The ship was braced into the chamber on enormous shock-absorbing pistons, gripping it from all angles. Even as Auger watched, the ship lurched one way and then another, as if subject to immense lateral forces. “I took the Twentieth to Phobos,” she said, feeling slightly seasick. “What’s one of its shuttles doing here?”
“The liner was hijacked. Hostile ships made rendezvous and hard docking beyond reach of systemwide law enforcement.”
“Slasher forces?”
“Not obviously so. According to eyewitnesses, they behaved just like your run-of-the-mill extralegal agents. Pirates, in other words. Luckily, the liner was running at nowhere near maximum capacity. There was room for most of the passengers and crew to escape on shuttles.”
“And the pirates just let them go?” Auger asked incredulously.
“They had nothing to gain by butchering those on board. There wasn’t enough room for everyone on the shuttles, and some of the crew elected to remain aboard. They were allowed into a secure compartment with life-support capability and provisions. That’s where the ones who stayed aboard were all found, when the Twentieth drifted within reach of Thresher police.”
Auger thought she had misheard her. “Drifted?”
“She had been gutted,” Cassandra said. “Stripped of her entire drive assembly.”
“That’s insane.”
“Oh, there was some attempt to dress up the piracy as being for the usual reasons,” she said, “but it was all cover, really. The main thing they were after was the drive core.”
“But why would anyone want the drive core of an old junkheap like the Twentieth? The Slashers will happily sell anyone a more efficient engine, provided they stump up the costs.”
“That’s precisely what bothered me,” Cassandra said. “The entire operation to steal the Twentieth’s engine must have been quite expensive in its own right. Several ships had to make that rendezvous, including one large enough to contain the entire drive assembly. It’s not the sort of thing you dismantle.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Auger said.
“But you sense a connection none the less. Why steal an antimatter engine when we can offer something infinitely safer, and just as powerful? The only practical use for such a thing would be—”
“As a bomb,” Auger said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Think about it, Cassandra. It has to be a bomb. That’s the only thing that drive can give the Slashers that you don’t already have. Your bleed-drive engines suck energy from the vacuum in tiny, controlled doses. I know. I’ve seen the sales brochures.”
“They’re very safe,” Cassandra said defensively. “The vacuum potential reaction is self-limiting: if the energy density exceeds a critical limit, it shuts off.”
“In other words, very useful for making a safe drive, but not much use as a Molotov cocktail.”
Beside her, Floyd smiled. “I almost thought I was going to get through a whole conversation without understanding a single word. Now you’ve gone and spoiled it.”
“I confess I have no idea what a Molotov cocktail is,” Cassandra said. “Is it some kind of weapon system?”
“You could say that,” Floyd said.
“I still don’t understand,” Cassandra said. “You’re implying that someone wanted the antimatter engine to use as a bomb. But what use is such a thing? A ship large enough to contain the stolen drive assembly could never approach close enough to a planet or habitat to do serious damage. It would be intercepted and destroyed in interplanetary space, light-seconds from any target. As soon as we issue a systemwide alert—”
“Go ahead and issue your alert,” Auger said, “but I don’t think it will make any difference. I think you’ll find it a lot more difficult to track those ships than you’re expecting. I also don’t think they intend to use that antimatter against anything in this system.”
“You’re making me most anxious to have a peek inside your skull,” Cassandra said ominously. “I thought we had an agreement.”
“And you said you had something else to show me.”
“It concerns the evacuees,” she said. “And, in a way, you.”
She made the window vanish, then led them a little further along the corridor and opened another gilded doorway.
The room beyond was a kind of dormitory. Inside, ranked against the two long, incurving walls, were twenty or so coffinlike containers. Again, they had the spongy, vegetative look of recently extruded hardware, their bases merging into the floor. Pulpy, rootlike tendrils connected the pods to each other and the walls.
“This is where we’re keeping the eighteen passengers and crew from the shuttle,” Cassandra said, inviting Auger to take a closer look at one of the pods. The upper part of it consisted of a curved, glossy lid, veined like a leaf, through which the head and upper body of one of the evacuees could just be discerned. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman, encased in what looked like a thick turquoise-blue support matrix of some kind. Auger even thought she recognised her as one of the other passengers she’d seen on the Twentieth.
“Is she ill?” Auger asked.
“No,” Cassandra said. “See that bluish gel she’s floating in? Pure machinery. It’s invaded her completely, right down to the cellular level.”
“Who gave you permission to do that?” Auger asked, outraged. “These people are Threshers. Most of them would never consent to having machines pumped into their bodies.”
“I’m afraid they didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter,” Cassandra said. “It was either that or die. We can quibble over consent later.”
“Die of what? You just said that none of them were ill.”
“It’s the evasive pattern, you see. We’re sustaining ten gees, which would be bad enough in its own right, but our random manoeuvres superimpose one or two hundred gee transients on top of that background load. It’s quite intolerable for an unmodified person. Without the buffering from those machines, they’d be dead.”
“Then why aren’t we?” Auger asked.
“I’ll show you.”
Cassandra waved them through to the back of the dormitory. “I mentioned eighteen evacuees from the Twentieth,” she said, “but you’ll notice that there are twenty caskets in this room. We wouldn’t have bothered creating the extras without good reason.” She gestured to the last two, set against the far wall. “You and your companion are in those two.”
“Wait…” Auger began.
“There’s no reason for alarm,” Cassandra said. “Come closer and look inside. You’ll see that you’re perfectly unharmed.”
Auger looked through the transparent cover of the first casket. There, suspended in the same blue gel as the woman, lay the sleeping form of Floyd, his eyes closed, his face an unmoving mask of serenity. She stepped aside to let him see, then viewed her own body in the other casket.
“Why does this feel as if everything’s just turned into a bad dream?” Floyd asked.
“It’s all right,” Auger said, reaching out to squeeze his hand in an attempt to give reassurance that she didn’t really feel herself. No matter how much this bothered her, she could not begin to imagine what Floyd was feeling. “Isn’t it, Cassandra?”
“I didn’t want to alarm you immediately,” the Slasher said, “knowing how Threshers tend to feel about our machines—”
“She’s telling the truth,” Auger said to Floyd. “We are on a spaceship and we were rescued from Mars. I’m pretty certain that much is true. But we still haven’t been woken up.”
“I feel pretty awake for someone who hasn’t been woken up.”
“You’re fully conscious,” she said. “It’s just that the machines are fooling your brain into thinking that you’re walking around. Everything that you see or feel is bogus. You’re really still in that tank.”
“It’s the only way we can keep you alive,” Cassandra said, with evident concern. “The acceleration would have killed all of us by now.”
“So you’re…
?” Floyd began, not really knowing how to frame the question.
“In another casket, as are all my colleagues, somewhere else in the ship. I’m sorry that a small white lie was necessary, but everything else I’ve told you was the truth.”
“Everything?” asked Auger.
Cassandra cleared a portion of the wall and created a three-dimensional grid, into which she dropped the tiny form of their ship. It veered and swerved, the ship’s lithe, flexible hull bending and twisting with each change of direction. “This is our real-time trajectory,” Cassandra said. “You saw a hint of it when I showed you the captive shuttle. I could have doctored the view—it would have been trivial—but I chose not to. You’d have guessed sooner or later.”
“Are we really all right?” Auger said.
“Absolutely,” Cassandra said, “although the healing processes are still taking place. You’ll both be good as new by the time we arrive at Tanglewood.”
“If we ever get there,” she said.
Cassandra smiled. “Let’s err on the side of optimism, shall we? In my experience there’s very little point worrying about something you can’t control.”
“Even death?”
“Most especially death.”
THIRTY-THREE
Auger was picking her way through an orange when Cassandra reappeared, stepping through a curtained doorway that rippled in an imaginary breeze.
The girl-shaped Slasher made a chair appear from nowhere, then lowered herself into it. “How are you feeling?”
“This is the best fruit I’ve ever tasted,” Auger replied.
“The best fruit you’ve never tasted,” Cassandra said, correcting her with an amused smile. “It’s rather unfair, of course: how could any real food compare with direct stimulation of the taste centre?”
Being reminded that the orange was a figment of her imagination was enough to kill what little of her appetite remained. “Is this what it’s like for you every day?” Auger asked. Beside her, Floyd continued to attack a bunch of grapes.
“More or less.”
“I suppose you get used to it, in the end. Being able to experience anything you want, when and wherever you want to…”
“It has its attractions,” Cassandra said. “But so does unlimited access to candy, when you’re a child. The simple fact of the matter is that we learn to live with what we have, and the novelty begins to wear off after a while. The machines in my environment can reshape any room—any space—according to my immediate needs. If the machines can’t respond quickly enough, or there’s a conflict with someone else’s requirements, I can tell other machines in my head to achieve the same thing by manipulating my perceptions. If there’s a memory that troubles me, I can erase or bury it, or programme it to surface only when I need some reminder of my shortcomings. If there’s an emotion I find unpleasant, I can turn it off or lessen it.”
“Like anxiety about the future?”
“Anxiety is a useful tool: it forces us to make plans. But when too much anxiety freezes us into indecision, it needs checking.” Cassandra leaned back in her seat, making the wooden joints creak. She reached for an apple from a bowl on a nearby table and bit into it. “It’s a matter of balance, you see. These things may sound miraculous to you, but to me they’re simply part of the texture of my life.”
Floyd pushed aside his plate. “It sounds like Heaven to me. You can make anything happen, or at least make yourselves think it’s happened. And you live for ever.”
“Cassandra’s people have no past,” Auger said. “We don’t have much of one, but what we do have is sacrosanct.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Floyd said.
“Everyone alive today is a descendent of someone who was living in space when the Nanocaust hit,” Auger elaborated. “No one on the surface of the planet made it out alive, so we’re all descended from the colonists who had already begun to settle the solar system.” She looked at the Slasher. “True, Cassandra?”
“True enough.”
“But getting into space was difficult back then. Every gram had to be accounted for, argued over, justified at the expense of another gram. We didn’t bring books when we could make do with digital scans of the texts, preserved in computer memory. We didn’t bring films or photographs when we could more easily transport digital versions of them. We didn’t even bring animals or flowers, making do with transcriptions of their DNA.”
“It went the same way for both of our ancestral peoples,” Cassandra added. “The only difference being that Auger’s grouping—the ancestors of the USNE—embraced the digital with slightly less gusto than we did. They were cautious—rightly so, as it happened.”
“We brought some physical artefacts into space,” Auger said. “A few books, photographs. Even some animals. It cost us terribly, but we sensed that the storage of so much knowledge in the form of digital records—in the memories of machines—made us vulnerable. After the Nanocaust, when we’d seen machines go wrong on such a scale, we embarked on a crash programme to convert as much of that electronically stored information as possible back into solid, analogue format. We made printing presses to produce physical books. We burnt digital images back on to chemical plates. We had factories churning out paper as fast as our printers could swallow it. We even had armies of scribes copying texts back on to paper in longhand, in case the printers failed before the work was done. We did everything we could—everything we could think of doing—to make copies we could touch and smell, like in the old days. It almost worked, too. But we just weren’t fast enough.”
“We call it the Forgetting,” Cassandra said. “It happened about fifty years after the Nanocaust, when our respective societies had regained some measure of stability and self-sufficiency following the death of Earth. Even now, no one really knows what caused it. Sabotage is sometimes mentioned, but I’m inclined to think it was an accident—just one of those things waiting to happen.”
“The digital records crashed,” Auger said. “Overnight, some kind of virus or worm spread through every linked archive in the system. Texts were turned into garbled junk. Pictures, movies—even music—were scrambled into senselessness.”
“Some archives survived,” Cassandra said. “But after the Forgetting, we could never be certain of their reliability.”
“We lost almost everything,” Auger said. “All we had left of the past was fragments. It was like trying to reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from a few books saved from a burning library.”
“What about institutions?” Floyd asked. “Didn’t they keep the originals of all this stuff?”
“They’d been falling over themselves to shred and pulp their paper collections for years,” Auger said. “They couldn’t do it quickly enough once they’d been sold on the idea that they could reduce all this cumbersome volume to a single sheet of microfiche, or a single optical disk, or a single partition in a flash memory array, or whatever was being hailed as the latest and best storage medium that week.”
“Perfect sound for ever,” Cassandra said, in the manner of someone reciting an advertising slogan. “That, at least, was the idea; it’s just such a shame that it didn’t actually work. You see now why our people have followed two paths. The Threshers believe that the Forgetting must never be allowed to happen again. To that end, they abstain from the very technologies that could offer them immortality.”
“No one’s immortal,” Auger said sharply. “You’re just immortal until the next Nanocaust, or the next Forgetting, or until the Sun blows up. And any one of us is free to defect to the Polities, if we don’t like living under the iron rule of the Threshold Committee.”
“A fair point,” Cassandra said. “We, on the other hand, have decided not to worry about the past. We’ve lost it once, so why worry about losing it again? We live in the moment.”
She extended her hand and made the room change, expanding it massively, the white walls racing away in all directions. Suddenly they were in a space the size of a
cathedral, and then a skyscraper. It kept on growing, the walls receding until they were kilometres or tens of kilometres away, the ceiling rocketing into the sky until it took on the blue of the atmosphere itself, with a layer of clouds suspended just below it. The room’s open window now looked out into star-sprinkled night.
It was a bravura display of control, but Cassandra wasn’t finished. She narrowed her eyes and the distant walls flickered with vast, sculptural detail: fluted columns and caryatids as tall as mountains, buttresses and arches leaning across absurd reaches of empty space. She made stained-glass windows open into the walls, shot through with light in a spectrum Auger had never imagined. Cassandra must have been tweaking her brain on a fundamental level, altering her very perceptual wiring. Not only were the colours unfamiliar (and heart-wrenchingly beautiful), but she could hear them, feel them, smell them.
She had never known anything so lovely, so sad, so wonderful.
“Please stop,” she said, overwhelmed.
Cassandra returned the room to its prior dimensions. “I’m sorry,” she said to Auger and Floyd in turn, “but I felt that some demonstration was necessary to illustrate what I understand as living in the moment. That’s the kind of moment I mean.”
“I have just one question,” Floyd said. “If you can do this, if you can have everything you want, whenever and wherever you want it—then why are some of you so keen on getting your hands on Earth?”
“That’s a shrewd question,” Cassandra said.
“So answer it,” Auger said.
“We want Earth because it is the one thing we cannot have,” Cassandra said. “And that, for some of us, is intolerable.”
Cassandra was waiting when the veined lid peeled aside. “Well, Auger? Was the reintegration as painless as I predicted?”
“I’ll cope. Can you help me out of this thing?”
“Certainly.”
Another Slasher was already helping Floyd out of his casket. Auger looked around with bleary eyes while the last remnants of the blue fluid gathered into larger blobs and flowed back into the open maw of the casket.
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