by Adam Roberts
‘Think of the smell!’ said Gordius, wide-eyed. ‘It would be horrible!’
‘The savings would be tiny,’ said Jac. ‘Hardly worth factoring in. And there would be associated costs. Indeed, I reckon it would cost more.’
‘How you reckon that, half-man?’ Mo wanted to know.
‘Mainly,’ said Jac, ‘the cost of delay. Every year that they don’t put this box on the real estate market is a year of lost revenues. I’d bet the Accountancy AIs would rather not wait the full eleven years – I mean, that’ll be the term of the contract they signed with the Ulanovs, but I’m sure they’d rather come collect us as soon as we hollowed the rock out. They can’t, of course. But I’m saying they’d prefer sooner to later. And if they left us to die, there would be ancillary costs. If we were all dead and decayed they’d have to clean the whole interior. I’m guessing that would be more costly than simply flying us back to 8Flora.’
‘Yes,’ said Gordius, with a big smile on his trembling face. ‘See? They’ll definitely come for us.’
‘You think bodies would decay in this chill?’ said Mo, disinclined to concede the argument. ‘I’d say we’d keep pretty fresh. It’s cold as any freezer.’
‘Two more years,’ said Jac, ‘with the fusion cell pumping out heat, plus our body warmth, and bearing in mind how good an insulator space vacuum is – two more years, and this place will be hot as a sauna. Our main problem will then become how to lose heat. We’ll be digging just to find colder rock to bring the temperature down. And when we’ve hollowed the whole place out we’ll have to start thinking about how to radiate away waste heat.’
‘Ah,’ said Mo. He was near enough to the fusion cell to give it a slap. ‘That’s assuming this junk is still heating in a year’s time.’
‘Fusion cells last decades,’ said Marit, sulkily. It was as if he resented the endurance of the technology. ‘That light pole will still be shining for decades. The heater will work just as long.’
‘Fusion cells generally speaking – sure. They’ll keep generating power for decades. But we don’t know what’s inside the box we got, do we? Its top temperature is capped, isn’t it? Sure.’
‘Your point,’ said Marit, gruffly. Gordius was whimpering in time to his shivers. Conceivably he was unaware that he was making any noise.
‘You know what I’d do?’ said Mo. ‘If I were in charge, in the Gongsi? For the first few months, sure: without heat we would simply have died – sure. But what if the box has an internal timer? A thermostat? It waits until the temperature reaches a preset level – zero, say – and then it cuts out.’
Everybody pondered this possibility. ‘That would be sadistic,’ said Gordius, shaking slurs into the ‘s’s.
‘You think sadism is beyond them? Look at it this way: it’s not quite cold enough to kill us, but not warm enough to keep us comfortable. And though vacuum insulates, we’ll still lose heat to radiation. And anyway, the bulk of this rock is colder than ice, and we’re chopping into it every day. That’ll more than counteract our collective body heat. What if we never get warm? What if, on the contrary, we get colder and colder? So we carry on working, because it’s the only way to keep warm. But it gets colder, and colder, and soon enough we freeze to death. Then the Gongsi sends a ship along; it’s all been calculated by the AIs, down to the hour. They open up this box, and inside all they have to deal with are our freeze-preserved corpses. Maybe they don’t even chuck up spaceside! Maybe they grind them up and grow tomatoes in the mulch! I don’t know. My point is – wouldn’t that be more economic?’
‘Eleven years,’ said Gordius. He wasn’t smiling any more. ‘That was our sentence. It was judicially determined. It would be against the law to . . .’
‘If we die in service of our sentence,’ said Marit, in a growly voice, ‘then the Gongsi is not liable. Legally speaking. That’s our look-out. Staying alive.’
‘They wouldn’t do that,’ said Gordius, not meeting anybody’s eyes. ‘What Mo said. They wouldn’t do that.’
‘I still say it would cost more,’ said Jac. ‘If nothing else, there would always be the risk that they would be found out, and fined. And Gongsi hate risk. Risk is expensive.’
‘You know what I studied at Gobi?’ said Mo, bringing both his arms out in an expansive gesture. ‘Economics. You know what I learned? There are only three things in the universe. Only three things. There’s raw materials, there’s energy, and there’s labour. Now energy’s expensive. Yes, it’s cheaper than it used to be in the chemical age for sure, but it still costs. And raw materials are more expensive than they’ve ever been. They’re abundant, but only in space, and space is a horribly expensive environment in which to harvest them. Energy is scarce, and raw materials are scare, and scarcity means more cost. The only thing that isn’t scarce? Labour. People keep spawning people. The poorer they are, the more kids they have. It’s one of those crazy counter-intuitive laws of the natural world. Because, really, it ought to be the other way about; it ought to be the richer you are the more kids you have. But that’s not how it is. Earth is exhausted, in terms of raw materials, and is very poorly positioned in terms of energy, because it’s got this blocking veil between it and the sun called “atmosphere” and because its gravity degrades the efficiency of fusion cells to the point they’re ludicrous. But it is super-abundant in people. It’s a crazy – breeding – manufactory. And that’s the physics of economics: scarce means expensive; abundant means cheap. Supply and demand. That’s the system we live in, gentlemen – and god-boys. It’s a system where raw materials are costly, and energy is costly, and the only thing that isn’t costly is human life. This box made of rock is worth more to our Gongsi than any number of human lives.’
This was a long speech, and it left Mo hoarse. He floated to the scrubber and took a sip from the spigot.
‘That’s a rather . . . ,’ said Jac, treading cautiously, unsure of the volatility of Mo’s mood. ‘A rather nihilistic view of the state of things, maybe?’
‘You think?’ said Mo, darkly. ‘I was raised a Trickledowner. I was raised on Earth, too, not in some shanty bubble made of plastic that you can watch degrading around you in real-time. No, I was raised in a gated city in West Africa. God-boy here had it easy, compared to me. The functioning of economics was the Newtonian mechanics of our world. My fathers studied and worshipped economics. You know why?’
‘Because they believed economics explained the whole cosmos,’ said Marit, with the tone of somebody who knew whereof he spoke.
‘That of course,’ agreed Mo. ‘Sure. But you know what, friend? Something more, too. Because they believed that economics preserved the special place for humankind at the universe’s heart. We used to think the Earth was the centre of the cosmos, and that meant we were special, until science told us we’re marginal creatures. Then we thought the sun was centre, until science told us not even that was true. We used to think God made us in His image, and that meant we were special, until science told us we just evolved that way because it suited a landscape of trees and savannas. That’s what science does: it says, look again and you’ll see you’re not special. But economics? Economics is also a science. And what does it say? Ask my fathers, and they’d tell you. It says: there is energy, and there are raw materials, and that’s the cosmos. But without us the energy is random and the raw material is inert. It’s only labour that makes the cosmos come alive. It’s only us that make economics happen at all. And that makes us special.’
‘It’s a good point,’ said Lwon, diplomatically.
‘I thought so too. You tend to believe what you’re taught, growing up, I guess. But then I went to Gobi, to study. Economics, of course; I was hardly going to study anything else at university. I majored in Chaos Exchange, and the philosophy of money. But I also took a course in historical economics. The point of that course was to show how inefficient antique human economic systems were, because they didn’t understand the physics of the systems they were trying to operate. But it didn
’t have that effect on me. On the contrary. It opened my eyes. It made me lose my faith – not my faith in economics, which is as immutable as entropy. But my faith in the idea that economics preserves a special place for humanity. Suddenly I saw. Economics preserves a special place for value, and value is not the same thing as people. For a while, in Earth’s earlier development, the two things happened to coincide. But not anymore. Not since we used up the mundane raw materials. Not since we stepped into space. Listen: economists on Earth used to say that sending human beings into space could never be cost-effective. Imagine! For half a century, Earthen governments spent billions of credits shooting robots into space on chemical explosions. Oho, that was cost-effective, was it? Robots are expensive now; but they were vastly more so then. People, though, are cheap, and getting cheaper. They keep breeding, and that means they’re always becoming relatively less valuable. We’re always the cheapest option. We’re always the cheapest option. We’re losing absolute value with every generation. So I quit school, and I went into crime. My fathers disowned me. You know what? I don’t think that was really fair. I was only following their precepts, after all. I started leveraging profit from the only superfluous resource available. I joined a gang of people smugglers. I did that for pleasure and profit for ten years – until the Ulanovs caught up with me.’
Mo had worn himself out speaking; and he turned to the wall and went to sleep. ‘He makes it sound like he’s a grand philosopher,’ grumbled Davide. ‘But I’m the one here arrested in person by the great Bar-le-duc.’ Nobody even had the energy to mock him for this ridiculous affectation of his. Silence fell.
Marit passed the time chucking stone the length of the main space at a protrusion on the ash-coloured walls. He hit it dead-on nineteen times out of twenty, but still he continued practising. Tock, tock, tock. It was a maddening sound. It had the relentlessness of water-torture. But there wasn’t a way Jac could tell Marit to stop without redirecting the fellow’s anger onto himself. He tried to ignore it. Tock, tock, tock.
Gordius floated over to Jac. ‘I’m cold,’ he said. ‘Give us your tunic.’
‘It won’t fit you,’ said Jac. This was a simple statement of fact.
‘I’m cold. It’s better than nothing. I could die of this cold! It’s more than a human body can bear. You’re my friend. Come on, Jac! Let’s share your tunic – that’s what I’m saying. I wear it until I get a little warmer, then you can have it back.’
‘No,’ said Jac.
Gordius’s big face shuddered, and then crumpled, like a toddler about to burst into tears. But it wasn’t tears that came. Instead he scrunched up his brows, and glared demon-eyes, and unleashed the tanked-up anger of the downtrodden. ‘Yes!’ he squealed. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ And his hands were on Jac’s neck, and the loose skin of his arms flapped and slapped against Jac’s shoulders.
The suddenness as well as the ferocity took Jac by surprise. Gordius’s much greater mass carried the two of them hard against the wall. Jac felt the crash painfully. The skin at his neck was being wrenched most uncomfortably.
He withdrew deeper inside himself, put himself away from his own pain. Where did he go? Hard to say. Perhaps he went into the box. But if he did, the box remained intact, unopened. There – on a completely different orbit, much further out in the darkness beyond Jupiter – was his own heart, though it was thrumming too rapidly. That wasn’t good. The skin of his neck was rasping. It might tear, and blood would come out. That wasn’t good either.
He calmed his thoughts. Here was his brain. This was what was inside the box of bone that was his head. Under his right hand was a rock. He felt it: loose, sharp-edged. He grasped it. His fingers ends just missed it, and it span in mid-air. He reached again, tickled it closer, and grasped it.
This was a delicate situation. He wanted of course to minimize physical damage, and most especially to avoid serious cuts, wounds or even major abrasions to the skin. But he had to act.
It was not going to be easy.
He calmed his heart.
Here were his eyes, and they transmitted the action of photons striking the retina along the optical nerve to his brain. There were two holes in the box of bone. He put himself back into his eyes, and saw Gordius’s face leering and fury-gurning close up against his own. The diamond-shaped scar in the middle of his forehead glowed red, like an angry eye. The third eye is the one linked to the soul. But Jac’s own vision was oddly distorted, distilled into a central oval with darkness all around. He realised that his eyes were bulging, and that he had not taken a breath. There was no point in trying to take a breath, so he didn’t bother with that. He had to think what to do with the rock in his hand.
The options slotted into place beside him. To strike repeatedly at the body, or the neck, or perhaps at the face. That would surely encourage Gordius to cease his attack, but it would surely open wounds in the skin. To knock him on the back of his head, where the long and matted hair would soften the blow; such that the skin would probably not be broken, but where there was no guarantee the knock would be enough to make Gordius desist. The third option was the only one that remained.
His vision shrank further. There was a gargling, choking somewhere in the vicinity. It belonged to him. Jac considered the trajectory, felt for the sharpest edge of the rock he was holding, lifted it.
He jammed it as hard as he could into Gordius’s eye.
It was a sideways trajectory, coming in at an angle, and their two faces were so close together than Jac couldn’t quite avoid hitting his own head too. But the sharp point of the rock went into the eyeball.
Gordius howled, and released his grip on Jac’s neck. In a way that was the hardest moment; Jac’s diaphragm sucked down instinctively, air flowed down the rasped-raw windpipe, the heart burst into a drumroll of rapid beats, and the physicality of it all almost drew Jac back from his calm-place in the box. But he couldn’t afford to lose control. Not if he wanted to minimise physical damage.
Barely, he clung on to his internal composure. He flipped his left hand round and got it to the back of Gordius’s head; with his right hand he ground the sharp point of the rock hard as he could into the eyeball. Gordius’s scream rose exactly a tone and a half in pitch. His own hands were at his face, trying to pull the rock away.
It was enough. Jac let go, slid himself along the wall, and fully re-entered his body. This was not pleasant: his throat burned with a horrible pain, a blend of crushed and abraded sensations. A different, distinct pain was banging rhythmically inside his head. His eyes were watering, his lungs retching with some acidic, uncontrollable coughing. He doubled up and rode out the initial hump of hurt. As the worst of the physical distress began to recede he became aware that the drills had stopped. Marit’s toc-toc-toc was absent too. The only sound was Gordius’s screeching. No – there was another sound. It was a rainfall sound.
He opened his eyes. The other five were floating, applauding him. That’s what the noise was. ‘Bravo, leggy,’ said Marit, his face one big beaming smile. ‘I thought you were a casualty there, but you showed . . .’ he flourished his right hand, rolling it over and over like an antique courtier underlining a point, ‘commendable resourcefulness.’
‘That was entertaining,’ agreed Davide. ‘Maybe we should get you guys to fight on a regular basis. Break up the tedium.’
E-d-C chuckled. ‘Like Ancient Greek Gladiators!’ he said.
‘Roman,’ said Lwon.
‘Whatever! It passed the time.’
Jac took three deep breaths to try and settle his scorched lungs, and pulled himself over the wall towards Gordius. The big fellow’s screeches had shrunk a little, and he had hidden his face entirely in his hands. When Jac touched his shoulder he flinched. ‘Let me see your eye.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he squealed.
‘Come along, Gord,’ Jac said, taking his large hands and moving them gently aside. ‘Let me see the damage.’
‘I don’t know what came over me! I’m so
sorry – you’re my only friend! I’m sorry!’
‘There there,’ said Jac. Gordius had scrunched his good eye closed; but his left eye was a mess. ‘Come over to the scrubber,’ he said. ‘I need to wash this at the spigot.’
‘It’s just I’ve been so cold – so long, so cold—’ Gordius let Jac bring him over to the scrubber, and only flinched a little as he rubbed myriad little ball-bearings of water over the wound. The others were still watching. ‘Give him a kiss,’ called Marit. ‘Kiss it better.’ He laughed harshly. Jac glanced up and then back. His worry was that he might have done more than crush the eyeball; he might have cut open the skin around it, gashed the cheek or the brow. It wasn’t the cut as such that worried him – a simple cut would scar over quickly enough. But the environment was not healthy; hygiene was very difficult to maintain in such a place, there was so much crap and crud, so many bits and pieces floating through the air, that a cut might very easily become infected. And once infection took hold, who knows where it might go – it could suppurate, whole patches of skin could become open sores. Gordius might die in agony. Jac didn’t want that. The cut to the forehead had been bad enough, but luckily it seemed to have healed cleanly. He might not be lucky again.
Prising the eyelids apart made Gordius whimper, but nothing more: the pupil had been pushed into the body of the ball, and a rip opened that had let out the scrambled pale jelly inside. But Jac assumed that was a sterile matter and would – he didn’t know; set, or scar, or something. He closed the eyelid and washed it some more. ‘Don’t touch it,’ he instructed Gordius. ‘Leave it alone to heal. In a day or two it will stop hurting.’
Gordius’s emotions had now cycled from rage to remorse to indignation again. ‘My eye!’ he cried. ‘You’ve blinded my eye!’
‘You’ve still got another one,’ called E-d-C. ‘Count your blessings, you sack of ghee.’ This made the five of them laugh heartily, and Mo started doing an impression, pitching his voice high and effeminate: ‘my eye! Oo my eye!’
