Manhattan in Reverse

by Peter F. Hamilton

  I wished them well, for the next portal led to Nibeza, one of the Vatican-endorsed societies, with complex proscriptions built into its biononics. Essentially they were limited to medical functions and providing raw materials for industry, everything else had to be built the hard way. A society forever frozen on the cusp of the nineteen sixties, where people are kept busy doing their old jobs.

  Fully half of the new worlds were variants on the same theme, the only difference being in the level of limitations imposed on their biononics. There were even some deactivated portals now; those that had been used to establish the Restart worlds. There were no biononics on such planets, nor even the memory of them. The new inhabitants had their memories wiped, awakening on arrival to the belief they had travelled there in hibernation sleep on an old slower-than-light colony ship that left Earth in the nineteen forties. They remained free to carry on their lives as though the intervening years had never happened.

  I believe it was our greatest defeat that so many of us were unable to adjust naturally to our new circumstances, where every thought is a treasure to be incubated. It was a failure of will, of self-confidence, which prevented so many from taking that next psychological step. The adjustment necessary was nothing like the re-education courses which used to mark our race’s waves of scientific progress; an adaptation which could be achieved by simply going back to school and learning new skills. To thrive today you had to change your attitude and look at life from a wholly new perspective. How sad that for all its triumphs, the superb society we had constructed and systematically laboured to improve for two thousand years was unable to provide that inspiration for everyone at the end.

  But as I’d been told so many times, we now had the time to learn, and this new phase of our existence had only just begun. On the Earth below, nearly a third of the older adults spent their time daysleeping. Instead of the falsehood of enforced technological limitation on colony worlds, they immersed themselves in perfectly activated memories of the old days, trading such recollections amongst themselves for those blissful times spent in a simpler world. The vast majority, so they said, relished the days of childhood or first romances set in the age of horse-drawn carriages and sailing ships.

  Maybe one day they would tire of their borrowed times and wake from their unreality to look around anew at what we have achieved. For out there on the other worlds, the ones defying any restriction, there was much to be proud of. Fiume, where the gas giants were being dismantled to build a vast shell around the star, with an inner surface capable of supporting life. Milligan, whose colonists were experimenting with truly giant wormholes which they hoped could reach other galaxies. Oranses, home to the original sinners, condemned by the Vatican for their project of introducing communal sentience to every living thing on their planet, every worm, insect, and stalk of grass, thus creating Gaia in all her majesty. All this glorious playground was our heritage, a gift from the youth of today to their sulking, inward-looking parents.

  My flyer soared out of the traffic stream just before we passed over the rim of Tangsham portal. I directed it round the toroid of exotic matter to the station on the other side. The molecular curtain over the hangar complex entrance parted to let us through, and we alighted on one of the reception platforms. Charles Winter Hutchenson, the station chief, came out to meet me. The Hutchensons are one of our partners in Tangsham, a settlement which is endeavouring to transform people into star-voyagers, a species of immense biomechanical constructs that will spend eternity exploring space. Placing a human mind into the core of such a vessel is simple enough, but its psychology must undergo considerable adaptation to be comfortable with such a body. Yet as I saw on my approach to the portal, there was no shortage of people wishing to join the quest. The solid planets in the Tangsham star system were ringed with construction stations, fed by rivers of matter extracted from asteroids and gas giants. Energy converter nodules had been emplaced deep within the star itself to power such colossal industrial endeavour. It was a place of hard science; there was little of nature’s beauty to be found there.

  ‘Pleasure to welcome you on board,’ Charles Winter Hutchenson said warmly. ‘I didn’t know elder representatives concerned themselves with incidents like this.’

  ‘I have several motives,’ I confessed. ‘I met Carter Osborne Kenyon a long time ago. Attending to him now is the least I can do. And he is one of the senior nuclear engineers on the project, he’s entitled to the best service we can provide. Is he back yet?’

  ‘Yes. He arrived about an hour ago. I halted the transshipment as you asked.’

  ‘Fine. My cybershadow will take care of the official casework for us. But I’d like to assess the requirements in person first.’

  ‘Okay. This way.’ He led me over to a cathedral-sized cargo hall where the stasis chamber was being kept. It was a translucent grey cylinder suspended between two black glass slabs. The outline of a prone human figure was just visible inside.

  My cybershadow meshed me with the chamber’s control AI, and I instructed it to give me a status review. Carter Osborne Kenyon wasn’t in a good condition. There had been an accident on one of Tangsham’s construction stations; even with our technological prowess, machinery isn’t flawless. Some power relays had surged, plasma temperature had doubled, there had been a blow-out. Metal was vaporized as the errant plasma jet cut its way through several sheets of decking. Loose panels had swung about, one of them catching Carter a severe blow. The left side of his body had been badly damaged. Worse than that, the edge of the metal had cracked his skull open, pulping the brain tissue inside. It would have been fatal in an earlier age. He was certainly clinically dead before he hit the ground. But the emergency systems had responded efficiently. His body had immediately been sealed in stasis, and microdrones had swept the area, gathering up every cell that had splashed across the floor and nearby walls. The cells were subsequently put in stasis with him.

  We had all the component parts, they just had to be reassembled properly. His genome would be read, and each damaged cell repaired, identified, then replaced in its correct location. It could be done on Tangsham, but they would have to commit considerable resources to it. While Earth, with its vast elderly population, retained the greatest level of medical expertise among all of the settled worlds, and subsequently devoted the highest percentage of resources to the field. That concentration of knowledge also meant our software and techniques remained far ahead of everyone else. Carter’s best chance for a full reanimation and recovery was with us.

  ‘The damage is within our accepted revival limits,’ I told Charles Winter Hutchenson. ‘I’ll authorize the procedure and take him back with me to the institute clinic.’

  The station chief seemed glad that the disruption to his routine was being dealt with so propitiously. He instructed the cargo hall’s gravity field to refocus, and the stasis chamber bobbed up into the air, then slid away to my flyer’s hold.

  I left the portal, and guided the flyer directly to the Raleigh institute. It wasn’t just the physical cell structure of Carter’s brain which the medical technicians would repair, his memories too would have to be re-established. That was the part of him I was most interested in salvaging. It was as close to time travel as I would ever get.

  With the sensorium integration routines developed for the daysleepers I would be able to drop right into his world. I would be there, observing, listening, and tasting, right from the very first time he met Justin Ascham Raleigh during that initial freshers week, until the night of the murder. And unlike him, I wouldn’t view those moments through sentiment – I’d be scouring every second for anomalies, hints of out-of-character behaviour, the misplaced nuance of a single word.

  There were three and a half solid years to reconnoitre. I wasn’t just examining the time they were in each other’s presence. Anything that was said and done during that time could prove crucially relevant. Even his dreams might provide a clue.

  It would take a while. There were so
many resources I had to supervise and negotiate over, I couldn’t schedule much current time to the case; maybe an hour a week. But I’d waited this long now. Time was no longer a relevant factor.

  SIX

  ETA CARINAE AD 2038

  The deepflight ship eased out of the wormhole portal and twisted smoothly to align itself on the habitat disc. Two light-years away, Eta Carinae had inflated across half of the universe. Its blue-white ejecta lobes were webbed with sharp scarlet lines as the outer plasma envelope slowly radiated away their incredible original temperature. The entire edifice was engulfed in a glowing crimson corona that bristled with spiky gas jets slowly dissipating out towards the stars. Fronds of dark cold dust eddied around it at a greater distance, the remnants of earlier explosive activity.

  Eta Carinae is one of the most massive, and therefore unstable, stars in the galaxy. It is also the most dauntingly elegant. I could appreciate why the transcendients had chosen to base themselves here, ten thousand light-years away from Earth. Despite its glory, an ever-present reminder of matter’s terrible fragility. Such a monster could never last for more than a few million years. Its triumphant end will come as a detonation that will probably be seen from galactic superclusters halfway towards the edge of infinity.

  How Justin Ascham Raleigh would have loved this.

  The habitat appeared in our forward sensors. A simple white circle against the swirling red fogs of the hulking sky. Two hundred miles across, it was alone in interstellar space apart from its companion portal. One side flung out towers and spires, alive with sparkling lights. The other was apparently open to space, its surface undulating gently with grassy vales and meandering streams. Forests created random patches of darker green that swarmed over the low hills.

  ‘We have landing clearance,’ Neill Heller Caesar said.

  ‘Have they changed the governing protocols?’ I asked. I wasn’t unduly nervous, but I did want this case to go to its absolute completion.

  He paused, consulting his cybershadow. ‘No. The biononic connate acknowledges our authority.’

  The deepflight ship slid through the habitat’s atmospheric boundary without a ripple. We flew along an extensive valley, and alighted at its far end, just before the central stream broke up into a network of silver runnels that emptied into a deep lake. There was a small white villa perched on the slope above the stream, its roof transparent to allow the inhabitants an uninterrupted view of Eta Carinae.

  I followed Neill Heller Caesar across the spongy grass, impressed by how clean and natural the air smelt. A figure appeared in the villa’s doorway and watched us approach.

  It was so inevitable, I considered, that this person should be here of all the places in the universe we had reached. The transcendent project was attempting to imprint a human mind on the fabric of space-time itself. If they succeeded we would become as true angels, creatures of pure thought, distracted by nothing. It was the final liberation to which Bethany Maria Caesar had always aspired.

  She smiled knowingly at me as I came through the gate in the white picket fence surrounding her garden. Once again, the elegant twenty-year-old beauty I’d seen in Justin’s rooms at Dunbar College. I could scarcely remember the wizened figure who’d talked to me on Io.

  ‘Edward Buchanan Raleigh.’ She inclined her head in a slight bow. ‘So you never gave up.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I appreciate the pursuit of a goal, especially over such a length of time. It’s an admirable quality.’

  ‘Thank you. Are you going to deny it was you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I would never insult you like that. But I would like to know how you found out.’

  ‘It was nothing you could have protected yourself from. You see, you smiled.’

  ‘I smiled?’

  ‘Yes. When my back was turned. I’ve spent the last thirty years reviewing Carter’s memories of his time at Oxford; accessing a little chunk of them almost every day. I’d gone over everything, absolutely everything, every event I considered remotely relevant was played again and again until I was in danger of becoming more like him than he ever was himself. It all amounted to nothing. Then I played his memories right to the bitter end. That night when Francis and I arrived at Justin’s rooms, I asked Detective Pitchford to take blood samples from all of you. He was rather annoyed about it, some junior know-it-all telling him how to do his job. Quite rightly, too. And that was when you smiled. I couldn’t see it, but Carter did. I think he must have put it down to you being amused by Pitchford’s reaction. But I’ve seen you smile like that on one other occasion. It was when we were on Io and I asked you to come back to Earth because of the way low gravity was harming you. I asked you because I didn’t understand then what the Caesars wanted with Jupiter. You did. You’d worked out in advance what would happen when biononics reached their full potential and how it could be used to your advantage. You were quite right too, that particular orthodox branch of your family has already consumed Ganymede to build their habitats, and they show no sign of slowing their expansion.’

  ‘So I smiled at you.’

  ‘Yes. Both times you were outsmarting me. Which made me wonder about the blood sample. I had your sample taken out of stasis and analysed again. The irony was, we actually had the relevant test back in eighteen thirty. We just never ran it.’

  ‘You found I had excessive progestin in my blood. And I smiled because your request confirmed the investigation would go the way I’d extrapolated. I knew I’d be asked for a sample by the police, but it was a risk I was prepared to take, because the odds of anyone making a connection from that to the murder were almost non-existent.’

  ‘The most we’d be likely to ask was how you got hold of an illegal contraception. But then you were a biochemist, you were probably able to make it in the lab.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy. I had to be very careful about equipment usage. The church really stigmatizes contraception, even now.’

  ‘Like you say, using it still wasn’t a reason to murder someone. Not by itself. Then I wondered why you were taking contraception. Nearly a third of the girls at university became pregnant. They weren’t stigmatized. But then they’re free to come back in fifty or seventy years after they’ve finished having children, and pick up where they left off. Not you though. I believed you were suffering from low-gravity deterioration on Io because I had no reason to think differently.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ she said disdainfully. ‘Everybody thinks the Sport of Emperors just bred the families for long life. But the Caesars were much cannier and crueller than that. There are branches of the family bred to reinforce other traits.’

  ‘Like intelligence. They concentrated on making you smart at the expense of longevity.’

  ‘Very astute of you, Edward. Yes, I’m a Short. Without biononic DNA reset I wouldn’t have lived past a hundred and twenty.’

  ‘You couldn’t afford time off from university to have children. It would have taken up half of your life, and you could already see where the emerging sciences were leading. That century was the greatest age of discovery and change we’ve ever had. It would never be repeated. And you might have been left behind before biononics reached fruition. No problem for us, but in your case being left behind might mean death.’

  ‘He didn’t care,’ she said. Her eyes were closed, her voice a pained whisper. ‘He loved me. He wanted us to be together forever and raise twenty children.’

  ‘Then he found out you weren’t going to have children with him.’

  ‘Yes. I loved him, too, with all my heart. We could have had all this future together, if he’d just made an allowance for what I was. But he wouldn’t compromise, he wouldn’t listen. Then he threatened to tell my college if I didn’t stop taking the progestin. I couldn’t believe he would betray me like that. I would have been a disgrace. The college would have sent me away. I didn’t know how much value the Caesars would place on me, not back in those days, before I’d proved myself. I didn’t
know if they’d cover for me. I was twenty-one and desperate.’

  ‘So you killed him.’

  ‘I sneaked up to his room that night to ask him one last time. Even then he wouldn’t listen. I actually had a knife in my hand, and he still said no. He was such a traditionalist, a regular bloke, loyal to his family and the world’s ideology. So, yes, I killed him. If I hadn’t, today wouldn’t exist.’

  I looked up at the delicate strata of red light washing across the sky. What a strange place for this to finally be over. I wondered what Francis would make of it all. The old man would probably have a glass of particularly fine claret, then get on with the next case. Life was so simple when he was alive.

  ‘It would,’ I said. ‘If not you, then someone else would have reached the breakthrough point. You said it yourself, we were freefalling to the plateau.’

  ‘All this does put us in an extremely awkward position,’ Neill Heller Caesar said. ‘You are the inventor of biononics, the mother of today’s society. But we can hardly allow a murderer to go around unpunished, now can we?’

  ‘I’ll leave,’ she said. ‘Go into exile for a thousand years or whatever. That way nobody will be embarrassed, and the family won’t lose any political respect.’

  ‘That’s what you want,’ I said. ‘I cannot agree to that. The whole reason that we have family command protocols built in to biononics is to ensure that there can be no radical breakaways. Nobody is able to set up by themselves and inflict harm on the rest of us. Humanity even in its current state has to be able to police itself, though the occasions where such actions are needed are thankfully rare. You taking off by yourself, and probably transcending into a pure energy form, is hardly an act of penance. You killed a member of my family so that you could have that opportunity. Therefore, it must be denied you.’ My cybershadow reported that she issued a flurry of instructions to the local biononic connate. It didn’t acknowledge. Neill Heller Caesar had kept his word. And I marvelled at the irony in that. Justice served by an act of trust, enacted by a personality forged in a time where honesty and integrity were the highest values to which anyone could aspire. Maybe the likes of he and I did have something valid to contribute to everything today’s youngsters were busy building.