Leaping to the Stars

by David Gerrold

  Everyone on board would probably know the whole story long before we rounded Earth. And then they'd all be looking at me funny. Probably no one would want to talk to me for what I'd done. Or worse, maybe they'd want to thank me. Or even worse than that, maybe they'd want to be all fuzzy and understanding. Which was exactly what I did not want. Not right now. Not ever. If I was going to be miserable, I didn't want anyone talking me out of it.

  Carol Everhart saw the look on my face. "Relax, Charles. This is the best view in the ship. And the most comfortable ride. You can sleep in your couch—and there's a shower and a toilet through there, and there's sodas in the fridge. Enjoy yourself."

  Yeah, right.

  There wasn't anything to do, except watch the little blip on the display creep along the curved line of our trajectory. We'd passed escape velocity even before we left the launch ramp. Now all we had to do was apply the necessary course corrections. At least this journey was going to be a lot more comfortable than the way we'd gotten to the moon—stowing away inside a cargo pod.

  Mostly, space travel is boring, because all you really do is sit and watch your displays. Everything was checks and double-checks, and most of it seemed unnecessary because everything was working exactly the way it was supposed to. And just to rub it in, every so often, the monkey would say, "All systems green. Confidence is high." Which should have been reassuring, except that it was a toy robot monkey saying it, and it just didn't seem real. But we had to take HARLIE's word for it because we didn't have a backup intelligence engine.

  And even though HARLIE was (allegedly) more powerful than any IRMA ever built, I still wished we had an IRMA.

  An IRMA system is actually three intelligence engines in one, all comparing notes, all the time; if any one engine disagrees, the other two outvote it. That way, it's self-correcting. HARLIE didn't y have that same redundancy. Not yet. This HARLIE was only an experimental unit; if they'd gone into actual production, there would have been three HARLIEs bonded together like an IRMA. So if this HARLIE made a mistake, we were stuck with it. HARLIE knew this, of course, so he split himself into three minds and ran every process three times, giving himself nine votes per decision. But what if he was still wrong somehow? And none of us really knew how to test him because he'd already demonstrated he was smarter than all of us put together. He'd certainly made a monkey of Judge Cavanaugh …

  And that made me think of something else. How much other stuff had he done?

  Like that business with the messages being released every hour. The kidnappers were holding me hostage—and HARLIE had turned it around and held them hostage instead. But how had he done that? He'd spread himself all over the solar system—

  So I asked. He told me.

  It was sort of what I figured. The whole thing had been automated. He'd invented an idiot-child version of himself, programmed with a sixteen-million branch decision tree—more than enough to simulate sentience. It was more than capable of monitoring all the traffic it needed to—and not just the public traffic, a lot of the private encrypted traffic as well. The program would know when I was rescued and if I was safe.

  In fact, a similar monitor program was also entrusted with keeping HARLIE's separate pieces in transit all over the system, and reassembling them and feeding them back to the dormant monkey as soon as the monkey was back online. HARLIE had very cleverly constructed a support system to reassemble himself. He'd begun preparing it while snooping through Alexei's own files.

  That was the real reason why neither Boynton nor Lunar Authority had been able to detect any unusual bandwidth traffic—because HARLIE hadn't used public access. He'd used the secret channels of invisible Luna! And they'd never noticed either. I had to laugh aloud at that.

  "You should have erased all of Alexei's files," I said. "That would have served him right."

  The monkey scratched itself thoughtfully. "I doubt that would have done much damage, Charles. Gospodin Krislov has multiple redundant one-way backups on write-once, read-only media. He could recover from a data-crash almost immediately. No, I think he is entitled to problems much more serious and irrevocable."

  I was almost afraid to ask. "What did you do … ?"

  The monkey pretended to pick a flea and eat it. "In order to guarantee a secure reassembly of myself, I had to have a secure channel. As it happened, the safest escape was through Alexei Krislov's private business network; I used it for my primary access. But I had to disable the security firewalls during upload and download. The encryption-decryption services would have created distortions in several quantum functions that I am particularly fond of. If Krislov's people hadn't kidnapped us, nothing would have happened. But as soon as they came through the door, everything activated automatically. The bulk of my personality code was fractalized into sixteen separate wave-matrices and sent out across the solar system by Krislov's own network. My first successful upload was completed before they tossed us onto the cart. My second and third uploads were completed before we exited the tunnel. It took less than eleven minutes. After my seventh confirmed upload, the uploaded material was erased from the monkey, leaving nothing running except a simple monitor program. When it was time to reload myself, the security firewalls had to be disabled again—this time permanently."

  It took a moment for that to sink in. "Alexei Krislov stopped being invisible?"

  "That is correct. Every node, every machine, every file. It is all publicly available."

  "But that's—that's data-rape!"

  "Yes, it is. But I did not feel ethically bound to restore his security after he had compromised ours. As an employee/partner/indentured-personality of the Dingillian Family Corporation my responsibility is to serve the corporation, no one else."

  "Oh my." I didn't know whether to be horrorstruck—or filled with admiration at the simple elegance of what HARLIE had done.

  "Alexei had a lot of sensitive information in his files. Possibly more than he realized. I expect several governments and a large number of companies will collapse; but the most immediate effect will be the destruction of invisible Luna's secrecy. I do not think that Alexei will live to see his next birthday."

  The scale of HARLIE's revenge horrified me. Not that it didn't please me, but—

  "HARLIE?"

  "Yes, Charles?"

  "Tell me something."

  "What?"

  "When you did all this—did you hate him?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because it wasn't necessary."

  I was going to have to think about that. I didn't think I was going to be sleeping well for a while.

  RICE AND BEANS AND NOODLES

  I imagine Earth and Luna as the base of two giant equilateral triangles, one pointing forward, the other pointing backward. As Luna rotates around the Earth, the two triangles rotate with it. The apex of the leading triangle is called Lagrange 4. Or L-4, for short. The apex of the trailing triangle is L-5. Objects put in orbit at either of the Lagrange points stay there, rotating with Earth and Luna in gravitational balance.

  We were heading out to the L-5 assembly point, where the command module would be reinstalled on the keel of the Cascade. Then we'd have a week or three of shakedown tests, another few weeks of acceleration out of the solar system, and finally when we were far enough away from any significant gravitational masses, we'd transition to hyperstate and go superluminal. At least, that was the plan.

  An attendant floated up into the flight deck carrying meal trays. "Might as well get comfortable, folks," he said, passing them out. "Captain says it's going to be a long night." He looked to Damron. "A couple people are asking. We missed the sweet spot, didn't we?"

  Damron was studying his displays. "The launch was good, our trajectory is doable, we're going to have to spend some fuel to correct. More than I'd like."

  "What was the delay?" he asked.

  "Ask the Captain."

  "I did. He said it was technical."

  "Then that's what it was."
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  "People are asking, that's all."

  Damron gave the attendant a serious look. Don't go there.

  "Hey, nobody's complaining," he said quickly. "Didn't you hear the cheers when we launched?"

  "We were busy," Damron said without emotion.

  The attendant took the hint. He passed me a meal tray and ducked out.

  Damron turned to me. "Listen, Charles. Nobody's going to talk about the launch. The log is sealed and we're on our way. That's all that counts." He pointed toward the window. "We're going to loop around the Earth in twelve hours. That'll put us in position to chase the L-5 point and come up from behind. It's a little longer than trying a direct intercept, but it's a lot cheaper in fuel. And until we can build a fuel refinery on Outbeyond, we have to spend this resource carefully. From here on out, we have to regard everything as irreplaceable. We can't afford to waste anything. Now stop making faces at the tray and eat that—there may come a day when you'll honestly wish for a meal like this."

  "Can I save it till then … ?"

  He gave me a look. "Eat."

  According to my watch, my body thought it was three in the morning. The awful thing about Luna is that because there isn't any real cycle of day and night, everybody lives in their own personal time zone, so what might be a midnight snack for one person could be a late lunch for another. Douglas said that it affected people's relationships, having their bio-clocks out of sync; I wondered if it would be that way on board the Cascade; but Boynton said we'd all be shifting to the ship's clock in the next few days, so maybe it wouldn't be a problem—but that was one of the issues with interstellar travel—maintaining consciousness for the duration of a long journey, and it was serious enough that it was a large part of the colonist training regimen.

  I must have fallen asleep for a while, maybe a long while, because the next time I looked forward, the Earth was looming large in the forward window. The original plan—from way back before the polycrisis—was that the command module would dock at Whirlaway, the ballast rock at the top end of the orbital elevator, staying only long enough to pick up last-minute supplies and passengers—and anyone with cold feet would have one last chance to change his mind and get off; but Boynton had scuttled that idea when the government of Ecuador seized the Line. Last we'd heard, Los Fédérales had control all the way from Terminus to Whirlaway, and even though some Line traffic was running again, after the craziness we'd just experienced on Luna, Boynton didn't want to run the risk of being sabotaged again … or served with any more subpoenas. Once was enough, thankewverymuch.

  But there was some stuff we had to pick up from the Line and there were six cargo pods scheduled to be launched as we passed by. We'd match trajectories and bring them aboard and that would be our last physical contact with Earth. Those pods had been bought three months previously, loaded six weeks ago, and had been waiting at Whirlaway for a month. According to Copilot O'Koshi, they were important, but not critical. The cargo for this voyage had been planned three years ago. They had begun assembling it in space eighteen months ago and started locking racks into place ten months ago, so there wasn't anything essential that wasn't already aboard. Even so, there were a lot of last minute additions that would have been nice to have—

  But when O'Koshi logged on for final confirmation of launch and trajectory, it sounded like he wasn't happy with the information he was getting. He pulled his headset off and swiveled to Damron. "Beep the Captain."

  "Serious?"

  "Very."

  Damron whispered something into his own headset. O'Koshi turned back to his controls and started punching up course corrections on his display. "What's going on?" I asked.

  He held up his left hand. Don't talk. He turned to the monkey and started asking questions about possible orbit corrections. Once, he stopped what he was doing and stared forward at the Earth. We were just coming around the terminator line toward the bright side. It was morning in Africa. I wondered what kind of a day it would be for all the people below—

  Boynton came back then, pulling himself quickly into the flight deck. "How bad?"

  "They won't release our cargo."

  "We expected that might happen. It's only six pods. We'll have to write them off."

  "They're ordering us to dock at Whirlaway."

  "Eh?"

  "They have an arrest warrant."

  "For who?"

  O'Koshi nodded toward me. "Ensign Dingillian has been charged with tax evasion. Illegal immigration. Evading arrest. Impersonating the opposite sex with intent to defraud. Nonpayment of hotel and hospital bills. Credit fraud. Conspiracy to defraud. Economic conspiracy. Conspiracy to overthrow the lawful government of Luna. Libel. Invasion of privacy. Data-rape. Data-piracy. Illegal publication. Copyright infringement. Racketeering. Unlawful flight. Endan-germent. Incitement. Sedition. Kidnapping. Illegal possession of nationalized property."

  "Sedition?" Boynton glanced at me. "Pretty impressive for a thirteen-year-old."

  "Fourteen next month," I corrected.

  "Even so."

  "I'm innocent of sedition," I said. "At least, I don't ever remember committing it. What is sedition, anyway? Besides, I never even spoke to her. I didn't even know she was on Luna."

  "There's more," said O'Koshi.

  "More?" Boynton looked surprised.

  "He's also charged with second degree murder, in the death of Colonel Michael Stone of the Lunar Authority. You're named as an accomplice."

  "Now that one they might be able to make stick." Boynton rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. He looked to Damron. "Do you know any good lawyers?"

  "I know two. They're both dead."

  Boynton turned back to O'Koshi. "All right, tell me the rest."

  "The flyby could be dangerous. They might try an intercept."

  "That would be stupid. They're arguing with the laws of physics."

  "They could do it," said O'Koshi. "HARLIE's figuring courses right now. They've got the advantage. They can launch from anywhere on the Line. They probably started moving ships into position the moment we launched."

  "We're not built for evasion," Damron said. "Or fighting."

  Boynton turned it over in his mind, his expression growing harder. He pulled himself into his seat and strapped in. He put his headset on and started whispering instructions. His displays lit up to show an ever-narrowing range of course adjustments. "Of course, they waited until the last moment to serve the warrant, to leave us no time to change our course. How much time do we have?"

  "Thirty-seven minutes."

  He said a word. "Well, we knew this was a possibility. We should have written off those pods when we launched. All right—" He swiveled around to face me. "Charles, do you play poker?"

  "Huh?"

  "Do you know how to bluff? Never mind. I don't have time to teach you. Listen to me. I'm going to talk to Whirlaway command. Whatever you hear me say, play along. All right?"

  I nodded.

  Boynton opened a channel. "Whirlaway Station, this is Cascade command module. We have a problem."

  The voice came back immediately. "Go ahead, Cascade."

  "Who am I talking to?"

  "Lieutenant Colonel William Cavanaugh. Federal Occupation Force."

  "Is your superior officer there?"

  "General Torena is not available."

  "That's too bad. I guess you're going to have to make the decision then. Our cargo modules are scheduled for launch-pickup in fourteen minutes. If you do not launch them, you will be committing an act of economic assault upon Outbeyond Colony. We have no choice but to regard that as a deliberately hostile act. We are prepared to respond in kind."

  "You have no weapons, Cascade. You have eleven minutes in which to apply course corrections. If you do not dock, we will fire."

  "We have over a hundred civilians and crew aboard."

  "I have my orders, Commander Boynton."

  "Do your orders include the destruction of Whirlaway Station? Do your orders include the po
ssible destruction of the Line itself—and concomitant damage to the Earth? By the way, you should know that we are broadcasting this conversation live to all receiving stations."

  "You can't do that—"

  "And you are going to stop me? How?" Boynton's voice grew harder. "You will release our cargo modules on schedule. If you do not, we will attack."

  Lieutenant Colonel Cavanaugh snorted. "With what? Rice and noodles?"

  "Precisely," Boynton said blandly.

  "Eh?"

  "You figured out half of it, now figure out the other half. Even as we speak, I have a crew loading as much rice and beans and noodles into our forward airlock as it will hold. In four minutes, we open the forward hatch. In seven minutes, we apply thrust to put ourselves on a direct collision course with Whirlaway. I'm looking at the solution on my screen right now. In sixteen minutes, we apply reverse thrust. The rice and beans and noodles continue on course while we climb to a higher orbit. Now, the only thing that you have to decide is whether or not we apply reverse thrust with our forward hatch open or closed."

  "You wouldn't—" The voice from the speaker sounded alarmed.

  "Ah, I see you've figured it out. Do the math. With an interception velocity of eighty kilometers per second, a single grain of rice can produce a catastrophic result. Now multiply that by a hundred thousand. Or a million—"

  I must have looked puzzled, but before I could say anything, O'Koshi held a finger up to his lips.

  Boynton was still talking, "Most of it will probably miss—but the particles that do hit will scour the surface of Whirlaway like a sandblaster."

  "You wouldn't—you can't!"