At the physical level she studied crisp matrices of data, shifting, coalescing. And overlaid on that was the logical structure of data storage and access paths which represented the components of her mind.
Good... good, Lieserl. You're sending us good data. How are you feeling?
"You keep asking me that, damn it. I feel—"
Enhanced...
No longer trapped in a single point, in a box of bone behind eyes made of jelly.
What made her conscious? It was the ability to be aware of what was happening in her mind, and in the world around her, and what had happened in the past.
By any test, she was more conscious than any other human — because she had more of the machinery of consciousness.
She was supremely conscious — the most conscious human who had ever lived.
If, she thought uneasily, she was still human.
Good. Good. All right, Lieserl. We have work to do.
She let her awareness implode, once more, into a Virtual-human form. Her perception was immediately simplified. To be seeing through apparently human eyes was comforting... and yet, she thought, restrictive.
Perhaps it wouldn't be much longer before she felt ready to abandon even this last vestige of humanity. And then what?
Lieserl?
"I hear you."
She turned her face towards the core.
"There is a purpose, Lieserl," her mother said. "A justification. You aren't simply an experiment. You have a mission." She waved her hand at the sprawling, friendly buildings that comprised the House. "Most of the people here, particularly the children, don't know anything about you. They have jobs, goals — lives of their own to follow. But they're here for you.
"Lieserl, your experiences have been designed — George and I were selected, even — to ensure that the first few days of your existence would imprint you with humanity."
"The first few days?" Suddenly the unknowable future was like a black wall, looming towards her; she felt as out of control of her life as if she was a counter on some immense, invisible chutes-and-ladders board.
"I don't want this. I want to be me. I want my freedom, Phillida."
"No, Lieserl. You're not free, I'm afraid; you never can be. You have a goal."
"What goal?"
"Listen to me. The Sun gave us life. Without it — without the other stars — we couldn't survive.
"We're a strong species. We believe we can live as long as the stars — for tens of billions of years. And perhaps even beyond that. But we've had — glimpses — of the future, the far distant future... disturbing glimpses. People are starting to plan for that future — to work on projects which will take millions of years to come to fruition...
"Lieserl, you're one of those projects."
"I don't understand."
Phillida took her hand, squeezed it gently; the simple human contact seemed incongruous, the garden around them transient, a chimera, before this talk of megayears and the future of the species.
"Lieserl, something is wrong with the Sun. You have to find out what. The Sun is dying; something — or someone — is killing it."
Phillida's eyes were huge before her, staring, probing for understanding. "Don't be afraid. My dear, you will live forever. If you want to. You are a new form of human. And you will see wonders of which I — and everyone else who has ever lived — can only dream."
Lieserl listened to her tone, coldly, analyzing it. "But you don't envy me. Do you, Phillida?"
Phillida's smile crumbled. "No," she said quietly.
Lieserl tipped back her head. An immense light flooded her eyes.
She cried out.
Her mother enfolded her in her arms. "The Sun, Lieserl. The Sun..."
The woman Lieserl — engineered, distorted, unhappy — receded from my view, her story incomplete.[3]
Humans diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. In the increasing fragmentation of mankind, the shock of the Poole wormhole incursion faded — despite the ominous warnings of Superet — and it remained a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.
Then the first extra-Solar intelligence was encountered, somewhere among the stars.
Squeem ships burst into the System, in a shower of exotic particles and lurid publicity. Communication with the Squeem was utterly unlike anything envisaged before their arrival. The Squeem didn't count, for instance. But eventually common ground was found.
The Squeem were aquatic group-mind multiple creatures. They crossed the stars using a hyperdrive system, which was beyond human understanding. They maintained an interstellar network of trading colonies.
The Squeem seemed friendly enough. Trade and cultural contacts were initiated.
And then, in orbit around every inhabited world in the Solar System, hyperdrive cannon-platforms appeared...
PART 2
ERA: Squeem Occupation
Pilot
A.D. 4874
WHEN THE SQUEEM OCCUPATION LAWS were announced, Anna Gage was halfway through a year-long journey into Jove from Port Sol. She paged through the news channels, appalled.
Human space travel was suspended. Wherever the great GUTship interplanetary freighters landed they were being broken up. The Poole wormhole fast-transit routes were collapsed. Humans were put to work on Squeem projects.
Resistance had imploded quickly.
Anna Gage — shocked, alone, stranded between worlds — tried to figure out what to do.
She was seventy-nine years old, thirty-eight physical. She was a GUTship pilot; for ten years she'd carried bulk cargo from the inner worlds to the new colonies clustered around Port Sol in the Kuiper Belt.
Since she operated her ship on minimum overheads, her supplies were limited. She couldn't stay out here for long. But she couldn't return to an occupied Earth and let herself be grounded. She was psychologically incapable of that.
Still outside the orbit of Saturn, she dumped her freight and began a long deceleration.
She began probing the sky with message lasers. There had to be others out here, others like her, stranded above the occupied lands.
After a few days, with the Sun still little more than a spark ahead of her, she got a reply.
Chiron...
She opened up her GUTdrive and skimmed around the orbit of Saturn.
Chiron was an obscure ice dwarf, a dirty snowball two hundred miles across. It looped between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, following a highly elliptical orbit. One day the gravitational fields of the gas giants would hurl it out of the System altogether.
It had never been very interesting.
When Gage approached Chiron, she found a dozen GUTships drifting like spent matches around the limbs of the worldlet. The ships looked as if they were being dismantled, their components being hauled down into the interior of the worldlet.
A Virtual — of a man's head — rustled into existence in the middle of Gage's cabin. The disembodied head eyed Gage in her pilot's cocoon. The jostling pixels of his head enlarged, as if engorging with blood; Gage imagined data leaking down to the worldlet's surface.
"I'm Moro. You look clean." He looked about forty physical, with a high forehead, jet black eyebrows, a weak chin.
"Thanks a lot."
"You can approach. Message lasers only; no wideband transmission."
"Of course—"
"I'm a semisentient Virtual. There are copies of me all around your GUTship."
"I'm no trouble," she said tiredly.
"Make sure you aren't."
With Moro's pixel eyes on her, she brought the GUTship through a looping curve to the surface of the ice moon, and shut down its drive for the last time.
She stepped out onto the ancient surface of Chiron.
The ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. The suit's insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in
the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Gage, Mars-born, felt as if she might blow away.
Moro met her in person.
"You're taller than you look on TV," she said.
He raised a gun at her. He kept it there while her ship was checked over.
Then he lowered the gun and took her gloved hand. He smiled through his faceplate. "You're welcome here." He escorted her into the interior of Chiron.
Corridors had been dug hastily into the ice and pressurized; the wall surface — Chiron ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic — was smooth and hard under her hand.
Moro cracked open his helmet and smiled at her again. "Find somewhere to sleep. Retrieve whatever you need from your ship. Tomorrow I'll find you a work unit; there's plenty to be done."
Work unit?
"I'm not a colonist," she growled. "You think we'll be here that long?"
Moro looked sad. "Don't you?"
She found a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings into the cabin — Virtuals of her parents on Mars, book chips, a few clothes. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place.
There were about a hundred people hiding in the worldlet. Fifty had come from a Mars-Saturn liner; the rest had followed in ones and twos aboard fugitive GUTship freighters, like Gage herself. There were no children. Except for the liner passengers — mostly business types and tourists — the colonists of Chiron were remarkably similar. They were wiry-looking, AntiSenescence-preserved, wearing patched in-ship uniforms, and they bore expressions — uneasy, hunted — that Gage recognized. These were pilots. They feared, not discovery or death, but grounding.
The drives of some of the ships were dismounted and fixed to the surface, to provide power. The colonists improvised plants for air processing and circulation, for heating and for AS treatments. Crude distilleries were set up, with tubing and vessels cannibalized from GUTdrive motors.
Gage dug tunnels, tended vegetables, lugged equipment from GUTships of a dozen incompatible designs into the ice.
It was hard work, but surprisingly satisfying. The ache in her muscles enabled her to forget the worlds beyond Chiron, places she was coming to suspect she would never see again.
This was her home now, her Universe.
Two years limped by. The Chiron colony remained undiscovered. The grip of the Squeem occupation showed no sign of relaxing.
A mile below the surface the colonists dug out a large, oval chamber. The light, from huge strips buried in the translucent walls, was mixed to feel like sunlight, and soon there was a smell of greenery, of oxygen. People established gardens in synthesized soil plastered around the walls, and built homes from the ancient ice. The homes were boxes fixed to the ends of ice pillars; homes sprouted from the walls like flower-stalks.
Each dawn arrived with a brief flicker, a buzz as the strip-lights warmed up, then a flood of illumination. Gage would emerge from her cabin, nude; she could look down the length of her home-pillar at a field of cabbages, growing in ice as old as the Solar System.
It was like being inside a huge, gleaming egg. She missed Mars, the warm confines of her pilot cocoon.
The colonists monitored the news from the occupied worlds. There seemed to be no organized resistance; the Squeem's action had been too unexpected, too sudden and complete. As far as the colonists knew they were the only free humans, anywhere.
But they couldn't stay here forever.
They held a meeting, in an amphitheater gouged out of the ice. The amphitheater was a saucer-shaped depression with tiered seats; straps were provided to hold the occupants in place. As she sat there Gage felt a little of the cold of the worldlet, of two hundred miles of ice, seep through the insulation into the flesh of her legs.
Some proposed that the colony should become the base for a resistance movement. But if the massed weaponry of the inner planets hadn't been able to put up more than a token fight against the Squeem, what could one ad-hoc colony achieve? Others advocated doing nothing — staying here, and waiting until the Squeem occupation collapsed of its own accord.
If it ever did, Gage thought morosely.
A woman called Maris Mackenzie released her belt and drifted up to the amphitheater's focal point. She was another pilot, Gage saw; her uniform was faded but still recognizable. Mackenzie had a different idea.
"Let's get out of this System and go to the stars," she said.
There was a ripple of laughter.
"How?"
"One day Saturn or Uranus is going to throw this ice dwarf out of the System anyway," Maris Mackenzie said. "Let's help it along its way. We use the GUTdrive modules to nudge it into a close encounter with one of the giants and slingshot out of the System. Then — when we already have escape velocity — we open up a bank of GUTdrives and push up to a quarter gee. We can use water-ice as reaction mass. In three years we'll be close to lightspeed—"
"Yes, but where would we go?"
Mackenzie was tall, thin, bony; her scalp was bald, her skull large and delicate: quite beautiful, like an eggshell, Gage thought. "That's easy," Mackenzie said. "Tau Ceti. We know there are iron-core planets there, but — according to the Squeem data — no advanced societies."
"But we don't know if the planets are habitable."
Mackenzie spread her thin arms theatrically wide. "We have more water, here in the bulk of Chiron, than in the Atlantic Ocean. We can make a world habitable."
"The Squeem will detect us when we open up the drives. They can outrun us with hyperdrive."
"Yes," said Mackenzie patiently, "but they won't spot us until after the slingshot. By then we'll already have escape velocity. To board us, the Squeem would have to match our velocity in normal space. We've no evidence they've anything more powerful than our GUTdrives, for normal spaceflight. So they couldn't outrun us; even if they bothered to pursue us they could never catch us."
"How far is Tau Ceti? It will take years, despite time dilation—"
"We have years," Mackenzie said softly.
A bank of cannibalized GUTdrive engines nudged Chiron out of orbit. It took three years for the ice dwarf to crawl to its encounter with Saturn.
The time went quickly for Gage. There was plenty of work to do. Sensors were ripped from the GUTships and erected in huge, irregular arrays over the ice-ship's surface, so they could watch for pursuit. Inside the ice cave, the colonists had to take apart their fancy zero-gee homes on stalks. One side of the chamber was designated the floor, and was flattened out; squat igloos were erected across the newly leveled surface. The vegetable farms were reestablished on the floor and on the lower slopes of the walls of the ice cave.
The colonists gathered on the surface to watch the Saturn flyby.
Gage primed her helmet nipple with whisky from one of the better stills. She found a place away from the rest, dug a shallow trench in the ice, and lay in it comfortably; vapor hissed softly around her, evoked by her leaked body heat.
Huge storms raged in the flat-infinite cloudscape of Saturn. The feathery surfaces of the clouds looked close enough to touch. Rings arched over Chiron like gaudy artifacts, unreasonably sharp, cutting perceptibly across the sky as Gage watched. It was like a slow ballet, beautiful, peaceful.
Saturn's gravitational field grabbed at Chiron, held it, then hurled it on.
Chiron's path was deflected towards the Cetus constellation, out of the plane of the Solar System and roughly in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy. The slingshot accelerated the worldlet to Solar escape velocity. The encounter left the vast, brooding bulk of Saturn sailing a little more slowly around the remote Sun.
A week past the flyby the bank of GUTdrive engines was opened up.
Under a quarter gee, Gage sank to the new floor of the ice cave. She looked up at the domed ceiling and sighed; it was going to be a lot of years before she felt the exhilarating freedom of freefall again.
A week after that, riding a matchspark of GUTdrive light, the Squeem missile came flaring out
of the plane of the System. It was riding a full gee.
The countdown was gentle, in a reassuring woman's voice. Gage lay with Moro in the darkness of her igloo. She cradled him in the crook of her shoulder; his head felt light, delicate in the quarter-strength gravity.
"So we got two weeks' head start," she said.
"Well, we'd hoped for longer—"
"A lot longer."
"—but they were bound to detect the GUTdrive," Moro said. "It could have been worse. The Squeem must have cannibalized a human ship, to launch so quickly. So the missile's drive has to be human-rated, limited to a one-gee thrust."
The Squeem had evidently been forced to concur with Mackenzie's argument, that pursuit with a hyperdrive ship was impossible; only another GUTdrive ship could chase Chiron, crawling after the rogue dwarf through normal space.
The woman's voice issued its final warnings, and the countdown reached zero.
The ice world shuddered. Gage felt as if a huge hand were pressing down on her chest and legs; suddenly Moro's head was heavy, his hair prickly, and the ice floor was hard and lumpy under her bare back. The crown of her igloo groaned, and for a moment she wondered if it would collapse in on them.
The bank of GUTdrive pods had opened up, raising Chiron's acceleration to a full gee, to match the missile.
If Mackenzie's analysis was correct, Chiron couldn't outrun the missile, and the missile couldn't overtake Chiron. It was a stalemate.
Gage stroked the muscles of Moro's chest. "It's actually a neat solution by the Squeem," she murmured. "The pursuit will take years to play out, but the missile must catch us in the end."
Moro pushed himself away from her, rolled onto his front, and cupped her chin in his hands. "You're too pessimistic. We're going to the stars."
"No. Just realistic. What happens when we get to Tau Ceti? We won't be able to decelerate, or the missile will catch us. Although we may survive for years, the Squeem have destroyed us."
Moro wriggled on the floor, rubbing elbows which already looked sore from supporting his weight in the new thrust regime. He pulled at his lip, troubled.
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