Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  “Ah, Krina.” He grinned at me, baring sharp incisors. “Thank you for making room for me in your doubtless busy timetable: We’ve been combing the city for you for days! We were extraordinarily worried, you know. Out of curiosity, may I ask how you evaded me at the port offices? And why?”

  “You’d have to ask Her Majesty. It wasn’t intentional on my part, I assure you.”

  “Her Majesty?” His voice rose to a squeak: “What does she have to do with this?” I could almost believe that Rudi was concerned for my safety. His sarcastic, abrasive exterior disguised a sentimental streak, as I had discovered over the past year. I would have found it cute if I had not been so obviously in his debt, or under his power. But now the tables were turned. I dropped into one of the chairs positioned to either side of the window. It looked out onto the sunlit subsurface, a rippling silver ceiling just above our heads that was toning toward emerald in the near distance. Occasional human or vehicular traffic drifted past, crossing the wide-open well that separated the hotel’s outer wall from the other dangling tentacles of the floating city core. “I followed you and Dent into immigration and was promptly hauled up in front of her and arrested,” I told him. “Was it your doing?”

  “Eh? No! Absolutely not.” Rudi managed to look guilty and worried simultaneously. “What did you tell them?”

  “They seemed to be interested in Ana’s disappearance. I believe I’m not allowed to say any more. There is a police investigation in progress. They let me go after I told them everything I knew—and after giving me a warning about not interfering in a criminal investigation.” I shivered slightly.

  “The investigators think she was abducted or killed?” Rudi stared at me in unconcealed dismay. “I had hoped—” His expression of frustration involved complex nose-wrinkling and ear-twitching—“for something better. Feh. Abducted or killed, and they don’t even know which.” Another edgy twitch. “Feh.”

  “It’s all right for you,” I pointed out. “I’ve lost a close relative!” And my six-month study collaborator. Not to mention the person to whom I was supposed to be delivering—but I wasn’t supposed to even think about that. The less remembered the better. “You’re just out by one insurance policy!”

  Rudi hissed at me. “It was a very expensive policy.” For a moment, I saw a flash of anger, and I recoiled: He becalmed himself almost immediately. “We sold it to her for little more than goodwill, Krina. Because—I believe it’s safe to tell you this—I very much wanted her to succeed in uncovering her treasure trove.”

  I gaped at him. “Her what?”

  Rudi cocked his head to his left and stared at me. “Come, now! Have you forgotten that she has lived in Dojima System for many years?” I shook my head. “And can you consider the possibility that she might have undertaken consultancy work, on the side, for various enterprises? Including, dare I say it, the Permanent Crimson?” I paused for a moment, then nodded. “I’ve met Ana,” he said, before archly adding: “I probably know her better than you do.” He tilted his head to the right. “You’re very similar in some ways, you know.”

  “What!” I glared as I tried to recover my poise. “What did she tell you?”

  “Quite a lot, once I gained her trust. She told me about your upbringing, and your mother. She told me about your shared interest in retrieving and rolling back lost slow money transfers. She told me about your interest in, ah, a certain long-term project investigating what really happened in Atlantis System.” All mannerisms fled; his expression achieved an impressive level of impassivity.

  “What did you tell her to get her to tell you all that?”

  In truth I only asked him because I wanted to keep him off-balance and talking, but Rudi seemed to take it as a legitimate inquiry.

  “I told her about a banking scandal from a very long time ago. Ivar Trask-1, a founder of Dojima SystemBank at Taj Beacon, who went missing, carrying one end of a transfer of a huge quantity of slow dollars that Ana seemed to think could be traced back . . . to Atlantis.”

  Oh snap, I thought, feeling a sinking sensation at my core. “And what did you tell her about this scandal?”

  “Everything I had on file. At which point, for some reason, she decided it was a good idea to try to track down whatever happened to master Trask. I told her it was probably impossible, that he had disappeared centuries ago somewhere in the wild waters of Shin-Tethys, and there had been numerous searches at the time, but she was peculiarly insistent. Refusing to be deterred, she sought to find work here as a plausible explanation for her presence. The life insurance policy”—he folded and refolded his wings about himself agitatedly—“will cover her restoration from a decade-old soul dump, and a ticket out-system. I may, perhaps, have overstated its value: I am more drawn by curiosity as to what she found that caused various parties to make her disappear.” Was that a faintly guilty expression I read into his foxy muzzle?

  I was still having trouble admitting it to myself: My sib had come here in pursuit of the evidence we so sorely needed but had been drawn into some sort of very shady operation and had clearly been made to disappear by its owners—probably permanently. I took a deep breath. “I don’t think I can achieve anything more here. If anyone can find her, it’s Medea’s police. I don’t think you can achieve anything useful, either. Let’s be honest: You hoped she was going to retrieve part of a certain uncommitted transaction, and you wanted to be in on it yourself. But I can tell you, if she was entangled with a chunk of the, what we’ve been calling the Atlantis Carnet, it’s beyond our reach. She’s been kidnapped or killed, and either her kidnappers or the Queen have their hands on anything she had. I have no idea who her abductors are, and I submit that neither you nor I are in a position to hold Her Majesty to account. So I intend to cut my losses and run—unless something turns up in the next few days. And when I say run, I mean I intend to leave Dojima System completely, cut short my pilgrimage, and go directly home.” I attempted a bright smile, but I don’t think he was fooled by it. “I believe she is dead. Thanks to meddling treasure hunters like yourself.”

  I found I was on my feet again, glaring at him, despite a faint sense of embarrassment at accusing him so bluntly. Rudi, to his credit, looked abashed. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “More sorry than you imagine, perhaps.” He paused uncomfortably before continuing. “I believe I also owe you some back wages. Should I understand that you do not want to extend our arrangement?” He glanced around the room: “I assume you have found some alternative source of funding.”

  “You understand correctly. As for the wages, I was planning to invoice you.”

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary.” He held out one hand, glowing green: “If you would care to shake?”

  We shook hands, and I blinked: The amount he’d transferred was rather larger than I’d expected. “Come now, Ms. Alizond,” he said. “Do you really think I’m stupid enough to pay a professor an unskilled ship-hand’s salary?” His incisors briefly revealed themselves again: “I believe in fair dealing. If you should ever find yourself in need of a privateer for hire, you’ll know who to call. Good-bye!” He shuffled toward the door and let himself out.

  I shook my head and checked at his deposit. He wasn’t joking about having paid me a professorial salary for the year I’d spent aboard his ship. If I’d known he intended to, I might not have converted that slow dollar. But on the other hand, he hadn’t paid me until he knew I had an alternative source of funding: Perhaps he only did it in order to cultivate my goodwill?

  Still shaking my head, I started toward my suite. It had been a long and disturbing day, and I could feel my mood dropping. My arrival in Dojima System appeared to have triggered a feeding frenzy among grave-robbing treasure hunters and opportunists. If Andrea was to be believed, the intrigue had its poisoned roots in a power play back home, and it had followed me all the way to the stars, waiting to catch up. Ana was gone, the entire primary purpose of my pi
lgrimage was wrecked, and with a stalker trailing me, I really needed to think about chartering a yacht and making a course back to Taj Beacon, and meanwhile reconsider my entire future. (If there was less of a security issue, I’d simply upload myself from here and relay via the beacon, but the risk of, shall we say, nonaccidental data corruption was significant. In contrast, physical space vehicles are much harder to intercept than a helpless upload transmission.)

  Thinking these gloomy thoughts, I made my way to the elevators and dropped toward my suite. Security doors opened, recognizing me: Finally, I reached my destination. Here, the outer door required a physical handshake to check my identity. I turned the door handle and pushed, then froze.

  “Good afternoon,” said the fellow on the sofa in the lobby, rising. “You requested medical services?”

  I relaxed. “Yes,” I said. “You’re the hotel doctor?” He nodded. And indeed he looked the part: a modified surface dweller, with just the package of extras I needed on display everywhere from his hands to the discreet fringe of gills at his throat. “I need to arrange for some phenotype modifications.” The door closed behind me as I continued: “Finger and toe membranes, better oxygen retention, and depth tolerance. Nothing fancy. I was told you could order the necessary design templates—”

  “Oh, absolutely,” he reassured me. “So you’re wanting a basic package of hydrosphere modifications suitable for a land dweller visiting the upper waters, is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m after,” I confirmed.

  “Good. I work with a couple of local suppliers; if you’d like to sit down and plug in this diagnostic cable, I can dump your body’s structural layout and ask them to tender—”

  I sat obediently and accepted the fiber-optic cable. “Where does this go?” I asked, holding up the free end.

  “Right here. If you’ll allow me—” I nodded, letting him stab the cable into my medical port. Then everything suddenly went away.

  * * *

  Every interstellar colony is founded on a Ponzi scheme; but the architects of Atlantis were the first to make this principle explicit.

  Normally, the founders of a new colony are motivated by the opportunity to be among the earliest settlers and shareholders; the earlier you get there, the more real estate and energy you can lay your hands on. But to be able to enjoy the fruits of your land grab, you require a functioning, self-sustaining civilization. It’s entirely possible to lay claim to a gas giant planet all by yourself, but what do you do with it thereafter? There’s the rub. Civilization is complicated and expensive and surprisingly difficult to transplant to a new star system, even for such as we—never mind our Fragile predecessors who couldn’t survive even a little bit of hard vacuum and ionizing radiation. Hence the incentive for founders to go into debt if necessary, to hire in the extra workers it takes to expand from a couple of hardscrabble tents on an asteroid into an interplanetary civilization in only a couple of hundred years.

  And this explains the incentive to launch further colonies in turn, so that they can go into debt borrowing labor from you in return for slow dollars which you can use to pay off your own founders’ debt.

  But why don’t we, the founders of Atlantis thought, try to come up with a better, faster way to collapse our foundational debt?

  (This is inference. I do not know for sure what was going through their minds: This is purely my own highly speculative reconstruction of what happened roughly two thousand years ago. Let me emphasize this: Nobody now living knows for sure.)

  Paying off the founders’ debt can take centuries, and the grinding investment of resources required to build and launch starships. The new colony may go into debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands or even millions of slow dollars drawn on the banks of their neighbors. How can this debt be made to go away?

  One way to do it is to arrange a Jubilee—a global remission of all debt. But it takes pressing circumstances to impose such a thing on an open-ended trading network. Investors tend to dislike having their creditors evaporate like mist for some reason. You can make a Jubilee work in a closed system, by decree, but because of the debt-driven pattern of expansion of interstellar colonization, it’s almost impossible for everyone to get out of debt simultaneously. Some utopians campaign for a galactic Jubilee; in my opinion, they might get one sometime after the stelliferous era gutters to a darkening end, and the lights go out throughout the universe.

  On a smaller scale, a really well-established colony system with a good economy and a stable sun might aim for autarky, the practice of total isolationism and autonomy. In effect, they could declare a local Jubilee. Cut the interstellar communications links, and nobody will be able to call in their debts—not by any reasonable means, anyway. (Sending a starship to demand repayment is a ludicrous idea.) However, attempts at autarky generally founder when there is a change of governance; the old oligarchs ossify or die, or the young demand their imported entertainments, or unforeseen new circumstances generate demand for hitherto-unneeded skills that can most easily be imported, or, or, or. Autarky is unstable. A system rich enough to make a serious play for autarky is probably so rich that it has already paid off its foundational debt.

  And that more or less exhausts the legal ways of escaping a system debt.

  Which leaves fraud. It is almost impossible to fake the establishment of an interstellar bank that issues slow money. For the money to be recognized as such, the issuing bank must satisfy its peers in two or more neighboring star systems that it’s really there. This is a straightforward process—point telescope at newly colonized star system, look for laser light—so it is very hard to imagine a conspiracy duping two or more systembanks in perfect synchrony, even with a timetable of false transmissions prearranged years in advance. It has been tried a couple of times, but it fails as soon as one of the duped banks tries to get the “new” bank to sign a slow dollar received from another dupe. You can’t defraud the speed of light.

  But the speed of light offers another opportunity to escape a slow money debt. If a faster-than-light drive really did exist, then the whole slow economy of settled space would be jeopardized. All the equity locked up in light-speed transmissions could be short-circuited; there would be no further need for slow money. Confidence in slow money would collapse, and with it, the value of any debt denominated in the old slow currency. It would, de facto, create the circumstances for a global Jubilee—by changing the rules and destroying the old economy.

  It is my belief that the founders of Atlantis knew this full well, and moreover knew that everybody else was aware of it: And so they willfully decided to use this global assumption as a lever to move the universe.

  First, they went through the usual growing pains of a new colony, importing labor and knowledge and skills and incurring debt.

  Then they imported a bunch of natural philosophers and historians and scholars and established, very publicly, a gigantic and diverse research enterprise. They went further into debt, issuing bonds denominated in slow money to fund the expansion and operations of their Academy for High Energy Research. In the course of which they cautiously admitted that, yes, developing a faster-than-light space drive was a major systemwide economic goal, to which all else was subordinate.

  Needless to say, this caused much speculation and analysis throughout the whole of settled space: Opinions ranged from mirth and skepticism through to genuine alarm, not to mention triggering attempts at scientific espionage (and, it is rumored, sabotage). Financial markets became jittery, and sharp-witted fast folk turned a profit by designing hedges against the impending collapse of the slow money–based trade system. There was actually a drop in the frequency of colony starship launches for the first time in millennia, as everyone postponed their plans in order to wait and see.

  Then, after spending half a century on what an earlier age would have described as a war footing, on the eve of a widely publicized announcement of s
ome importance . . . Atlantis went dark.

  Depth Charge

  Iam not the most perceptive person with respect to threats against my safety.

  Because I had asked the concierge to arrange for my security and to have the hotel doctor attend to my needs, I naturally assumed that the presence of a doctor-shaped individual in my suite was entirely legitimate: and not, for example, a sign that the hotel’s security protocols had been breached.

  Bad mistake, Krina.

  In the past year I had acquired more experience of being kidnapped and deceived than the rest of my lineage had managed over a period of several centuries. But I freely admit that what happened after I unwittingly gave the false doctor access to my morphological-control firmware was probably the most drastic of all my abductions.

  At the time, I didn’t know anything. I was switched off, effectively as dead as a downloaded soul dump in transit between star systems. Which was, when I revisit the incident with full hindsight enabled, a mercy.

  An invisible observer would have seen the “hotel doctor” hand me a fine cable, then wait for me to sit down and attach it to the nape of my neck. At which point I would have fallen over, limp as a hank of leviathan grass on dry land. The doctor stood, walked across the suite to an inconspicuous service hatch, and opened it, then pulled out a body-sized cargo cylinder. Into the cargo cylinder I went, then into the service hatch and out of the hotel.

  Somewhere else and somewhen later, the “hotel doctor” and their accomplices retrieved me. I can’t describe the location, only infer that it was probably deeper than the hotel, and in a cheaper neighborhood populated by fly-by-night businesses and anonymous warehouses. There would have been cassettes of unassimilated mechanocytes to hand, seething and squabbling in search of a body to join. A power supply and liquid feedstock. There would have been a vivisection slab. The doctor and his accomplices would have lifted my body onto the slab and shackled it in place before they took up their scalpels and sketched lines on my skin, then my ’cytes to fissure to either side.