Betrayals: Three
by Steve Bowers
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Betrayals: Threeby Steve Bowers |
Zero minus seventy-five years
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The night before the Minimum Power race the competitors and support
teams held the traditional party inside a small rotating double
cylinder to add a reasonable amount of artificial gravity to the
proceedings.
Gus agreed wholeheartedly with this arrangement, as so many things were
dropped, spilt, vomited that he declined to imagine the atmosphere
inside a zero gee environment.
Hirpal, the jet specialist in the Rule/Scrabo team with Gus, called to
him,
"Hey, Gus! This chilli cous is really hot! Watch out!" He
swigged from a flask he held in one hand, gesturing for everyone to
stay back, then flicked an igniter he had in the other hand. And spat a
huge blinding flame ten feet into the air.
“Well! You certainly have some hidden talents, Hirp!”
Hirp, his mouth full of spirit, couldn’t talk, but
displayed
Thanks
on his chest tattoo display area.
“Perhaps you should keep ‘em hidden,”
said Max Handy, who was perched on Gus’s shoulders.
. Max was a jet black bushrobot, at full extent a metre-ten in
diameter, branching from a central point a myriad times till the
smallest of his fingers was microscopic. Red, green and blue lights
sparkled in his fronds. He could take a multitude of shapes, but right
now was impersonating a peacock’s tail on Gus’s head and
shoulders.
The relationship between Max Handy and Auguste Gienah Cis was known to
the sociologists of that period as symaiotic; robot and human,
interdependent, Gus was a symbiotic partner to Max's artificial
symaiote. They could be a formidable double act when they could be
bothered.
Gus noticed that the Sulphur Blossom team, heavy set Sino-Penglaiese
near-baseline humans with the advantage of coming from a slightly
higher gravity ring, were keeping themselves apart and avoiding
stimulants of any kind.
The hefty Blossom pilot, Yu-linn, was drinking only water or lemon
juice. Gus was willing to trust the antienebriant treatment he took at
the evening’s end, but still, he partook sparingly of the toxins
on offer.
A couple of Colbiornsen skinplayers demonstrated that having a flexible
and highly elastic skin layer was conducive to coarse and humorous
display, making strange and bizarre shapes and doing impressions of
everyday objects or personalities, even concealing various items inside
their skin and challenging people to find them.
Not to be outdone, several of the support crew from the two Scrabo
teams were showing risqué or violent anime on their torso
tattoos. Petyr from the Alliance/Scrabo team gathered every one round
to view a new tattoo sequence he had acquired. Even Max reared up like
a fan from Gus’s shoulders to see.
"I got it in a Prior A archive dissemination. It’s an
ancient full-colour Loony Toon, a sacred file to some Negentropists,
with the Trickster Duck Himself in combat with the evil Fudd.
Unfortunately there isn’t any audio, so you have to guess what is
going on."
They watched the tragic and baffling events unfold with various degrees
of reverence.
"Why did the Daffy put his head inside that primitive
projectile weapon? Did he have binding non-violence insurance?"
said Max.
"Ha ha ha ha it seems unlikely that the Fudd would pay proper
compensation for any injury."
"Strikes me that the Daffy is pretty dumb," said Lesöva,
the other Scrabo pilot, who Gus only knew vaguely.
"That’s a brave statement from the pilot representing the
Alliance Ring, seeing as you are just about half way to joining the
Neg-Ents, " Gus said, looking at her closely for the first time. Her
tattoos were simple, pleasant.
He tried to match them without being too obvious.
"Hah! Never happen. If it does, I’m leaving. The
Negentropy Alliance are a bunch of uptight prigs, even if they do like
weird old cartoons." She looked at him. “ Aren’t you the
guy that does the big sculptures?”
“Well, I used to churn a few bits and pieces out, but
I’ve been concentrating on Minimum Power racing and caving for
several years now. Went back to physiological twenty as well, this
isn’t an old man’s game.”
“They’ve done a good job, you’ll have to give
me the address of your rejuvenator.”
Early in the next day period, after most of the teams and interested
parties had rested or slept, the weigh-in and final Backup ceremony was
to take place.
Gus had slept for an hour, as was his custom, to provide a break in the
otherwise indivisible timestream. Max also rested, curled into a spiral
at the foot of the bed.
The two-thousand-kilometre diameter rings that form the Necklace around
Arkab Prior B rotate once every seventy minutes, and take over three
standard years to orbit the bright class A star. Gus could ask Max to
tell him the date in standard tendays and years, or in the Prior B
calendar, measured in ring rotation periods (spins) and Prior years
since the foundation.
When Gus woke again the local Prior B time was 1006 APB, spin 3457.5.;
Standard Civilised Galaxy Empire Time was 9965 a.t., tenday 23.1, 0800
hours.
The teams had decided that this would be collectively regarded as an
early start, although many near-baseline humans no longer needed sleep
periods.
The Backup ceremony ensured that the competitors would not be lost if
killed, but could be restored from a mental and physical copy, which
would be stored in the databanks in the twin rotating
cylinders. Gus was all too aware that what ever happened to his copy,
he could die in the race, and his present stream of experience would
come to an end.
Yu-linn was aware of this too.
"So, tattooman, if we die, we die, yes? That copy might come
back to life but we will die and forget we ever had this conversation.
You are not scared, I am not scared, eh?" he said, in affectedly broken
Anglic.
At that time Sulphur Blossom ring in the Prior B Necklace still
maintained the ancient Early Penglai language, but Anglic was the
common tongue in most middle region systems like Arkab Prior. Gus was
sure that Yu-linn could switch to perfect Anglic if necessary. Max, who
was in wig mode, reared up on Gus’s head and started to insult
the hi-grav human in the ancient tongue.
"Caow zhen shi dehe—"
"No, leave it, Max; I can handle this guy. Look, Yu-linn, we
both have contracts with thrill recording media megacorps, right? Come
on who are you with? Novamedia?"
"Me, I am recorded by InfiniteWorlds. You see the logo here, no?"
"Right. Now if you catch it-" Gus was using the euphemism for a
sport related death-" They’ll just add that little bit of
recorded sensation into the mix when they reconstitute you. You will
never know the difference."
Chuntering unintelligibly the big Penglaian moved off to rejoin his
team.
. Glittering as the star Prior B shone through the framework, the
half-built Ring habitat rotated steadily. Today the Minimum Power Craft
Challenge Race would be routed through the open carbon buckytube
lattice.
A hundred kilometres from the new habitat the first five racing craft
were ready, linked by a series of branching, slowly rotating tethers to
a large counterweight. Soon, the tether would rotate faster, then
release the craft towards the ring. They would intercept the ring at a
relative speed of one hundred fifty kilometres per hour, fragile
projectiles with no means of propulsion but manoeuvred by manually
pumped gas jets.
Today there were three races, the first one mostly featherweight dwarf
pilots, who had smaller, faster craft, but did not compete against the
heavier classes as the thrusts involved were so different.
The second race was for lowgrav ring dwellers; tall people of New
Martian and Iotan race that had emigrated to the cosmopolitan Necklace,
on rings like Syrtis and Carter with particularly slow rotation.
One of the New Martian pilots was killed in a collision with the
latticework, and would need to be reconstituted from her backup and the
InfiniteWorlds Media thrill recording of her last moments.
Finally Gus, Yu-linn, the other Scrabo pilot Lesöva
Zubenelshamali, the Colbiornsen 6Trievor and Bourgatevsk from Novgorod
ring were taken to their flimsy ships by the fluorescent orange race
marshal bots.
Max and other companion robots floated nearby, excluded from the race.
Only the strongest competitors were expected to perform the flight
weave, emerging for a second time through the lattice. After Ye Han,
the great Penglai pilot managed it in 9899, everybody in the strongest
class was expected to do the second weave. Many could not. Ye Han
however was now retired and living in Anse.
Inside the tissue thin craft, Gus strapped himself onto the seat of the
pedal assembly, called the
Race controller-
"Gienah Cis ready"-
and waited until the overmarshal gave the signal to start the race.
~Standby - standby - power rotation commences now-* it said.
The great counterweight started accelerating, rotating the entire
tether assembly with the five lightweight craft at the far end moving
at a much greater speed. After three rotations Gus and the other racers
were pulling more than a standard gee outwards.
~Standby for release- three, two, one, now-*
And they shot off the ends of the tether, directly towards the edge of
the moving ring.
For twenty minutes they approached the huge open latticework ring floor
from beneath, pedalling with hands and feet, priming the gas jets,
filling the reservoirs from a trailing loose balloon of inert nitrogen.
As they were in zero gee the sweat stuck to their faces and bodies, or
scattered around inside the craft, and Gus had a soft towel pad rigged
up to rub his face on periodically so that he cold see. Now the
manometer showed that he had enough overpressure to perform his
flightweave, so he allowed a little thrust from the rear jet to speed
himself up slightly.
Ahead Yu-linn was already expending pressure and getting away from him.
Now he was starting to feel the burn, and yelled into the damp air-
"Yaaaaghhhh!"
The oxygen mix in the cabin was constant and he had to rely on his own
movements to ensure sufficient air circulation to avoid carbon dioxide
pooling around his head.
The Latticework came up fast, four hundred kilometres wide, and curving
away from them. - they approached almost at a tangent, but Gus knew
well that the view would be very different from the point of view of
the ring. He knew, having been a spectator from various half built
rings many times, that the fragile craft would appear from under the
feet of the spectator, shoot through the open ring floor (which
eventually would support a kilometre thick rocky substrate and above
that, forests, lakes and cities). The craft would seem to trace a
curve, back down into the lattice, at over a hundred klicks per hour,
then out of sight would all pop their jets and reappear through the
lattice again three or four kilometres away. Approximately one in ten
would not make it through the second weave.
If the ring had been rotating at its full speed no-one would have made
it at all.
"Ghahhhhh!"
He gave a tiny burst on the vernier to aim into a diamond shaped hole
in the ring floor, adjacent to the one Yu-linn had just disappeared
into. A second burst to correct a slight spin. And he was through.
Suddenly he was flying over a landscape made up of netted cables, with
barely glimpsed spectators in vac-suits dotted around on perches above
the stars. Yu-linn was using his jets to dive down into the floor
ahead, which was only necessary because he was going too fast. Gus
could use his natural trajectory to just miss the weft of the cables up
ahead. On his left he glimpsed the green balloon of Lesöva’s
craft doing the same.
Under the world again, he discharged his main reservoir downwards,
expending nearly all the stored energy he had created by pedalling.
This gave him enough impetus to popup again through the lattice on a
second trajectory, and he pedalled again as fast as he could in case he
needed a final course change on his final dive.
More spectators flashed by at nearly two hundred kilometres per hour.
Over the top-
Into the weave-
Oh Binah-
An unexpected cross-cable, reinforcing the ring floor, barred his
way-no time to go round- less than a second before impact –
he shut his eyes-
A flash of red light behind closed lids- he was through.
Not dead, or reconstituted, but still in the race.
Fritz my backup! Somebody likes me! he thought.
The forward window was black- it seemed to be covered in something like
carbon. He cranked a rearfacing camera round and could see again, but
even that was streaked with soot.
Some interfering AI must have torched the crosspiece. By rights he
should be dead, and his backup on his way to a newly built body.
Instead, disqualification, no doubt. Not that he was going to win, that
must be the green Scrabo flier now beating the red Penglai to the
winning line. Well, good for her, he thought. Good for her.
- - -
It would appear the Minimum Power Board of Control adopted the use
of the meteor defence lasers to remove obstructions after that event,
and fewer competitors are killed each year
nowadays, the Bailiff observed.
Yes, and the sport has declined in popularity. Hah! But who was
controlling the laser at that time, and saved our man from
reconstruction?
The Librarian accessed the records, and they read them
together.
Ah. The record shows the defence drone #f4533-0006 overheated and
was destroyed while firing - it was only a dedicated subturing, no real
loss. At the time the popular theory said it had been a sports fanatic
robot, grasping an opportunity to protect human life.
Poor old #f4533-0006. Torn between enthusiasm and programming.
Still, if our theory is correct, it must have been subverted in order
to protect Gienah from physical destruction.
And I think we can deduce that his skin was already was
carrying the Trojan Horse program that nearly killed the Fluke,
otherwise there would be no point in saving it.
Searching her massive database again the Librarian selected a promising
tidbit.
Rather than examine every tedious second of this fellow’s
remembered life, perhaps this news item from five years before can
point us toward something interesting.
Hem. "Spelunker saved by mythical beast"- yes. Thank, you,
cousin. Let's see what his memory of that incident
can tell us-
