Metaplanetary (A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War)

by Tony Daniel

  It was in this hearing that Breadwinner made an offhand comment about the possibility of the Met. Enraged by Hofink’s scoffing, Breadwinner proceeded to build a convincing case for the Met in an extemporaneous tirade (Breadwinner’s temper was legendary). At the end of the hearing, Hofink yanked Breadwinner’s engineering license, but several influential politicians in opposition parties were watching the webcast, and, in the following year, a combination of the Anarchy, State, and Utopia parties swept the ECHO Alliance away in the planetary elections. Breadwinner, a longtime Anarcho-libertarian, was given Hofink’s job.

  Beginning construction on the Met was not as simple as selling a car and building a bridge on Earth. Breadwinner proved up to the task, however. Within ten years, she had cajoled and flattered politician after politician into providing the necessary funds to complete the space tethers and to begin construction of the Aldiss, the first radial-like cable that would connect the Earth and the Moon. In another ten years, the Aldiss was complete, and was a complete success. Initial construction began on the Diaphany. The year was 2475.

  Breadwinner continued in her job until her retirement in 2511, coincidentally the year of Raphael Merced’s birth. She took the position as the director of the newly established Breadwinner Labs within the first Met bolsa to be constructed on the Diaphany, Apiana. It was twenty years later at Breadwinner Labs that a young engineer named Feur Otto Bring, who suffered from incurable Tourette’s Syndrome, would obtain his first internship in nanotech construction techniques. Bring would soon be fired by Breadwinner after questioning her parentage during a laboratory dispute. Bring would then end up at Bradbury University on Mars, where he eventually met Raphael Merced, and the grist as we know it today was invented.

  Twenty-six

  “The situation at the hospital has gotten a lot worse, hasn’t it?” Sherman was out of the virtuality, back in his apartment. He spoke to the walls of the spire, and Dahlia’s voice answered from a speaker.

  Dahlia’s voice was the same smoky alto, with the same cold delivery. Since the divorce ten years before, Sherman had kept in sporadic touch with his ex-wife. They shared two sons, after all, although both children were long gone to their separate fates. It was the death of Teddy, the eldest, that had led to the breakup between Sherman and Dahlia. When Teddy died, Sherman’s normal irascible nature had become, for a time, absolutely odious. Repulsive. It had certainly repulsed Dahlia.

  “There’s a huge crush of incoming patients at the hospital,” she said. “Broca grist breakdown in all the patients. There are sixty . . . no, sixty-two people who have come down with the malady. And that’s just those who have been brought in by someone.”

  “Communications warfare,” Sherman said to his ex-wife through the merci.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You attach riders to incoming information. Viruses. In the more sophisticated scenarios, you let them build up to a certain critical mass. And then something triggers them, either internally or externally.”

  Sherman bit his lower lip, frowned, touched his chin once more. There was definite real stubble developing there. Maybe it was time to regrow the beard. Shaving was a pleasure he perhaps would not have time for.

  “The original personality is erased,” he said.

  “I can’t believe it’s come to this, Roger,” she finally said. “I can’t believe anyone is capable of it.”

  “Believe it,” he said.

  “Your people . . . you arrogant . . . I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say such a thing. I know you’re not like that, despite everything . . . that you would never—”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Sherman replied. “And I hope that you can get used to the knowledge.” He took a breath, buttoned his jacket, getting ready to return to the base. “You see, there is nothing I won’t do to protect those whom I’m sworn to.Nothing . War is horror. Complete, unmitigated horror. That horror is my business. Bringing that horror back to my foe. Causing him to understand the extent of it, the completeness of what he has wrought. I’ve never thought otherwise. I hope you and I . . . I hope—”

  “Well then,” Dahlia replied. “I guess we’d both better get back to our jobs.”

  Sherman nodded. “Yes.” He wanted to apologize. For something. For everything. He might never speak with her again. Things were going to get that bad. He knew they were.

  “Roger?” Dahlia said.

  “Yes?”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Stop this madness.”

  “I will try.”

  This time Dahlia signed off before he did. And that was that. He would do as she asked. It was as clear a duty as any other.

  His off-duty time was over—it was going to be over for a long, long time, Sherman suspected. He made his way back to his hopper. Within minutes, he was springing into action over the spires of his city and into the idiocy that it was his job to somehow hold at bay.

  Twenty-seven

  Despacio slipped into his brown study. It was not really a study, and it was not really brown, but that was what he called it. He was a thing not of flesh and blood, and he did not feel the need to sustain the illusion when he was alone. He imagined this place, his special place, might seem to a flesh-and-blood human like a swim in a still, muddy lake. There were “regions” of warmth, and “regions” of cold, and a bottom that wasn’t really a bottom at all, but something shifting that was never the same “shape.” Of course he had no way of knowing what swimming in a lake might actually feel like.

  He considered many things, all at once. He was transcribing a piece of his for violin. He thought of who might play it. For a moment, he considered making it impossible for the human fingers to perform. But that would be a trick, and Despacio had long ago dispensed with tricks of that kind. Besides, somebody would probably figure out how to do it. It seemed to him that he had lived a long time. There were many reflections of him in many possible worlds who had died so that he might live. Quantum evolution of artificial intelligence, one of the programmers had called it. But Despacio did not consider these reflections as flawed. And he did not really think they were dead. They were inside him, membranes stacked one on top of another and rolled so tightly that they resembled a single line, a single entity. But he felt their potentiality, the infinite possibility within him. All those lives waiting to come to life in his music.

  He was writing a new piece. It was a simple cycle of songs, taking for text some of the poems of the American Emily Dickinson. Her verses fit precisely into the signature of ancient church hymns, the common time. He was enjoying working with the simplicity and the deceptive grace of that form. What was coming out of his “pen,” though, was an eerie series of melodies that frightened Despacio, though he did not know why. He did not believe in ghosts, but he believed in something like them when he was working on his cycle.

  And Despacio was thinking of his pupil, Claude Schlencker. The young man was devoted to music, and there was music somewhere in his soul—but how to bring it out? Perhaps Schlencker was best suited to remaining a listener for the rest of his life. He had good taste and an excellent ear. But Claude wanted so much more.

  How am I to give it to him, Despacio thought, without breaking the man into pieces? There was something intense—no, something profoundlydisturbed —in Schlencker. Did he even want to bring the music out of the young man? Would it truly be a service to the world? But he could not control that. The world and Schlencker would make of one another what they would make. The young man had fanatical discipline. If it were going to be a contest, Despacio pitied the world.

  Schlencker appeared for his next lesson on time as usual. Despacio had settled on his “Ben Johnston” plaid and jeans outfit as his standard representation while he worked with Schlencker on composition. The young man was making rapid technical progress, as he always did. He’d even turned in a couple of pieces that reflected some emotion—irritation in one, and a trace of . . . not anger, in the
other. Something vigorous and ill content. But for the most part Schlencker was missing the point over and over again. And Despacio could no longer blame it on a lack of skill or mental organization.

  Schlencker sat down, winding himself into the chair as if he were a wood screw. Despacio sank into the chair across from him. He waved a finger, and a pair of keyboards appeared on the table, one for each of them. Then Despacio had a second thought, motioned, and the keyboards disappeared.

  “Mr. Schlencker,” said Despacio, “tell me a joke.”

  “What?” Schlencker had, much to Despacio’s pleasure, dispensed with the ‘sirs.’ ”

  “Something funny.”

  “Ajoke joke, you mean?”

  “Yes, Claude—” This was Despacio’s version of ‘sir’—to use Schlencker’s first name. “—a joke. The best one you know.”

  “I . . . I can’t think of one.”

  “Surely you know at least one joke?”

  “I’m sure I do, but I can’t think of one.”

  “Nothing that strikes you as humorous? An observation?”

  “No.”

  Despacio motioned his own keyboard back. He played a short trill. He was happy when Schlencker immediately recognized it as Bach pastiche, and smiled. Despacio continued with his improvised copying of the master. Schlencker’s smile became a grin. Despacio motioned a keyboard for Schlencker.

  “Join me?”

  Schlencker thought for a moment, and Despacio gave him a cue. He entered in. They spent the rest of the lesson in wacky imitation.

  But Schlencker was ready for him the next time.

  “What did the composition program say to the programmer at its first recital?”

  Despacio groaned. He’d heard this one. And heard it and heard it.

  “Look, Ma, no hands,” Schlencker said perfunctorily.

  “Very funny,” Despacio said. “Now tell me about your mother.”

  “I haven’t got one,” the young man answered. “She left when I was little.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Not much. Is this important?”

  “Indulge me, Mr. Schlencker.”

  “She was . . . soft. Too soft. I kind of remember her as being like dough.”

  “Soft? And your father was hard?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “But now he’s dead.”

  “If you can believe your eyes,” Schlencker replied. “Of course,you haven’t got any.”

  “Now that was funny, Mr. Schlencker.”

  The young man sat back, nonplussed.

  “You’ve seen a psychologist?”

  “Yeah. I took some tests when I came to the gymnasium.”

  Despacio smiled slightly, tugged at his beard. “Did you ever tell the psychologist about how you like to hurt yourself?” he asked.

  Schlencker abruptly stood up. “What? Have you been spying on me?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Schlencker. Sit. Just a lucky guess.”

  “How the hell could you guess something . . . like that?”

  “We’ve been working together for over a year.”

  “Working. That’s all. Hey, how did you know my dad was dead?”

  “Now thatwas in the dossier they gave me.”

  “Oh.”

  Despacio leaned back in his chair and considered his pupil. “Do you realize,” he said, “that you could very well live to be five hundred years old with the new treatments? Some people—the lucky ones—are already five hundred or more. But now, just about everyone will be. I, on the other hand, am indefinite. But the point is, both of us are going to be around a very, very long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you suppose, Mr. Schlencker, that we will keep from going mad?”

  “Mad? Crazy mad?”

  “Crazy mad.”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “I have a theory.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you interested?”

  Schlencker was quiet for a moment, then said, “I guess.”

  “Music,” said Despacio.

  “Do you mean us, personally?”

  “I mean everybody.”

  “People will have to listen to music?”

  “To keep from drifting off. To remember how to feel. To remember how it feels to think clearly and with true feeling.”

  “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

  “When you are five hundred years old, your father will have been dead for four hundred and eighty-two years.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Despacio leaned forward and motioned on the table’s keyboards.

  “Do you hate your father, Mr. Schlencker?”

  “Yes,” Schlencker replied. “Yes, I do.”

  “Well then. Hatred. You have hatred. Maybe we can find something else. But we’ll start with the hatred. You’d better never forgetthat if you ever want to write music,” said Despacio. “Now show me what you brought in today.”

  Twenty-eight

  from

  Quatermain’s Guide

  The Advantages of the Strong Force

  A Guide to and History of the Met

  by Leo Y. Sherman

  The Science of the Met

  Although the theoretical possibility of space tethers was known in the twentieth century, the materials sciences were unable to produce a composite with the required tensile strength. Buckyballs had been invented, but superstrong and superelastic matter had to await the full working out of the principles of quantum electro- and chromodynamics, and the nanotech revolution which began in the 2300s and is continuing to this day.

  By the early 2400s, nanotechnologists had united buckyball constructions with superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) to create a reproducible molecular chain that displayed quantum behavior on the macro level. Buckyball SQUIDs behave like the individual components in an atom—that is, electrons, protons, neutrons, and the protons’ and neutrons’ constituent quarks. They do this by creating a kind of “resonating chamber”—much like an organ pipe. As sound resonates in a musical pipe, particles take the form of standing waves in a SQUID.

  The most important behavior that the nanotechnological engineers were able to produce, at least in regard to the Met, is the strong nuclear force.

  The strong interaction is the force that holds the nucleus of an atom together even though the clump of positively charged protons wants to blow apart, since like electrical charges repel. The strong force is actually a by-product of the color force of quarks, which make up the protons. Normally, the strong force operates only in a strictly prescribed distance, which is, naturally, close to the diameter of an atomic nucleus (about 10– 13centimeters). But at that range, the strong force is 100 times stronger than the force of electromagnetism. This means, in principle, that it is 100 times stronger than the chemical bonds that make up most ordinary construction material. In a chain of buckyball SQUIDs, the strong force is manifested as a “particle” that is 0.5 centimeters across—visible to the naked human eye. By the mid 2400s such chains were being regularly produced in the laboratory.

  The strong force has one more peculiar property that is essential in Met construction. It does not obey the inverse square law of both electromagnetism and gravity. Within the range of the strong force, quarks that are farther away are actually pulled more strongly than quarks that are closer together. You can picture it as a rubber band connecting two particles. The more you stretch the rubber band, the harder it pulls the particles. When the particles are close together, the rubber band is slack. It is this property of the strong force, operating on a macro level, that gives the Met cables their ability to bend without breaking. Torque forces that would easily separate material made of mere chemical bonds cannot overcome the strong force manifested by the buckyball SQUIDs, and the Met holds together.

  In fact, there is no known force generated by the turnings of the planets that is even close to pushing the Met’s structural tolerances. If you
live or travel in the Met, you are as safe as you are on the surface of a planet (and they are, themselves, held together, on the level of the atomic nucleus, by the strong force of nature).

  Twenty-nine

  After two years of composition work with Despacio, Claude Schlencker’s concerto took the first prize in the Met-wide competition for new composers. Its subtitle was “Meditations in Red.” He wrote it in the key of Charm, with several quick transpositions to Strange and Bottom.

  Despacio was the first person to whom Claude broke the news. His lessons had continued past Claude’s graduation from Asap Gymnasium and into his enrollment in Suisui University on Mercury.

  “It’s going to be performed,” Claude told him. “Here. In the Solar Hall in Bach.”

  “By a virtual orchestra?” said Despacio.

  “No,” said Claude. “By bodies.”

  Despacio looked sad for a moment. “I see,” he said. Then he brightened. “It’s quite good, you know, Mr. Schlencker. Better than anything in a long while.”

  “I owe it all to you.”

  “Do you?”

  Claude blinked, then sat down in his usual chair. That is, what he imagined to be his chair, even though it was only so much coding. Just as Despacio was.

  “No,” he said. “Not all.”

  “Let us always be honest with one another, Mr. Schlencker.”

  Claude was silent for a moment, and then he decided to ask the question he’d been wanting to ask for some time now.

  “Do you have a first name, Despacio?”

  “Yes,” said the composer. “Yes, I do.”