“I haven’t seen her either,” I admitted distractedly as I extended the suction duster and applied myself to the nooks and crannies behind the air ducts. I decided not to share what Deacon Dennett had told me: that Lady Cybelle was lying in the sarcophagus in the sepulcher, engaged in the lengthy process of binding two-thirds of her body mass in new and unimprinted mechanocytes into service—a gleaming chromed skeleton lying in a seething vat of iridescent foam as her marrow techné bid for control of the gigantic infusion of new indentured flesh.
“So where do you grow the Fragiles?” I asked, trying to make polite conversation.
“I incubate,” she declared proudly, reaching her three arms around the mound of bedding piled over her abdomen. “I incubate them inside me! I have four uteri, you know.”
“You—” It took me a while to realize what she’d said, and then another few moments to regain control of my mouth. “You incubate? You mean you actually give live birth to Fragiles?”
“Yes, that’s my job! I’m a manufacturing host for the New Flesh. It’s the highest secular calling in our order!”
“I didn’t know that was even possible,” I said, overcome by a moment of nauseous fascination.
“Oh, it’s quite simple! Modern people were originally developed from the old Fragile kind, I’m just backward compatible. It works just the way it used to before Creation, when there were only Fragile people—I can grow two Fragiles in each uterus, just like they used to grow inside each other! Except for the sex thing. That’s different, for us. When we’re ready to incubate, the Priestess of the Holy Inseminatory secretes a blastocyte and injects it into my—”
I screened it out, scrubbing hard at a stubborn stain on the ceiling. Some things are not for the squeamish. How a person made of mechanocytes could incubate and give birth to Meat People might be a miracle of nanoscale engineering, but I didn’t really want to know the details. Although, once I thought about it, the first mechanocytes were created by modifying the old Fragile ’cytes—eukaryotes, they were called—to add machine-phase organelles to control their inner processes: So perhaps the Fragile weren’t so unlike us, if you stripped us of every intelligently designed tweak that makes it possible to survive in this life-hostile universe. But that wasn’t the icky bit. The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and walked around on their own legs. I have heard of some bizarre vocations in my life, but seldom anything quite so disgusting.
I checked the sixteen cables that suspended her bed and kept her from crashing to the deck under acceleration, while she prattled on about the joy of pregnancy, until the talking box decided I wasn’t working fast enough. “Krina, please proceed to Sarcophagus Two, Holy Sepulcher of the Body of our Fragile Lord. Attention: consumable status of Sarcophagus Two is off-line. Please inspect immediately and replenish as indicated. Then report to Deacon Dennett in the vestry.”
“Sorry, got to go,” I told the Gravid Mother apologetically.
She blinked at me. “Oh, really?” She seemed to have completely forgotten her initial indignation at my intrusion. “Will you come back and talk some more?” (She really meant, Will you be my audience? But I didn’t correct her.) “It’s been so lovely having you . . .”
“I’d love to,” I said, leaving out as long as you stay off the subject of spawning. “But I’m needed elsewhere. Tomorrow—next day-shift cycle? Or when we’re under acceleration? By the way, do you have a name?”
“Tomorrow would be lovely!” She cocked her head to one side. “No, I don’t have a name. I might have had one once. But I’m not a who anymore, I’m a what.” She smiled beatifically. “I’m the Gravid Mother. The only one in Dojima System! Doesn’t that make me special?”
* * *
The stalker slowly swung on the end of her cable, falling toward the side of the chapel’s sanctuary with lazy grace. She waited patiently as the wall of irregular rocky blocks came closer. Vacuum lichens stained the gray, irregular faces of the stones with green and blue filigrees of tenuous life: the stained-glass windows of the nave (actually slabs of tinted aluminum oxide crystals, ruby and sapphire, held together by a fretwork of machined titanium rather than strips of lead) glowed from within, lustrous in the freezing darkness and knife-edge shadows cast by Dojima.
As the wall of the building approached, the stalker prepared for impact. Like most people, the outer layer of her skin was stippled with chromatophores—specialized mechanocytes that could change texture and color at will, like the epidermis of an ancient Earth cuttlefish. Unlike most, the stalker’s ’phores were military grade: They could shift from purest black to brightest mirror, and their surface-texture options allowed them to extrude setae, gecko filaments that adhered to almost any surface via Van der Waals forces. As she splayed her fingers and the soles of her feet, the exposed skin puffed up and formed tiny whorls and ridges, ready for impact.
The chapel was still barely accelerating as she impacted the wall, landing on her feet with a sticky jolt. She allowed her momentum to carry her forward until she planted both hands firmly against the stones. The cable lazily coiled and fell away behind her as she allowed her feet to disconnect, extended her body, and slowly plastered herself against the wall.
The false stones of the chapel walls were bitingly cold. Vacuum is an insulator, but the background temperature was less than three degrees above absolute zero: The outermost surface of these ceramic-and-aerogel blocks had reached thermal equilibrium well below the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Luckily, aerogels barely conducted heat: She warmed what she touched. An observer with near-infrared eyesight would clearly see the slug trail of luminous warm patches that she left as she lowered herself hand over hand down the side of the wall until her feet came into contact with the outer walkway that formed a belt around the chapel at the joint between its pastoral and mechanical aspects—where a planet-based temple would touch the ground.
Here the stalker encountered a dilemma.
This far out from Dojima Prime, the equilibrium temperature of a body in direct sunlight was still rather cold. Although the stalker was better adapted to life in vacuum than her target was, her ability to operate indefinitely in such conditions was limited. If she ventured inside, she could reach her target but would risk detection. Whereas if she remained outside, she had the advantage of total surprise—but in another few hours she’d have to enter a sleep mode in order to conserve energy, and in any event she’d freeze solid if she stayed out for more than a handful of standard days. So the question was not whether to enter the chapel, but when and how.
In the end, the decision was easy enough. The stalker had some other useful subsystems: a watchdog timer, an accelerometer, and a differential inertial navigation system embedded in her inner ears. She laboriously worked her way around the circumferential walkway until she was in a position to inspect the air-lock vestibule. The cylinder gaped like an empty eye socket, dark and chilly but offering shelter from external inspection and easy access to the warm, heated interior of the chapel. Moreover, the doorway was relatively small—adhering to the inside of the air lock, she’d be safe from accidentally falling overboard in the event of unusual maneuvers. She crawled inside, glued herself to the ceiling above the hand crank that rotated the lock chamber, set her alarms, and fell asleep for an entire week, or until the lock rotated, or until the chapel commenced sustained acceleration—whichever condition arose first.
* * *
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.
My lineage matriarch, Sondra Alizond-1, was instantiated well over two thousand years ago in another star system (I forget which; the detail is unimportant). Her progenitors were a credit union and a gambling cartel: An aptitude for figures was called for, and a near-photogra
phic memory for facts and digits. When Sondra was twelve, nearly out of the crèche and her fourth body upgraded to proximate adulthood, she demonstrated her prowess by memorizing the value of pi to one hundred thousand decimal places; and indeed, to this day I can sum a column of numbers as fast as I can read down it.
(Yes, we have spreadsheets and calculating engines. But it helps to have a knack for figures. Without a sanity check, a calculator will lead you merrily astray, and you’ll never notice the error until your balance sheet doesn’t line up.)
Sondra worked hard, and within her first fifty years—thanks in part to an admirably inspired put option—she was able to pay off the interest on her education and construction debt and, furthermore, buy out the intellectual property rights to her lineage and invest her remaining equity in a starship cooperative.
An accountant. Signing up as a crew member aboard a new interstellar colony expedition. Why would she do that, you might ask? And more importantly, why would they want her?
Starships are all work and no fun. First, you toil for decades to raise capital and establish the debt framework and interest-repayment structure that will fund your venture. Even in this day and age, with thousands of years of experience to draw upon, building and launching a starship is one of the most eye-wateringly expensive activities anyone ever engages in: The cost is measured in planetary GDP-years, and will take the new colony centuries to pay off.
Next, you and your colleagues define a construction framework and (if possible) buy an off-the-shelf design and hire astronautical architects to refine it, abolishing whatever weaknesses and flaws caused earlier starships on similar missions to founder in flight. Then, while this is going on, you select a destination—one where no starship has gone before, and which no starship is en route to. (The last thing you want is to arrive as a claim jumper, or to be bushwhacked by same. Conflict is a negative-sum game, and fighting for ownership of a wild and untamed asteroid belt is the fastest way imaginable to squander the resources you brought along at vast expense in order to establish your new demesne, condemning yourself to centuries of grinding poverty, if not to a slow spiral into death.)
While doing this, you plan your mission profile. Commonest and cheapest is burn-the-boat: You fly to a new star system and dismantle the ship on arrival to provide the tools and equipment needed to build a colony. Rarer and vastly more expensive is the free-flight option: to create a new, self-perpetuating polity in eternal flight, able every few centuries or millennia to send out short-range expeditions to whichever star system its course is passing, who will in turn create colonies and repay the resources they consume by resupplying the mother ship. (New California was, and is, one of the latter.)
While all this is going on, you—the co-op member lineages, the families from which the crew are drawn, if you like—undertake strenuous training to learn all the myriad subspecialties you’ll need. With luck and goodwill, a dozen of your sibs can become proficient in different roles (butcher, baker, fusion-reactor maker). Then you need only take a single body and copies of your sibs’ soul chips, a library of traits and skills to merge at the other end. Needless to say, the internal lineage politics of deciding who should go and who should stay are fraught. The benefit is that a mission with only a thousand bodies can take ten or even a hundred thousand trained specialists along, creating extra bodies for them as and when it becomes necessary to have a full-time pair of hands devoted to the job rather than an understudy with strangely memorable dreams.
Finally, you fuel, equip, and crew the ship. Let us suppose it is a burn-the-boat mission. Your friends who stay behind fire up the gigantic array of fusion reactors and microwave beams that provide motive power during the fifty to a hundred years it takes the ship to accelerate to cruise speed. During acceleration, those of you who are along for the ride subject yourselves to the rigors of slowtime, your metabolic rate dropping to a hundredth of normal so that two standard years pass by in a subjective week. You had better trust your friends who crew the propulsion beams; if they falter or stumble into premature bankruptcy, your ship will drift for millennia between the stars, until resources run low, and you succumb to cannibalism or starvation.
Subjective years—centuries, to the outside universe—pass unnoted while you drift along at almost 1 percent of light speed. A nearby supernova, or a pea-sized granule of dirt (packing the energy of a small nuclear weapon) can be a death sentence for you and all your crew mates during this stage of the expedition. The work is hard, dirty, and never-ending—years of it, until you near the destination system and fire up the fusion reactors that provide power during deceleration. Finally, you and your comrades face further years and decades of hard work as you establish a colony in a star system that has never known life before.
Why would anyone bother with such a messy, arduous experience? And what use might a starship crew have for an accountant?
Sondra wasn’t just an accountant: She was a banker. More to the point, Sondra spent four of her first five decades working in the arbitrage and escrow department of a beacon-station bank—the beating, slow money heart of the economy of the star system where she was created. She was low in seniority within the organization, itself grown fat and sluggish as the gatekeeper of an entire star system’s worth of accumulated intellectual debt. To Sondra, the only way to rapidly acquire seniority was to start afresh, somewhere new and free from the presence of troublesome patronage-seekers. Luckily, she was both young and flexible enough to undergo the rigors of an interstellar voyage, and adventurous enough to welcome the challenge of setting up a new Slow Bank for a colony upon its arrival.
I’ve mentioned the basics of what happens when a starship arrives in a new system—the years of toil, the mapping and the mining and the manufacturing and finally the birthing of new crèchefuls of citizens and the emergence of a new and wealthy civilization. But many are unaware that if there is one thing that is vital to the long-term stability and prosperity of a colony, it is the creation of interstellar debt instruments by means of a new Slow Bank.
Without a Slow Bank, it’s not possible to trade across the gulfs of interstellar space-time. It takes power and expert labor to run an interstellar communications laser beacon—lots of both. Nobody will point a laser at a new colony and beam libraries of design templates and cohorts of expert soul dumps at them without an expectation of getting something in return. All colonies must of necessity go deep into debt in the decades after their foundation: It costs a lot of slow money to acquire the vital new technologies and skills it needs to plug unforeseen gaps. Only once its population has increased enough to support a local education, research, and development infrastructure—which can take centuries—can it aspire to a trade surplus. It’s far cheaper in the medium term to borrow slow money from the neighbors and use it to pay for vital skills and minds in trade, to build the infrastructure to (eventually) pay back the loans with interest. So there is good reason to set up a beacon as soon as possible after arrival and to transmit the we are here tokens to the neighboring system banks that will prompt them to acknowledge the existence of a new issuer that can create currency and act as a guarantor of the new colony’s debt. (A partner whose very identity is proven by the direction and distance from which their signal arrives. Telescopes in neighboring star systems can see through any attempt to lie about a bank’s physical location.)
By the time of her subjective tricentennial, Sondra Alizond-1 was a self-made trillionaire. In fact, as a board member of the Hector SystemBank, she was worth nearly a million slow dollars—a sum that beggars the imagination. Of course, it took a century of hard work for her to amass that fortune: first as a semiskilled crew member aboard the Andromache, then as a construction hand laboring the first colony habs to take shape in the inner belt of Gliese 581c4, then as a founder and planner of the first authentication handshake to take place between Hector Beacon and its neighboring star systems, once there were sufficient resources to spare fo
r construction of the first interstellar beacon transceivers . . . one would hesitate to call her life easy.
Which is why, I suppose, she invested much of her wealth in the New California, a vastly expensive permanent spacegoing ark. Like a stellar colony in its own right, an ark (a self-propelled world-ship with a population of millions) also needs a bank. Then, a couple of centuries later, long after she established herself as one of the ruling oligarchs of the spacefaring nation, long after she founded her estate on the shore of the Inner Sea . . . Sondra became bored with her comforts. And that’s when she started to sculpt her personality and study new skills, partitioning and editing her identity and spawning second-generation sibs—sisters like me.
* * *
Iwent directly from the Gravid Mother’s cell to the classical sarcophagus in which Lady Cybelle was enjoying her integrative metamorphosis. It was indeed running short of isotonic polyhexose solution and methanol: I saw to it, then attended to the various other chores dictated by my talking belt-side tyrant. In all I spent over twenty-eight hours scurrying around, tying down loose fittings and polishing the bones in the walls, on my own for the most part but occasionally sharing a chore with a silent, cadaverous partner.
While so engaged, I secured 406 items and cleaned 18 compartments, rooms, tanks, cells, and other storage spaces. I also had an opportunity to study Gould’s silent servitors. Father Gould had taken several of the Fragile skeletons and animated them by means of head-mounted sensors and compact motors wired into each joint. Just powerful enough to move in low gravity, and sized for human-body-scale tasks, it was an elegant solution to the shortage of unskilled hands—but one that required constant supervision, for the revenants lacked any onboard intelligence. They were no more than motorized husks, controlled by the will of a living taskmaster.
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