by Greg Bear
"With the transfer of space defense to the alliances, they may not be limited to advisement now; they may have decided to wield power. If so, then our subscribers may wish to withdraw from all dataflux markets for the next few months or even years. Something is moving bigger than mere individuals can withstand."
Even in the exhaustion, I shivered. "Have you heard of them?" I asked Lieh.
"Only as silly rumors," Lieh said. "But this is an expensive advisement net. Maybe thirty thousand legal subscribers. Supposedly, rash or silly statements are never made here."
"A small group mind," I said softly. "Above the common herd. Sending orders down through alliances, through nations. Who, most likely?"
"Heads of GEWA," Lieh suggested. "They have control of Solar System defense."
Dandy shifted in his seat. "I've seen and heard enough scary stuff for one lifetime," he said.
Unofficially, Mars was on wartime footing, and by the rules of the constitution, acting as President until Ti Sandra's return, I had extraordinary powers . . .
But even my extraordinary powers could not extend to Cailetet. We had to treat it as a sovereign foreign nation; we could declare war, of sorts, and we would, but it would be a war of finance. I worried about Stan and hoped that he was using all of his considerable intelligence to keep himself and his family safe.
Damage reports came rapidly now. Station by station, region by region, lists of dead, missing, accounts of damages, requests for emergency aid, all crowded the restored channels. Point One transferred the calls to the government net, and Lieh drew them from the legislative and presidential channel, condensing and editing.
So little was known about some regions, still. Dataflow had not been reestablished everywhere; some thinkers in key positions had apparently "died" and could not be brought up again.
Mars was screaming in pain; I suddenly specked hearing the collected information as one voice. I shied from that quickly. I could not afford such grim inspiration now.
On the shuttle flight to Many Hills, I tried to rest, but couldn't close my eyes for more than minutes at a time. Unexpectedly, I started feeling my enhancement again, and began calculating the adjustments necessary to move a mass the size of Phobos. I visualized in multiple layers of equations the functions which described transfer of co-responsibility for conservation of these quantities to a larger system . . . The entire galaxy. Nobody would miss it. We had become thieves in a vast treasure house.
I murmured aloud some of the enhancement's activities.
Dandy came into the darkened cabin with my dinner. "Excuse me?" he asked.
"My muse," I said. "I'm possessed by physics."
"Oh," he said. "What does 'physics' tell you?"
I just shook my head. "I'm not hungry," I said.
"Tarekh says if you don't eat he's bound by duty to force-feed you." He smiled thinly and set the tray down before me. I picked at the food for a while, ate a few bites, and returned to my efforts to sleep.
I must have succeeded for a short while, for Dandy and Lieh stood before me suddenly. Lien shook my arm gently. "Madame Vice President," she said, "it's official. She's alive."
I stared up at her, muzzy and confused.
"Ti Sandra is alive. We've had it confirmed."
"Thank you," I said.
"I have a message from the President," Lieh continued.
"She's been injured," Dandy said. "They have her in recovery at a secret location."
I took my slate, touched it to Lieh's, and they left me alone while I listened to Ti Sandra. My eyes filled with tears when I saw her face; I could barely discern the support equipment around her. She did not seem in pain, but her eyes lacked focus and that clued me. Her nervous system was under nano control.
"Little sister Cassie," she began. Her lips stuck together for a moment, muffling her words. Someone gave her a sip from a cup of water. Drops glistened on her lips. "I am so grateful that you carried this horrible burden the past week. Our little trick nearly turned true. We had a real shuttle crash on the slopes of Pavonis Mons. Special targeting for me. Paul is dead."
My tears spilled over then, and my entire chest gave a sharp lurch. I felt as if my body might suddenly fail, my heart give out. I moaned.
Dandy looked in briefly, then closed the door again.
"I've lost half my body, they say. My big, lovely body. I'll recover. We're growing new stuff right now. But no thinker controls, no computer controls — just twenty human doctors round the clock. I feel so greedy, taking so much when so many others are injured . . . But they won't let me near anything that could do any more harm. I don't feel any grief right now, my dear. I won't for a long time, they say.
"Cassie, I told Charles and Stephen to do it, right after my accident, before I was put completely under. I hope I was in my right mind. It does accelerate things, doesn't it? I asked, and they assured me they were ready. There was danger, but it could be done. Now it's done, and you must let them know how grateful we all are. There's so much more to do, though.
"You must act for me a while longer. You're more than my crutch now, Cassie. You must be me as well as yourself. I can't think as well as I should."
I wanted so much to collapse into being a little girl, irresponsible and protected by others. Worse, a feeling of absolute dread had rooted itself. I turned off the slate, halting Ti Sandra in mid-statement, and almost screamed for Lieh to come in. She came through the door, face white, and kneeled beside may seat.
"Find Ilya," I demanded, grabbing the back of her neck.
"We're trying," Lieh said. "We've been searching since dataflow started coming back."
"Please just find him and tell me!"
She nodded, squeezed my arm, and left the cabin again.
Ti Sandra resumed at my touch. " — think we have very little time now to put together a consensus. Elections are impossible. The Republic is still under threat, perhaps a greater threat than ever before. This Solar System is fatal. It's fatal for Mars. Ask Charles to explain. Everything is out of balance. We have used fear to fight the effects of terror. Listen: we're lambs, you and I. We're expendable for the greater good.
"I don't mean our lives, honey. I mean our souls."
The research center at Melas Dorsa had been abandoned at the beginning of the Freeze. Charles and Stephen Leander had departed in the Mercury; the others had been brought out by tractor, with as much equipment as could be salvaged. Pictures of the site confirmed the wisdom of keeping the Olympians on the move: the remains of all tunnels, the grounds of the station itself, had been uprooted as if by thousands of burrowing insects or moles.
Locusts. Earth denied planting them, so we broadcast evidence of their use across the Triple, another part of the war of nerves. Tarekh Firkazzie and Lieh suggested we consider Mars as forever "bugged," that all future planning allow for the emergence of hidden warbeiters. We would never be able to sweep the planet completely.
Firkazzie had grimly surveyed the remains of the Melas Dorsa laboratory and decided that it could never be occupied again. We had to locate a new site for an even bigger laboratory, to house an even bigger research effort.
From orbit, Charles suggested the site for a new laboratory. He remembered his father's search ten years past for ice lenses not quite sufficient to support large stations. Such a lens existed beneath Kaibab in Ophir Planum, the remains of a shallow dusted lake from a quarter of a billion Martian years past. It was unlikely, it was in a desolate and difficult land, it was far from any other station, and there was little chance of encountering locusts.
In just twenty-four hours, architectural nano delivered and activated by a squadron of shuttles made a solid, moderately comfortable preliminary structure, a hideaway near the edge of the plateau. For the time being, a few dozen people could stay there in seclusion. Later, the site could be expanded for the larger effort.
Charles and Stephen Leander returned from Phobos, bringing the Mercury down under cover of a thin dust storm from Sinai
. A few hectares of crushed and flattened lava served as a rough landing pad.
My shuttle landed at Kaibab hours after the Mercury's arrival. The terrain was hellish — sharp-edged rills and ancient pocked high-silica lava flows, every edge a knife, all depressions filled with purple vitreous oxidizing rouge. These were badlands indeed, worse than anything I had ever seen humans inhabit on Mars.
Following Lieh and Dandy, I stepped out of the shuttle lock and squeezed under the low tube seal. I saw Leander and Nehemiah Royce first. Then I turned and saw Charles. He stood at the end of the ramp. Gray surgical nano marked parts of his head and neck. He smiled and extended his hand. I shook it firmly and enfolded it with my other hand.
"It's good to see you, Madam President," he said.
"I'm not President any more, thank God," I said.
Charles shrugged. "You have the power," he said. "That's what counts." He gestured for me to lead the way.
As I passed Lieh, I grabbed her arm again and stared at her. Ilya was still missing.
"We'll find him," she said. "He's all right, I'm sure of it."
I ignored the reassurance. Tough as nails, I thought. Winston Churchill in the Blitz. Remember. Tough as nails.
The "tweaker" had been removed from the Mercury and sat on a bench in one corner of a cramped tunnel. I quickly looked over the zero-temp chamber with its gray, squat force disorder pumps, the Martian-made QL thinker and interpreter, cables, power supply.
Leander had arranged for tea and cakes to be served on a low table nearby. We sat on thick pillow cushions from the Republic shuttle. Besides Charles and Leander, only two other Olympians were present: Nehemiah Royce and Amy Vico-Persoff. Point One had dictated that for the duration of the emergency, no more than four Olympians be in one place at one time. The others were being housed at Tharsis Research University, under tight security.
"How much does it all weigh?" I asked Leander as Charles poured the tea.
"About four hundred kilograms," Leander said. "We pared it down considerably in the last version. Most of the weight is in the pumps."
"So tell me," I said, crossing my legs and warming my hands on the cup.
Charles poured his cup last and kneeled on his pillow. He glanced at me, I smiled, and his eyes darted away as if in shyness. He focused on the table and cakes. "We guessed what was happening right away. So did Ti Sandra." The words seemed to come with difficulty. I stared at Charles as if feeding a new hunger, feeling a mix of awe and intense affection.
"Ti Sandra instructed us to get to Phobos any way we could, with the tweaker, and take a trip."
"She knew you were ready to do this?" I asked. "I didn't."
"She guessed, or she just made a wild request . . . We certainly weren't ready for so much, so soon. We fueled the Mercury, moved everything we could on board. The most difficult part was guaranteeing a clean power supply for the pumps. We managed that. We were ready for take-off twelve hours after the Freeze began."
"What about coordinates, navigation?" I asked.
"We worked it out while waiting for further orders from Ti Sandra. Stephen and I made up a working hypothesis on the relative position tweaks, worked out the momentum and energy descriptor co-responses and scaling, specified final position and state, stimulated the tweaker to access descriptors for every particle in Phobos, considered as a complete system ..."
"Charles had to hook himself into the QL," Leander said.
"Are you all right?" I asked Charles.
"I'm fine," he said. "They all did good work. Nobody knew everything except Stephen and myself, but everybody felt the urgency. They all knew it was important."
"A lot of medals should be awarded," Leander said.
"Not least to Charles. He guided the QL," Royce said.
Charles shook his head. "I don't remember most of that. It'll come back in time. We had a pilot with us — "
"One more medal," Leander said.
"He had no idea what was going to happen. We told him without checking his security clearance."
"He's fine," Lieh said, seated outside the circle around the low table. "We debriefed him separately."
"Why did you link with the QL?"
"The interpreter wasn't getting across everything we needed. The QL began returning trivial results, nonsense strings. I think it was exploring the possibility of an alternate descriptor system. It found that more amusing than the real one. I steered it back to giving relevant results. The whole apparatus became coordinated then."
"It hummed," Amy said, shivering suddenly. "My God, it really hummed. I was afraid for them. I left the Mercury and they launched."
They all seemed a little in shock even now.
"What did it feel like?" I asked Charles.
"As I said, I don't remember exactly. We — the QL and I — were communicating and I made my requests and it pulled answers out of its non-trivial syncline searches."
"Answers?"
"Instructions, actually. To pass on to the tweaker. Without the QL, we might have been able to do the same thing — with about six months of high-level thinker programming. The QL cut the time down to a few hours. Within eight hours, we were secured to an old mining base in Stickney Crater on Phobos. We'd measured what we needed to measure, everything was still connected and coordinated. Ti Sandra told us to go. She'd been in an accident, and it took us days to establish communications with her again."
I had been left completely out of the loop, despite being in charge of the entire project. I didn't know whether I felt resentment, or relief, that Ti Sandra had shouldered all of this particular burden.
"She was in pain," Charles said, as if reading my thoughts. "I don't think she had time to tell you what was planned. When she first gave us the instructions, we didn't know we could do it. It was all very confused."
"I understand. You went to Earth. What was it like?"
"The stars changed," Charles said. "We felt something shift inside of us — very minor. We're still not sure what it was — gravitation, psychological response, we don't know."
"Everything combined, probably," Leander said.
"We looked through the shuttle ports, saw a sunrise limb, the sun much brighter and larger . . . Earth. We scrambled to check our distance and orbital path. We were right on the money, effectively, but about a hundred kilometers behind the projected orbital insertion point."
"We're still working on that," Leander said.
"We listened but broadcast nothing. About fifteen minutes passed before someone sent us a signal. It was from a private analog radio operator in
Mexico. He spoke to us in Spanish. He said, 'Hello, new moon. Where are you from?'"
We laughed. Charles smiled. "Our pilot said, 'Don't ask. You won't believe us.'"
"We started getting official signals a few minutes after that," Leander said. "We had instructions from Ti Sandra what to say. We broadcast the same words — over and over again."
"We were waiting to be annihilated," Charles said. "But that was pretty silly, I suppose. Some of the officials sounded terrified. Some behaved as if nothing at all had happened, the most routine diplomatic communications. We spoke to government negotiators and diplomats from the Eurocon, GEWA, GSHA, and half a dozen others. We told them all the same thing."
"What was that?"
"'Mars is under attack by unknown governments on the Earth. You have ten hours to pull back and remove the threat, or there will be a retaliatory response.'" Charles's voice sounded hollow as he repeated the statement, burned into memory.
"What response? What retaliation?"
"Ti Sandra told us to remotely convert the White House in Washington into mirror matter," Charles said. "A symbolic gesture."
Silence around the room.
"Could you have done that?" I asked.
Charles nodded. "Without very much precision. She did not tell us to have it evacuated first, but I was going to give some warning. A half hour or so."
I covered my mouth with my hand,
suddenly nauseated. The sensation passed. I closed my eyes and dropped my hand slowly. "You have all been exceptionally courageous," I said.
"Yes, Ma'am," Charles said, with a flippant salute that jarred me. I looked up at him, shocked and puzzled. Charles leaned forward, eyes narrowed as if in pain.
"We have followed our instructions. We've done everything we've been told, at the expense . . . almost ... of our souls. We've understood the strategic necessity, and we believe enough to give ourselves to this cause, but, Casseia, I could not give a flying fuck about medals or patriotism now. I am scared to death of what is going to happen next. We've had our fun, we've made a flying circus run with Phobos and given nightmares to children and adults all over Earth. Do you think it's going to end there? Do you think we have any time left at all?"
"No," I said.
"Good," Charles said, biting the word off and leaning back, has face red with emotion. "God damned good. Because I'm half convinced this is going to be the end of the human race. Impart some of your thinking to us, oh master of politics. We are children lost in the woods."
"So am I, Charles," I said quietly. "We all know what's going to happen now. Ti Sandra knows. They saw you move Phobos. They have the resources, in people and machines and laboratories, to duplicate your discoveries, given this clue. And as soon as they can do what we can do, it's just a matter of time before somebody strikes somebody else."
"It's too damned convenient," Leander said.
Charles agreed. "They may discover things we don't know yet."
"A strike can be fast, it can be total," I said, "and it can guarantee survival in an otherwise dicey situation."
