Center of Gravity

by Ian Douglas

  “So . . . tell me about this virtual diplomat,” Koenig said.

  “They’re calling it ‘Tallyrand,’ ” Carruthers told him. “They’re supposed to be programming him now at a facility on Luna.”

  “Tallyrand?”

  “A historical diplomat. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century . . . France.”

  “They called him the ‘Prince of Diplomats,’ ” Gregory said. “Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord is widely regarded as the most versatile and influential diplomat in Earth’s history.”

  “You seem to be up on your history, Commander.”

  She grinned. “The admiral has had me over on Luna as an observer at the software labs where they’re writing him. So, yeah. I downloaded a lot on the original Tallyrand, at any rate.”

  “I suppose they’re being hopeful with that name,” Carruthers said.

  “They can be as hopeful as they like,” Koenig said. “How do they expect this . . . this virtual diplomat to communicate with the Sh’daar?”

  “It will be an advanced AI residing within a starship,” Carruthers said with a shrug, “probably something like an ISVR–120 or a 124. No organic crew, just the software. The idea would be to send it into Agletsch space, out in the direction of Canopus, where we think their stellar polity is centered. And the Agletsch would pass it on to the Sh’daar.”

  Koenig chuckled at that. “Good luck to them, then. Considering that computer technology is part of what the Sh’daar want to restrict, I’d say that Tallyrand would be a great way not to impress them. Or, maybe a better way to say it . . . it would impress them, but in exactly the wrong way!”

  The others laughed.

  “But how can they even consider caving in to the Sh’daar?” Buchanan asked. “Hell, nanotech alone is wrapped up one way or another in just about everything we do, in medical science, in assemblers, in retrievers, in nanufactories. . . .”

  “Even more so for information systems and computers,” Koenig said. “We’ve been inextricably entangled with our computers for four centuries now. Giving up computers would be to give up being human!”

  “Not entirely, sir,” another of Carruthers’ aides said. His id identified him as Commander Jesus Vasquez. “There are people out there today who don’t rely on computer technology.”

  “Squatties,” Gregory said, making a face. “Prims.”

  “Exactly. In any case, the Sh’daar seem to just want us to stop further technological development.”

  “This far and no further, eh?” Carruthers said.

  Koenig shook his head. “And I would argue, Commander, that that means giving up an essential part of our humanity as well. We’re always going to be tinkering. We find a way to make a hotter fire . . . and that in turn leads to discovering copper and tin when they ooze out of the rocks around the campfire. We play with those, find we can mix them, and we discover bronze. Meanwhile, someone builds an even hotter fire and learns how to smelt iron. Technological innovation started with knocking chips off the edge of a piece of flint, and it hasn’t stopped since.”

  “But progress can’t keep going on forever, can it?” Gregory asked. “There has to be a point where there’s nothing more to be discovered. No more inventions, no more improvements to be made.”

  “Can’t it? I wonder. Have you ever heard of the technological singularity?”

  “No, sir. What’s that?”

  “Old idea, late twentieth century. Back then, science and technology were improving at a steadily increasing rate, at an exponentially increasing rate.” Koenig moved his hand as though following a line on a graph, going up gradually, then more steeply, then straight up. “At some point, it was theorized, technological advancement would be accelerating so quickly that life, that humanity itself, would become completely unrecognizable within a very short span of time. It was called the technological singularity . . . or sometimes the Vinge Singularity.”

  Carruthers got the faintly glassy, distant look of someone pulling data down from the local Net. “Ah,” he said. “Vernor Vinge, right?”

  “That’s the guy. Of course, we haven’t hit the singularity yet . . . at least not to that extent. Someone from five hundred years ago would still be able to relate to the world we know today. Nanassemblers might seem like magic, sure, but with a little training and some minor surgery to give them the necessary implants, they’d get along in our society just fine. Life hasn’t changed fundamentally, not to the extent some theorists envisioned.”

  “I’m beginning to think some sort of new super-weapon is going to be our only hope,” Carruthers said. “But we’re going to need to develop it damned fast, because if the Sh’daar Empire doesn’t take us down pretty soon, I’m beginning to think the politicians will.”

  “So what is the current status of Crown Arrow?” Koenig asked with blunt directness.

  “On hold in committee in the Military Directorate,” Carruthers told him. “The vote has been delayed again, indefinitely, this time. I was told two days ago that we don’t want to provoke the Sh’daar into hasty action.”

  “What, they don’t want us to make them mad?” Koenig asked. He laughed. “I’d say they’ve been royally pissed at us for thirty-seven years!”

  “Maybe. And maybe an empire of some billions of worlds is so big they move slowly.”

  “And maybe we need to buy ourselves time, which is what Crown Arrow was supposed to do in the first place!”

  Operation Crown Arrow was a strategic concept originally presented by Koenig to the Senate Military Directorate ten months earlier, shortly after the previous year’s twin defeats at Arcturus Station and Everdawn. The ONI had tentatively identified a major Turusch staging base at Alphekka, a star that, from Earth, was the brightest star in the constellation Corona Borealis, the “Northern Crown.” Koenig’s plan called for a large-scale carrier strike against the enemy base there, seventy-two light years from Earth. By taking the war deep into enemy-held space, the Sh’daar’s timetable might be thrown off, and forces now being gathered for an assault against Sol and its inner colonies might be drawn off.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff had given the oplan their unqualified support, but for the past ten months, the Military Directorate had dithered, passing it through various committees and subcommittees, requesting clarifications and revisions, running it through virtual simulations to determine likely military, political, and economic outcomes, and always failing to bring it to a final vote.

  Carruthers palmed a contact on the table next to them, and the assembler inside produced another drink, which seemed to rise up out of the table as though extruded from the hard black surface itself. He picked up the glass, studied it for a moment, and then downed it in a single gulp.

  “I hear you, Admiral,” Carruthers said after a moment. “Believe me, we all do. We have allies in the Senate who are doing their best, but . . .” He shrugged and set the glass back on the table. After a moment, it seemed to dissolve back into the tabletop from which it had been nanufactured. “We’re going to have to be patient,” he said, finally.

  “Just so long as the Sh’daar and their allies are patient as well,” Koenig said. “I do know one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We humans are a technic species. Our technology, the pace of our technological advance, is a part of us, a part of everything we do. If we surrender our ability to make our own technological decisions to the Sh’daar . . .”

  “We can’t do that, damn it,” Buchanan put in.

  “No,” Koenig agreed. “For us, that would be racial suicide. Extinction. . . .”

  “Slow extinction if we surrender to the Sh’daar Empire,” Carruthers said, “and quick extinction if we keep fighting them, and lose. It seems our species has damned few alternatives open to it.”

  “Very few,” Koenig said.

  Outside the light and noise
of the eudaimonium, the night seemed very dark indeed.

  Chapter Four

  21 December 2404

  High Guard Destroyer Qianfang Fangyu

  Entering Earth Space, Sol System

  1440 hours, TFT

  The intruder had left the High Guard destroyer trailing far behind. Qianfang Fangyu’s top acceleration was five hundred gravities, and after seventy-five minutes, the vessel was traveling sunward at 22,500 kilometers per second, and had covered about one third of an astronomical unit, less than 4 percent of the current distance between Saturn and Earth. The intruder—the H’rulka ship, if that’s what it was—had rapidly begun accelerating at an estimated ten thousand gravities, swiftly outdistancing the High Guard ship, which was lagging farther and farther behind. By now, if the H’rulka vessel had held to that incredible acceleration, it would be traveling at just under the speed of light, and would have already covered nearly six AUs.

  It would now be within thirty minutes of Earth.

  The Qianfang Fangyu had had continued broadcasting warnings at radio and at optical wavelengths throughout the past seventy-five minutes, however.

  The messages should be arriving in Earth-space any moment now. . . .

  Palisades Eudaimonium

  New York State, Earth

  1941 hours, EST

  “Trevor, you can’t just run away from me. We need to talk!”

  He’d found a private alcove halfway up the stepped interior of the bowl. She’d found him, though, trailing the id broadcast by his implant.

  He looked up. “About what?”

  “About us? About what happened. . . .”

  “I don’t see where talking is going to change anything. Unless you want to come back with me?”

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t think so. Look . . . they explained it to me. You had a stroke, the stroke changed some of the neural pathways in your brain. You don’t love me anymore. I . . . I understand that. I don’t like it, but I understand.”

  “They said you saved my life, Trev,” she told him. “By getting me to the medical center. And by agreeing to join the military, so they’d treat me. I never thanked you.”

  He shrugged. “Nothing to thank.” In fact, he’d not realized at the time that he had agreed. The events of that horrible night five years ago were still blurred in his mind. He did remember the terribly icy fear, and knew he would have agreed to anything, anything to get treatment for Angela.

  Later, Navy psytherapists had offered to clear up those memories . . . or to remove them. He’d refused on both counts.

  He did find it interesting, though, that modern nanomedical science could fix a broken brain, but had very few ideas when it came to fixing a broken heart.

  “I’ve missed you, Trev.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Trev? Goddammit, don’t be like this!”

  “And how am I supposed to be, Angela?” he demanded. “We had a good life together—”

  “As squatties! Grubbing about in the Manhat Ruins like . . . like animals!”

  “I don’t recall any complaint about it on your part at the time! So maybe life wasn’t so good. We had each other. We had our life together. I thought we were happy.” When she didn’t say anything to that, he pushed ahead. “You turned it all upside down, wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even agree to see me! One meeting, one meeting with a counselor . . . and all you give me is an ultimatum. No discussion. No compromise. An ultimatum. You won’t live with me anymore.”

  “Trevor . . .”

  “By that time, I was already signed up for the service. They’d already tested me, found out I would make a good pilot, scheduled me for flight training. So it wasn’t like I was able to go back to the Ruins anyway.”

  “Trev, if we’d gone back to live in the Ruins again, we’d both be dead now. You know that, don’t you? That impactor surge wiped out all of the Old City.”

  He kept his face impassive, but . . . gods. What she’d just said hit home like an impactor in its own right. No. No, he’d not thought about that.

  He wondered how he’d missed that small fact. For a long time, he’d thought Angela was dead . . . before realizing that when the impactor had sent that tidal wave smashing north through the Narrows, she was already living with her new family in Haworth, beyond the wave’s reach. For a time, he’d not even been sure where Haworth was; it might have been a part of Morningside Heights, all of which had been washed away.

  He’d never stopped to think at the time that if things had worked out the way he’d wanted, he and Angela would have been on Manhattan when the wave struck. They might have survived—part of the TriBeCa Tower where they’d lived was still standing even yet—but there would have been no guarantees.

  “Look, it’s no good talking about what might have happened,” he told her. “We’re here, and we’re who we are now. And to tell the truth, I don’t know you anymore. You’re not the girl I fell in love with any longer.”

  “I’ve grown, Trevor. And I’ve healed.”

  “Yeah, they cured you of me, didn’t they?”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Well, well,” another voice said, interrupting Gray’s retort. “What have we here? A couple of sweet monogie pervs?”

  Gray blinked and looked to his left. Collins was there, smirking at them, with Kirkpatrick looming behind her. “Go to hell, Collins,” he told her. “This is private.”

  “That’s right. Private. Just one partner at a time, and you mate for all eternity.” She made a face. “Disgusting.”

  “Do I know you?” Angela asked. She would be checking Collins’ military id through her own implants. “Lieutenant . . . Collins?”

  “No, honey. We’ve not met. I’ve heard a lot about you, though, from your monogie lover here!”

  “Damned squattie,” Kirkpatrick muttered. “Thinks he’s good as real Navy. . . .”

  “You’re obviously drunk, Kirkpatrick,” Gray said mildly. “How the hell did you manage to bypass your deet?”

  “None’ve . . . your fuckin’ squattie business, squat-face,” Kirkpatrick managed to say. Was it alcohol, Gray wondered, or a recreational drug? Either way, he rather hoped that the man’s corder was picking this up. It meant nonjudicial punishment at the very least, a court-martial at worst . . . and that simply couldn’t happen to a more wonderful guy. . . .

  Collins seemed to be her usual coldly mocking and cruel self. She was too smart to get herself wasted like that. Unfortunately.

  “I don’t recall inviting either of you into this alcove,” Gray told them. “You want to make fun of me, fine, but have the decency to leave this person out of it.”

  “That’s great!” Kirkpatrick said. “A . . . a monogie talkin’ ’bout decent!”

  “Come on, Kirkpatrick,” Collins said. “We know when we’re not wanted!”

  “Damned monogies . . .”

  “How much did you have?” Collins asked him as she led the unsteady Kirkpatrick away.

  “Friends,” Gray said thoughtfully as they moved out of earshot. “Got to find myself some.”

  “Those were . . . friends?”

  “No. They’re in my squadron, but friends? No.”

  Learning his place within the culture in which he’d suddenly found himself, learning to fit in, had taken up a lot of Gray’s attention and energy over these past five years.

  Life in the Periphery, scrabbling for survival within the half-flooded ruins scattered around the margins of the North American Union, tended to be hard and it tended to be short. It had also been forced to adapt. Two-adult-person family units loosely allied with other two-adult units had proven to be the most successful when it came to the necessities of hunter-gatherer lifestyles. With larger communities pooling food and other scarce resources, there were always shortages—and short
ages either led to brutal and usually fatal fights to determine who went without, or else everyone in the group suffered when the little that was available was shared with all. Smaller units tended to be more flexible . . . and they isolated groups exposed to the Blood Death virus or other pathogens.

  For the full citizens of the Union and the larger Confederation, larger, extended families had been the norm for centuries. With nanoassemblers literally building food and other necessities from dirt and garbage, there was more than enough to go around. Children were best raised in crèche-schools where they learned to socialize with others as they received their electronic educational downloads. And the Blood Death and other diseases were, for the most part, non-existent, or at the least well controlled by modern nanomedical science.

  For the citizens of the Union, the Prims of the Periphery were old-fashioned, stubborn, ignorant, and dirty—much like the inhabitants of Appalachia who still lacked electricity or indoor plumbing back in the twentieth century. There was even a memory of that in one of the names civilized New Yorkers had for the Manhattan Ruins: “Newyorkentucky.” For the inhabitants of the Periphery, full citizens of the Union were selfish, self-centered, and shallow, far too preoccupied with social fads and electronic toys, superficial at best, decadent and perverted at worst. Spoiled, in other words.

  The divide between the two had become far wider and deeper over the past couple of centuries, to the point that there seemed to be no way of bridging the gap.

  Somewhat to his surprise, Gray did have friends in the Dragonfires. Ben Donovan was one. And Commander Allyn wasn’t a friend, exactly—you weren’t friends with your commanding officer—but at least she seemed to be on his side. Most of that, though, he was pretty sure, had to do with his combat skills. He’d held up his end of things during the Defense of Earth, and they thought of him as a fellow Starhawk pilot, not as a Prim or as an outsider.

  The problems were people like Kirkpatrick—bigoted and conceited—and Collins, who still seemed to blame him for the unpardonable sin of surviving two months ago when her partner, Howie Spaas, had been killed.