Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  Reinette Luz showed up about twenty minutes into the reception. She was wearing something medieval-looking in velvet and leather. Her skin was gold now, with faint cracks in it, so she looked like an old painting in a church.

  “So what have you got?” I asked her.

  “It’s a business plan,” she said. “I’m more of a strategy person than a techie.”

  She had a projector displaying a plan to set up a colony of robots on a sun-grazing metallic asteroid, smelt the thing using solar mirrors at perihelion, use the same mirrors to boost it into a Mars-grazing orbit, and finally park the mass of finished metal at one of the Trojan points along Mars’s orbit.

  “I can give the Community a century’s supply of low-cost metal. That’s our biggest import,” she said, as much for the benefit of invisible viewers as for me. “My analysis shows a return on investment of 65 to 200 percent over ten years, and it will make Deimos independent of Mars and Luna for minerals.”

  Which would lock in their hegemony for good. It made sense, really, but I couldn’t resist the urge to needle her a little. “You realize you’ve just given this plan of yours to the Community, right? Even if you don’t win, they can still use it.”

  Her smile didn’t shift a millimeter. “That’s fine with me,” she said. She added a silent personal message: “I’ve worked out a counterplan I can pitch to Luna investors if the Community wants to go ahead with this. Like I said, I’m a strategy person.”

  I poked around some of her pop-ups and supporting files and found out why she’d been able to finish so soon. She’d been working on this idea for a couple of years. The only thing she’d done that day was to jazz up the visuals and tailor the text to appeal to the Community. Clever. I hadn’t even thought of repurposing one of my old ideas.

  Over Reinette’s shoulder I saw Sofia explaining her air-mushroom. She happened to look in my direction, and just for an instant her confident, engaged expression slipped.

  By that point all the competitors were setting up, so it seemed like a good time to make my move. “Have you got a second?” I asked Reinette. “You can be the first to try out my project.”

  “I’d be delighted,” she said, and followed me over to where the box holding the Mask sat in the spotlight. A small crowd gathered as we approached.

  I cleared my throat and tapped into the sound system. “Members of the Community and guests, I present to you my entry for the first round of the competition: the Most Beautiful Mask.” I opened the box with as much of a flourish as I could manage and took out the mask. Reinette looked a little confused at the blank silvery face, so I held it up to her own. “Put it on.”

  She did, and I could tell she was watching the local feed to see how it looked. I didn’t want to make it turn into Sofia again, so I deliberately looked away while the Mask optimized itself for the journalist standing next to Reinette waiting to talk to me. For her it turned androgynous and pouty-lipped. For the older man who came up next, the Mask became an elfish-looking face with big eyes and a tiny mouth.

  “Now let’s see how it works for you,” I said, and took the Mask from Reinette. I put it on my own face and watched the local feed. As she looked into my eyes, the Mask adjusted itself until . . . a duplicate Reinette looked back at her.

  There was some polite laughter about that. I handed the Most Beautiful Mask off to the older man. He held my look long enough for me to see the Mask changing into a high-cheekboned face with dark skin and a narrow chin. Sofia again.

  “I guess this means you didn’t like my suggestion,” said Reinette in a private message when she saw what the Mask looked like.

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” I sent back.

  “I think your mind has made itself up. I wonder what she’s going to do with that information,” she replied.

  THE COMMUNITY VOTED ON our creations, but the results were secret. Of course people could speculate. There was a thriving prediction market, and plenty of outright betting. The line at Helium Colony on Mars had me in second place at even money based on my strong showing with the Mask. Even allowing for a little home-planet bias, I was definitely in the top half.

  Right at 2438, Piers Tyana called for everyone’s attention and took over the sound system. “And now for the second challenge. We all know the saying that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Well, that’s what we’d like our competitors to do. By this time tomorrow we want you to bring us an omelette made without breaking any eggs. There will be four tasters for each omelette, and people will see and hear their reactions, so flavor and consistency do count. You will also be judged on how creative and interesting your solution to the problem is.”

  Great. A food challenge, and me a clueless Martian rube. No quick and easy win for me this time. I decided to play it straight. How to get the contents of an egg out of the shell without breaking it? Maybe they hoped one of us would invent teleportation or space-folding or something.

  The first thing I needed was a couple of hours of sleep. Whether the tests were based on creativity, technical ability, or salesmanship, all of them required excellent sleep-regulation chemicals. I wondered if the Community created this whole competition as part of a plan to breed a subspecies that never slept.

  I napped, adjusted my brain with a cup of tea, and went down to the workspace to get started. It took me four hours to come up with my basic approach, and another twelve to actually implement it. I figured out how to get into an egg without breaking the shell.

  See, eggshells are porous, and even a brittle material like calcium carbonate has some elasticity. So I fabbed up a tiny multiaxis retractor with a pressure sensor and inserted it into one of the little micron pores, then started slowly ratcheting the pore open, stretching it nanometer by nanometer with pauses to let the material rest, until I could get a pipette inside and suck out the yolk and white. It sounds simple but I went through about fifty eggs before I got six where the calcium carbonate didn’t actually fracture.

  Then I had to make an omelette. Nowadays I can whip one up without even thinking. Back then I had never actually cooked much. When I was little, my family ate in the cafeteria in whatever habitat we were living in or traded washing up for cooking with our neighbors. As a little boy I learned to make tea, boil rice, and . . . well, that was it, really.

  I needed to see someone make an omelette. I thought of calling someone back home, but even the best telepresence isn’t the same as standing next to someone. Plus there was the gravity issue—making an omelette on Deimos wouldn’t be the same as doing it on Mars. So I took my eggs in a sealed flask and went to the El Dorado kitchen.

  Sofia was there ahead of me, with a bowl of something egglike. She was practicing her own omelette-making so I watched her. When she finished her final fold, she looked over her shoulder at me.

  “You’ve come to do some cooking?”

  “I’ve never made an omelette before. Mind if I watch you?”

  “It’s tricky in this low gravity. The egg spatters like crazy when you pour it. On the other hand it makes turning it very easy. You can flip it one-handed like a professional.”

  “So how’d you get the egg out without breaking it?” I asked her. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  “This egg never had a shell. I made it out of vegetable protein.”

  “Cool! I just found a way to get my egg open without breaking it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Hyperspace,” I said. “Rotate it through hyperspace so the shell’s on the inside.”

  I think she believed me for about a second.

  “You’re terrible! Just for that I’m not going to show you how to make an omelette.” She had a great smile.

  “I think I’ve got the basics from watching. I’m going to practice with some hotel eggs before I use my hyperspace eggs.”

  It was then that I noticed her responses were going crazy. Interest and a hint of arousal, fatigue, and a hefty dose of fear.

  “You’re no
t regulating?” I asked her.

  “I don’t do that,” she said.

  “You don’t have any implants?”

  “Of course I have implants, silly. But they’re to keep me healthy, not to change how I feel. If you don’t feel temptation, you’re not making moral choices. Now watch: you beat the eggs until they’re just slightly bubbly, but you don’t want them all frothy. See?”

  I bookmarked the sensor images of what the eggs looked like. “So . . . you like me? You’re not turning on the attraction on purpose?”

  “Yes, I like you,” she said patiently. “What do you think of me?”

  “Well, I damped myself down pretty hard to stay focused. This isn’t the time to start a relationship.”

  “Martians,” she said with a shake of her head. “Anyway, once you’ve got your eggs properly mixed, you have to make sure the pan is properly hot.”

  “What temperature?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, with a funny smile as though she was only just realizing it herself. “Just . . . when it looks right. When the butter is just about to brown.”

  “How do you know when it’s about to do something?”

  “Experience, practice—and smell! When it starts smoking like that, it’s too hot!” She snatched the pan off the heat and put it in the wash pile, then started with another one.

  I took note of the temperature. Just above 130.

  “That looks right,” she said, and scraped the egg mix into the pan. “It takes so long for things to pour here.”

  “You’ve never been off Earth before?”

  “I took a ride up the Kenya Elevator once, but I didn’t take the time to cook anything.” For some reason her fear levels rose as she spoke.

  “Didn’t like it?” I asked.

  “What? Oh, I loved the view, and the microgravity at the top was wonderful.”

  I sent her a private message. “What are you scared of?”

  She looked at me, and then at the omelette. “Oh, dear. That’s overcooked. See? It’s too rubbery. We weren’t paying attention,” she said. While she scraped the floppy egg disk into the organics bin she sent me a private reply. “If you must know, I am afraid I won’t win.”

  “Why do you care?” I sent back. “You can just fall back to Africa and run the place, right?”

  “You don’t know anything,” she said aloud, and banged the pan. “Make your own!” She took her stuff and moved to the opposite side of the kitchen.

  While I mixed up some practice eggs and got the pan ready again, I checked her history. Obviously I’d touched a live cable. Micromegas put it together. Sofia’s family had been key figures in the Africa Renaissance before she was born, but they’d been losing out in the political realignments ever since. They had the bad luck to be part of a wealthy minority group, which is always dangerous. Her adult relatives outside the Rhapta SEZ were either imprisoned or suspiciously dead. The projections showed their faction was about to lose control in Rhapta as well. Having a family member in the Deimos Community would give the Komu side a friend with a big stick.

  I tried another couple of practice omelettes, watching the temperature and time carefully. My failures got better, but they weren’t anything I’d feed to a human.

  After my third try, I took a break and went over to Sofia. “Listen,” I began.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “I’m nervous and spoke without thinking. Will you forgive me?”

  “No—I mean, yes! I forgive you, but it’s my fault, really. I’m sorry if I said something to upset you. I didn’t know about your family.”

  “Please, just let it drop,” she said. Everyone in Deimos was probably looking up Sofia’s family now. I went back to my eggs.

  The guy from Ceres won that round, hands down. He stretched the whole “without breaking an egg” definition to the limit by dissolving the shells in acid, but his finished product was really amazing. Turned out he was an expert at microgravity cooking and produced a Spanish omelette that looked like a cloud. The ecstatic expressions on the tasters made the rest of us grit our teeth in frustration.

  Sofia did pretty well. Her eggless creation looked and apparently tasted just like a classic French omelette aux fines herbes. Reinette Luz took a more creative approach and made a candy omelette out of marzipan, which got a good response.

  My own effort got some interested nods for how I got the egg open, but the reaction to my finished dish was perfunctory. Nobody spit it out—which actually happened to the poor girl from Luna, who also tried to make a substitute egg out of yeast and invented something absolutely inedible.

  When I checked the odds out of Helium, I found that they had me rated at five to one. Sofia was holding at three to one, and Reinette was now tied with her.

  THEY GAVE US ONE sol off before announcing the final challenge. We all slept a lot.

  I did some sightseeing around Deimos: the Lagado Academy, the spacecraft yard, and the water sculpture park. I found a café on the Rue Candide and watched the crowds go by.

  I’d been there an hour when Piers Tyana found me. He was dressed casually in a suit liner—though when I looked again I saw it was actually a woven silk bodysuit, tailored and dyed to look exactly like a beat-up old suit liner. “Are you waiting for anyone?”

  “Just sightseeing.”

  “May I?” He took the seat across from me, and the crowd noise faded as he turned on the sound cloak.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked him, suddenly afraid I had broken some unknown rule.

  “Oh, no, no,” he said, with a reassuring smile. “I’m not here as an official. This is entirely informal.”

  A bot arrived with a globe of white wine and a pair of samosas for him, and he took a bite and a sip before continuing.

  “You’re a very talented young man, Ying,” he said. “The tasters weren’t very impressed with your cooking, but our more thoughtful members still consider you a very strong candidate.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He took another bite of samosa. “What’s your big idea?”

  I just stared at him for a second. “How did you hear about that?”

  He smiled and drank a little more wine. “Members of the Deimos Community enjoy absolute privacy in their communications and network activity. It’s one of our fundamental rights. Visitors, however, may be monitored for the good of the Community. Even personal messages. Some of us in the loop are curious: What’s your big idea?”

  “When I was working at Eos, I started fooling around with some advanced propulsion concepts. I think I’ve found a way to—”

  I stopped. I’d been messing with the old Alcubierre drive concept—squeezing space-time to move faster than light without breaking the rules—and I’d come up with a way to get around the problems that had scuttled the idea a century ago. Chou had looked over my notions and couldn’t find anything wrong, but it would take a hell of a lot to develop.

  “To . . . ?” he prompted.

  “To change the way we move spacecraft around,” I finished. I could feel myself getting sweaty and nervous, and I gave myself a big hit of adrenaline blocker. Not that it would help; Tyana could probably hear my pulse from where he sat.

  He waited, then finished his first samosa. “You’re listed as a team member on three projects of Dr. Chou’s group—”

  “It’s not any of that,” I said.

  “As I said, I’m not here officially, and we’ve got full privacy. You don’t have to worry about anyone stealing your idea.”

  That was all very well, but he was listening—and of course Micromegas was, too. And anyone with a “need to know.” For the good of the Community. I was just a visitor, after all.

  My idea was a game changer, no question about it. Spaceships with an Alcubierre drive wouldn’t have to worry about minimum-energy orbits or available propellant. It would give us the stars! Deimos wouldn’t be the hub of all space travel anymore—just one more rock in one more star system.

&nb
sp; Unless, of course, the Community controlled the drive. Then they’d own the universe.

  “It’s still just conceptual,” I said. “Not ready to publish yet.”

  He finished his samosa and looked at me, and I looked back. You want what’s in the shiny box? You have to let me in. Otherwise I’ll show my shiny box to someone else.

  “Here in Deimos we really are a community,” he said. “It’s not just a name we call ourselves. All of us contribute.”

  I said, “I think I have a lot to offer.”

  Another long pause while he emptied the wine globe. “Well, thank you for this little talk,” he told me. He got up and shot off into the traffic stream, and the silence faded away around me.

  I WENT BACK TO my room and used my hotel credit to order a meal. But even after the bot set a table for me, I felt lonesome.

  So I took my food across the hall and knocked on Sofia’s door. “Would you like some dinner? I’ve got a big plate of fried fish and chips and it’s too much for me,” I said.

  “I’d been thinking of something more like a salad,” she said.

  “Suit yourself.” I started to turn away.

  “—But maybe I’ll have a little,” she said, and stepped back to let me in.

  Her room was nicer than mine. They were identical, of course, but she had done some cool stuff with the settings. The walls showed a city of white and gold towers in a green river delta under blazing sunlight, and we sat on a colorful carpet. Not smart matter but an actual carpet made of animal hair, which she had actually hauled all the way out of Earth’s gravity well and across half an AU just to sit on.

  The fish was okay—that is, it tasted better than most things I’d eaten in my life before that, but Sofia got out a little jar of hot pepper paste to dip it in. I wished for something stronger than tea to soothe my throat.

  We ate in silence, even though she had the room on full privacy. Ever since my conversation with Piers Tyana that afternoon I figured everything I said and all my network traffic would be watched by someone.

  “Who do you think will win?” she asked me when there was nothing but fried potatoes left.