Comes Town, Someone Leaves Town
. Doctorow's other books include
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction
, written with Karl Schroeder, a guide to
Essential Blogging
, written with Shelley Powers, and, most recently,
Content: Selected Essays of Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
. His most recent books are a new collection of his short work,
Overclocked
, and a new novel,
Little Brother
, which debuted at #9 on the
New York Times
bestseller list. He has a website at www.craphound.com.

C
aptain Reynold J. Tsubishi of the APP ship
Colossus II
was the youngest commander in the fleet. He knew he owed his meteoric rise through the ranks to the good study habits he'd acquired in the Academy: specifically, the habit of studying what people cared about and
embodying those things
for them. Thus he was an expert in twentieth-century culture (the mark of distinguished taste in the Academy for two hundred years); a sudden-death bare-knuckles martial artist; a rakish flirt; and a skilled three-harp player. He led nearly every away-team, didn't screw the junior officers, and—

And he didn't have the faintest idea what to do about The Ball.

The Ball had been detected in the middle of the second shift, when the B-string had the conn and the bridge. No one called them the B-string, but they were. Some ships had tried evenly spreading the top people across all three shifts, but no one who was any good wanted to work ship's night and anyone with clout filed for transfers to ships that let the As congregate in A spaces during “daylight” hours. So now it was the A-string from ship's 9 to ship's 17, the B-string from 17 to 1, and the miserable Cs on the truly nocturnal 1 to 9.

Tsubishi was in the middle of his first REM when his headband brought him swiftly to the surface of his mind, dialing up the lights and the smell of wintergreen and eucalyptus as the holo of First Lieutenant! Mota, framed by the high back of the command chair, filled the room.

“Sir,”! Mota said, ripping off a precise salute (his exoskeleton made all routine movement precise, but the salute was a work of art, right down to the tiny “ping” as the tip of zer metal-sheathed tentacle grazed zer forelobe), “my apologies for rousing you. The forward sensor array detected a yufo, and, on closer inspection, we believe it may be evidence of a poten
tially hostile garrison.” The B-string commander was actually pretty good at zer job, and would have likely had zer own command by now but for the fact that the admiralty was heavily tilted to stock humans and loathe to promote non- and trans-humans to the higher eschelon. As a Wobblie (not a flattering name for an entire advanced starfaring race, but an accurate one, and no one with humanoid mouth-parts could pronounce the word in Wobbliese),! Mota was forever doomed to second-banana.

“On bridge in three,” Tsubishi said, with a slightly sleepy salute of his own. His fresher had already cleaned and hung his uniform—a limitless supply of hard vac gave new meaning to the phrase “dry cleaning,” and the single-piece garment was as crisp as the ones he'd assiduously ironed as a kay-det on old Mars. He backed into the fresher and held his arms up while it wrapped him in the fabric. All on-ship toilets had an automated system for dressing and undressing uniformed personnel, while the away-teams made do with sloppier (but easier to shuck) baggies, or, in the rare event that a green ensign forgot to change before beaming down, relying on teammates to help with the humiliating ritual of dressing and undressing.

The duty officer barked “Captain on deck” before he'd even managed to set his foot down, and the whole B-squad was on its feet and saluting before his back leg came up to join it.! Mota made a formal gesture of handing over the conn, and Tsubishi slid into his chair just as it finished its hurried reconfiguration to suit his compact, tightly wound frame. The ship beamed a double cappuccino—ship's crest stamped into the foam—into the armrest's cup-holder, and he sipped it pensively before nodding to! Mota to make his report.

! Mota—the model of second-banana efficiency—had whomped up an entire slideshow (with music and animated transitions, Tsubishi noted, with an inward roll of his eyes) in the time it had taken him to reach the bridge. The entire command crew watched him closely as! Mota stepped through it.

“We were proceeding as normal in our survey of the Tesla Z-65 system,”! Mota said, the bridge holo going into orrery mode, showing the system and its 11 planets and 329 planetesimals, the fourth planet out glittering with a safety-orange highlight. “We'd deployed the forward sensor arrays here, to Tesla Z-65–4, for initial detailed surveys. Z-65–4 is just over one AU from the star, and pulls 1.8 gees, putting it in the upper bound of high-value/high-interest survey targets.” The holo swept forward in dizzying jumps as the sensor packages beamed each other closer
and closer to the planet in a series of hops, leaving them strung out in a lifeline from the ship's safe position among Z-65's outer rim to Z-65–4, ninety AU's away. The final stage established a long, elliptical orbit, and beamed its tiny progeny into tighter geostationary orbits around the planet's waistline.

“The yufo was detected almost immediately. It had been on the dark side of the planet, in geostationary, and it came into the lateral sensor-range of two of our packages when they beamed in.” In a volumetric display, four different views of the yufo: a radar-derived mesh, a set of charts displaying its likely composition, an optical photo of the item in shaky high-mag, and a cartoon derived from the former, showing the yufo as a sphere a mere 1.5 meters in diameter, skinned in something black that the radar-analysis suggested was a damned efficient one-way sheath that likely disguised a Panopticon's worth of sensors, spy-eyes, radar.

The holo transitioned—a genie-back-into-the-bottle effect—and was replaced with a bulleted time line of the encounter, including notations as to when radar incursions on the sensor package emanating from the yufo were detected.! Mota let the chart stand for itself, then clicked to the final slide, the extrapolated cartoon of the yufo again.

! Mota ripped off another artful salute. “Orders, sir?”

“Have you brought one of our packages forward to get a closer look?”

“No sir. I anticipated that contingency and made plans for it, but have not given the order.”

“Do it,” Tsubishi said, giving one of those ironical little head-tilts that the female kay-dets on Mars had swooned for—and noted the B-shift tactical officer's appreciative wriggle with satisfaction—and watched the holotank as the packet changed its attitude with conservative little thruster-bursts, moving slowly relative to the yufo while the continents below whirled past as it came out of geostationary position. The cartoon yufo resolved itself with ever-more minute details as the packet got closer, closer.

“Packet reports radio chatter, three sigmas off random. Eighty-three percent confidence that it is communication.” The comms officer had an unfortunate speech impediment that she'd all but corrected in the Academy, but it was still enough to keep her on the B-squad. Probably wouldn't accept neurocorrection. “Eighty-five. Ninety-five. Signal identified as ultra-wide-band sequence key. Switching to UWB reception now. Playing back 900 MHz to 90 GHz spectrum for ten minutes, using key. Repeating pattern found. Decoding.”

It was the standard first contact drill. Any species plying the spaces between the stars was bound to converge on one of a few Rosetta strategies. The holotank showed realtime visualizations of the ship's symbology AI subsystem picking a million digits of Pi out of the chatter, deriving the counting system, then finding calculus, bootstrapping higher symbols out of
that
, moving on to physics and then to the physics of hyperspace. A progress bar tracked the system's confidence that it could decode arbitrary messages from the yufo's originating species, and as it approached completion, Tsubishi took another sip of his cappuccino and tipped his head toward the comms officer.

“Hail the yufo, Ms. De Fuca-Williamson.”

The comms officer's hands moved over her panels, then she nodded back at Tsubishi.

“This is Captain Reynold J. Tsubishi of the Alliance of Peaceful Planets ship
Colossus II.
In the name of the Alliance and its forty-two member-species, I offer you greetings in the spirit of galactic cooperation and peace.” It was canned, that line, but he'd practiced it in the holo in his quarters so that he could sell it fresh every time.

The silence stretched. A soft chime marked an incoming message. A succession of progress bars filled the holotank as it was decoded, demuxed and remuxed. Another, more emphatic chime.

“Do it,” Tsubishi said to the comms officer, and First Contact was made anew.

The form that filled the tank was recognizably a head. It was wreathed in writhing tentacles, each tipped with organs that the computer identified with high confidence as sensory—visual, olfactory, temperature.

The tentacles whipped around as the bladder at the thing's throat inflated, then blatted out something in its own language, which made Wobbliese seem mellifluous. The computer translated: “Oh, for god's sake—
role-players
? You've
got
to be kidding me.”

Then the message disappeared. A klaxon sounded and the bridge dimmed; flashing red lights filled the bridge.

“Status?” Tsubishi took another calm sip of his cappuccino though his heart was racing. Captains never broke a sweat. It went with the territory.

“The package has gone nonresponsive. Nearby telemetry suggests with high confidence that it has been destroyed. Another has gone offline. Two more. All packages nonresponsive and presumed under attack.”

“Bring us to defcon four,” Tsubishi said. “Do it.”

 

The A-team assembled on the bridge in a matter of minutes, freshly wrapped in their uniforms, unceremoniously pushing the unprotesting B-team out of their seats just as the ship's computer beamed their preset high-alert snacks and beverages to their workstations. As a courtesy,! Mota was allowed to remain on the bridge, but the rest of the second shift slunk away, looking hurt and demoralized. Tsubishi pursed his lips at their departing backs and felt the burden of command.

“Bring us to within five AU, Lieutenant,” he said, nodding at Deng-Gorinski in the navigator's chair. “I want to get a little closer.”

At five AU's, they could beam photon torpedoes to within fifteen minutes of the yufo. If it was anything like their own packages, they could outmaneuver it with the torpedo's thrusters at that range.

The lieutenant showed her teeth as she brought the ship up to speed, battle-ready and champing to blow the intruder out of the sky.

The ping of another incoming message brought the crew's attention back to the comms post. The progress bars went much faster now, the symbology AI now much more confident of its guesses about the intruder's language.

“Now what are you doing? Can't you see I'm already here? Get lost. This is my patch.”

“In the name of the APP, I order you to stand down and power down your offensive systems. Anything less will be construed as a declaration of war. You have thirty seconds to comply. This—is one second.”

He crumpled his cappuccino cup and tossed it over his shoulder; the ship obliterated it by beaming it into nullspace before it touched the ground. The holotank was counting down, giving the numbers in the preassigned ultimatum voice: female, calm, cold, with an accent that a twentieth-century Briton would have recognized as Thatcher-posh.

“Oh. Really. Now. You want to shoot at each other? I've got a better idea. Let's meet on the surface and duke it out, being to being, for control of the planet. Capture the flag. First one to get a defensible position on the highest peak of this mountain range gets to claim the whole thing for zer respective empire.” Tsubishi noted the neuter pronoun with some interest: neuter species were more common than highly dimorphic ones in the galaxy, and they had a reputation for being meaner than the poor he-she species like h. sap saps. Something about having your primary genetic loyalty to your identical clones as opposed to your family group—it created a certain…ruthlessness.

“Why should I bargain at all? I could just blow you out of orbit, right here.”

The tentacles writhed in a gesture that the computer badged with the caption “smirk, confidence 86%,” and Tsubishi pointed a single finger at the ship's gunner, who flexed in her chiton and clicked delicately at the control interface, priming and aiming it. The computer quietly turned a patch of Tsubishi's armrest into a display and flashed a discreet notification about the spike in hormonal aggression volatiles being detected on the bridge. He waved it away. He didn't need a computer to tell him about the battle-stink. He could smell it himself. It smelled good. First contact was good—but
war…war
was what the Alliance of Peaceful Planets lived for.

“You can try,” the alien said.

“A warning shot, Lieutenant,” he said, tipping his head to Deng-Gorinski. “Miss the yufo by, say, half a million klicks.”

The click of Deng-Gorinski's talon was the only sound on the bridge, as every crewmember held zer breath, and then the barely detectable hap-tic
whoom
as a torpedo left its bay and streaked off in glorious 3-D on the holotank, trailed by a psychedelic glitter of labels indicating its approach, operational status, detected countermeasures, and all the glorious, pointless instrumentation data that was merely icing on the cake.

The torpedo closed on the yufo, drawing closer, closer…closer. Then—

Blink

“It's gone, sir.” Deng-Gorinski's talons clicked, clicked. “Transporter beam. Picked it right out of the sky.”

That's impossible
. He didn't bother to say it. Of course it was possible: they'd just seen it happen. But transporting a photon torpedo that was underway and emitting its punishing halo of quantum chaff should have required enough energy to melt a star and enough compute-power to calculate the universe. It was the space-naval equivalent of catching a sword-blade between your palms as it was arcing toward your chest.

“Take us back to seventy AU's,” he said, admiring the calmness in his own voice. He had a bad feeling, but it didn't pay to let it show. The armrest gave him another discreet notifier, this one about the changing composition of the pheromones on the bridge. Fear stink.
“Now.”