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Betrayals: tenby Steve Bowers |
Zero minus four hundred thirty three years
Sunrise over the edge of the ring. Living under the lamp at the centre of Rendell Ring, Auguste rarely saw the star that was his local sun, and was always surprised at the brilliance that met his eyes. In fact he was observing the star on an internal window display, patched directly to the visual centre of his brain via a long-implanted neural port. Everyone had them, bar a few primitivists. The view was set to replicate naked eye visibility – Gus thought he would try the simplest option first.
As soon as he knew that he had accumulated enough credit for this holiday out-system he had invested in an education course in astronomy. The amount of available detail was so vast he had to store most of it in yet another dedicated implant, and he thought that it wouldn’t be long before he ran out of space for those (this one was in his right forearm).
As the spacecraft was describing a tangential trajectory now, he could see the stars and the Milky Way without the annoying rotation of the Ring. From the surface of Rendell, and from every other ring he had visited, the stars rotated once every ninety minutes (longer on the New Martian habitats, which rotated more slowly in order to replicate a lower gravity world). Much of the time, the bright companion star Arkab A described a hoop in the sky as well, drowning the stars on that side of the sky and turning it pale blue.
But now he could see only still, bright stars, when he directed his point of view towards deep space.
“Every one of them,” he muttered.
Max was curled around a handrail nearby, two tufts of fronds drifting in the zero gee.
“What. What are you talking about, Gus?”
“The stars. Every one you can see with normal human-level vision has been colonised, now that the Objectivist Probe has reached Rho Cassiopeiae. And all the little invisible ones in between. Yellow dwarfs. Red
dwarfs, brown dwarfs. Almost two billion now, they reckon.”
“I’ve never bothered to look it up. But if you like, my trusty little internal search engine can find out the exact number for you-“
“ No, don’t bother-“
“too late- 1,740,336,891 stars (including Brown dwarfs) claimed as colonised by Terragen entities (disclaimer- many systems which have only been visited by automated probe craft are included in this total; under the Tragadi accords these robot probes must be followed by more extensive development within 1000 years or the claim is void)”
“Corrupt my backup, Max, but don’t give me any more info- I’ll be forced to find somewhere to file it…my head is bursting with that Astronomy didaxy I’ve just downloaded as it is.”
“Is that why you were muttering to yourself then, meatbag? Was the data leaking out of your mouth?”
As he was wearing a low cut vest, the tattoos on Gus’ body were hardly hidden at all, and several pairs of secateurs appeared out of the current spiral pattern he was wearing. The secateurs opened and closed, hungrily. It became apparent that some of the spirals were morphing into curled up brushbots. In the image the jaws of the secateurs moved closer to the finest branchlets of the tattoo brushbot images and poised, ready to cut.
“Which is your least favourite branch, Max?”
“Okay, okay, no more unsolicited information for your amusement, Gus- I don’t want to have to clear up the mess when your brain goes pop.”
Propelled by the mass driver on the rim of Rendell Ring, and by the rotation of the ring itself, the Starliner Yue moved away rapidly but did not ignite its powerful drive until it was well away from the habitat. A blast of fusion excited by a little antimatter finally began to accelerate the Yue toward the distant companion star, Arkab A. Even at a distance of 340 billion miles it was dazzlingly bright. How the Negentropists managed to live so close to the star was a puzzle and a wonder to Auguste Gienah, the novice space tourist.
One that could be easily solved by a properly phrased question to his new database (or even to smug Max, now hanging straight down in the 0.8 gee acceleration).
But dammit. He was going to savour the wonder and mystery for a little while longer.
Or perhaps just dip into a virch for a couple of days.
* * *
Gus put the trowel back in its sheath and stumbled down the hill. The Perpendicular warrior wasn’t dead yet, but she wouldn’t be following him in a hurry. Somehow everybody else in this battle seemed to run faster than he could, unless they were wounded. If the foundation trench was undefended he could rejoin his cohort, moving rapidly away from him halfway across the Contested Redevelopment. But that was a vain hope, he knew- the Perpendiculars always made good use of cover and concealment.
It would be a good day to die for the cause of the Romanesque Empire, he told himself, but of course he didn’t believe it. For several reasons, one of which he couldn’t quite remember right now.
There. A pile of stone architraves, inverted, led up like a ladder and was matched by a similar pile on the other side of the trench.
Easy to jump that, Gus thought, in Barzelona’s low gravity, and be out of reach of any Perp in the trench; even one with a long handled adze or pickaxe.
He staggered up the steps –
Warning energy low
And jumped over the gap, as a black object flew up and wrapped a cord around his ankle.
Damn! Plumb bob! he thought, and was dragged down into the trench to be faced by a Perpendicular with a wild mane of black hair and beard, who was holding the biggest, sharpest bradawl Gus had ever seen.
“Prepare to meet your architect,” said the Perp, then, in a familiar voice.
“The Neggie Sun has just gone out.”
Gus was still trying to comply with the instruction in the bearded man’s first sentence, when the second one came along to drag him back into reality. The real reality. The reality of a space tourist on a liner, which was still accelerating between Arkab Prior B and Arkab Prior A. A tourist who was watching a warrior with a black beard morph into a black bushbot.
* * *
“You would have a little less trouble when you joost out of virches if you didn’t choose the total belief option,”
Max said sarcastically.
“It is something to pass the time, any way-“he said swallowing hard, ”I enjoy the disorientation effect- call it a guilty pleasure.
Now, what is so important?”
“We have travelled beyond the edge of the Prior A sunbeam- now you can see the Swarm clearly for the first time.”
Even now Gus declined to use his database or search engine to find out what Max was taking about.
He wanted to appreciate the phenomenon without prejudice, without foreknowledge. No doubt everybody else on the liner knew what to expect, but Gus was in the fortunate position of being ignorant of the wonders of the companion star. He was aware of many wonders in the Mutual Progress empire, which were often referred to in advertising and in edudrama: the Rotovators of Djed, (the Rotovators were actually on their itinerary as tourists, after their short trip into Negentropy space), Kepleria, Gordelpus ring, Urban cloudscapes.
The secrets of the Negentropy alliance took a little more digging to find out. A little more datamining he had never been bothered to do.
The external astro-cam that he accessed sent a visible light image to his mind via his implants. Where the viewfinder indicated Arkab Prior A should have been was a visible red sphere, instead of a brilliant point of light. Looking more closely, but without using magnification, he saw a black band around what was presumably the equator.
Hmm. We have travelled out of the sunbeam, Max had said. That means the star he had been seeing in the sky since his childhood was really some kind of beam, perhaps shining through a hole in a screen of some sort. You can see the Swarm. That must be this red thing, a spherical Dyson swarm. The A1A Swarm people called it in the Necklace, on the few occasions the talked about it at all. It must be huge to be visible from here without magnification.
It would be red because the bright, white starlight of Arkab A would be absorbed by the swarm, which consisted of quadrillions of tiny, orbiting, light-absorbing craft. This energy would be used for computation and perhaps converted into stored energy. Even the most efficient methods of doing either of those things would give off waste heat, which would be visible as red and infrared light.
This was the Negentropist philosophy: the stars were wasteful of energy, sending it off to all directions of the universe at once and losing it for ever. Like squirrels, the Negentropists wanted to save as much energy as they could in huge exotic matter batteries so that they could continue to live into the far future, when all the stars had died. Perhaps they could spare a little to beam at the poor wasteful Progress habitats over at the Necklace- they did not like to steal anything, not even starlight from their neighbours.
“Oh, yes, Max. A Dyson swarm.”
“Don’t bullshit me, you just looked it up.”
Using a small amount of magnification, the beautiful blue planet of Santos was clearly visible against the red sphere of the massive A1A swarm, lit as it was by another of the narrow sun beams. The leg of their journey between Arkab Prior B and Prior A was the longest part of their whole trip, taking 92 days at 0.8 gee accelerating, then the same length of time decelerating. They would be away just over two years in total.
Gus decided to dip into the Database at last, and found that Arkab Prior A sends narrow beams to every star within thirty light years, and to several more distant systems, to compensate for the loss of starlight caused by the swarm. On all those worlds the star is visible exactly as it always has been. The mechanism for emitting the star beams was a modified phase-array~
~klick~ blah blah boring stuff~
~the world of Santos is dedicated to the practical exploration of perfection in a human self governing context, and has historical or ongoing examples of many diverse forms of government.
“Might be interesting, Max…I never really imagined the Negents being complicated or having any kind of political discussion at all.”
“It is supposed to be one of their tenets, apparently.” Max
said.
“What is?”
“Arriving at an end result via many different paths is desirable, they reckon. Don’t ask me why.”
There were two other bright sparks of planets visible around the Swarm, both lit by sun beams, both supplied with a comfortable amount of heat and light despite their different distances from the invisible sun.
Datacheck- (he dug into his implanted memories)
Al-Masu'di 10500 km diameter, Christaller 10100km diameter,
perfect earth-like worlds manufactured from ancient gas giants. The planetary engineering was a remarkable achievement, even compared to the Mutual Progress projects.
The Negentropists saw the creation of the habitable planets as a secondary benefit, a spin-off from the creation of the energy-storage of the Swarm, rather than an aesthetic end in itself.
Nevertheless, these planets were beautiful. Gus had yet never stood on a rocky ball and felt real gravity in his life, and he was enthusiastic about it.
“I don’t know why you are so mardey, robot. I’m looking forward to seeing a real horizon.”
“The Necklace engineers take thousands of years to make comfortable
habitats for you humans to run around in, and you start salivating over a real
planet. These planets are no more real than the Necklace, skinbag, and they are
still being cooled down inside by superconductors so as not to burn your
delicate feet.
"But since you ask, o master, I do feel uneasy in my innermost
processing pile somehow. Tell me the truth - you didn’t order me to come with
you, or hypnotise me, or anything, did you? Or are we both the victims of some
kind of advertising virus? For myself, I have never wanted to see the galaxy
except in simulation, thank you very much. Then all of a sudden you come up with
this madcap scheme and off we go to Tau Ceti via Santos.”
“I swear that I haven’t given you any kind of imperative, or invoked the Second law or any shit like that. How do you hypnotise a robot, anyway? Is that the sort of game you play with those little tin friends you never introduce me to?”
“Well, it must be high-tech AIdvertising then. You can’t fight expensive memetic engineering. I feel like an old slave robot from the information era.”
Santos had a single beanstalk, or space elevator, to provide easy access to the surface from orbit. That is one advantage of the rotating habitat- space is just the other side of the ring floor, or the atmosphere wall. As long as you can position your ship stationary with respect to one or the other of those, you just dock and walk through the wall or up through the floor. With a planet, you have to land through the atmosphere, annoying the inhabitants, or come down the elevator.
Which was going to take hours.
