The Ouroboros Wave

by Hayashi, Jyouji

  For her part, Shi’en was mystified to discover this side of Agnes. Back when Agnes first assumed her place on AADD’s highest steering committee, relations with Earth had entered an extremely difficult and dangerous phase. AADD’s growth and culture were perceived by the Terrans as threats to their societal norms. Even when the Terrans had begun to assemble an armada, threatening to seize the artificial accretion disk by force, Agnes’s calm hadn’t wavered. Why would she be seized by panic at the rebellion of a mere student?

  Shi’en knew that Aguri was one of the few people in the solar system who really understood Agnes—and that this understanding was mutual. Shi’en knew, too, that the steely personalities of these two women had also been responsible for much misunderstanding, both between themselves and with others. In a sense, both women had wasted a good portion of their lives correcting the mistaken impressions of others, impressions they themselves had been responsible for creating. That made it all the more important for each woman to have the other, to have someone who was family.

  For Agnes and Aguri, trust didn’t mean licking each other’s wounds. Understanding might mean acceptance, but neither of them would ever allow self or other to become dependent. Although they held each other to standards that sometimes left scars, their shared bond of trust was too deep for mere pain to cause either to run away. That confidence was probably the reason their relationship had endured for so many years.

  But Shi’en had always walked alone, and she frankly didn’t understand why it was necessary for two people with such grounds for conflict to sustain a relationship. If mutual wounding was a prerequisite for building deep trust—and mutual dependence was ruled out—then why not choose rejection? Not, of course, that it made any difference to her.

  Still, it seemed to Shi’en that ultimately this mutual understanding had proven a mirage. Although Dr. Agnes and Aguri knew far more about artificial intelligence than the average scientist, Shi’en had a hunch that both of them found two-way empathy with another individual an especially difficult challenge. Such minds might do better to seek trust from an AI.

  But perhaps their tragedy was that they expected understanding from another person—a person as close to family as anyone they’d ever had. And now Agnes was panicking in a way Shi’en had never seen.

  “She’s still ignoring our attempts to contact her. That’s not all.” Shi’en shook her head and webbed her agent program’s latest data to Agnes.

  “What is this? She’s erased her personal data from the network!”

  “Are you really surprised? You hacked the system once yourself. If Aguri can slip a hundred and sixty kilotons of antimatter past us, purging her system data wouldn’t be much of a challenge.”

  “How can you be so calm about this, Shi’en?”

  “Getting excited doesn’t generate results. If Aguri has demands, she’ll make them. Then again, she may not have any.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Maybe she already has what she wants. If so, she’s no threat to us, at least as long as we don’t interfere. Port Shiva is in no danger.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Aguri isn’t holed up on Caliban. She’s preparing for departure. The ship’s configured to be pilotable by a single individual if necessary. Aguri was the chief system designer. If anyone can do it, she can, even without universal network support.”

  “But it will take her fifteen years to reach her destination. How can she… Oh, this is just absurd!”

  “Agnes, listen to me. Twenty-six years ago, when Shiran captured me, she gave me two choices: join the Guardians on the spot or try to make it back to Kobe City alone on foot—ten days in the desert with no survival gear and barely any supplies. I’d already decided to join her, but I wasn’t going to do it her way. She had to see that I was choosing the Guardians my way. Sometimes how you face life is more important than life itself. Now Aguri is facing the same decision—and she has more than enough provisions for the trip.”

  That was when it happened. Shi’en’s last few words were drowned out by the roar of rocket boosters. Aguri had made her decision. In a moment, Caliban became a fiery beacon against the blackness of space, then a bright but dwindling star. Agnes stared in disbelief. The spacecraft was already invisible to the naked eye, but the monitor showed twenty-four boosters falling symmetrically away, like flower petals. Finally, Caliban’s eighteen AE-20 antimatter engines roared to life.

  Even at this distance, Titania was directly in the path of the radiation stream. But Port Shiva faced away from Caliban now, and the bulk of the planet acted as its shield.

  “So she escaped from the solar system,” Agnes said. “No, she escaped from me.” Agnes felt overwhelmed by the loss. “I don’t know what she could have done to reject me more absolutely.”

  “You underestimate her, Agnes. Aguri is Shiran’s daughter, your disciple. Look at what she’s become. She’s not escaping anything. She’s just gone ahead of you.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Caliban is a prototype. Aguri may travel to the stars, but I doubt she can make it all the way back on her own—unless more ships are built to follow her. Now she’s made certain that will happen. New spacecraft will have to be designed, plus the infrastructure to support them.”

  “Shi’en, were you expecting this? The distribution system… How did Aguri…?”

  “You want to know the truth? Ask her yourself. You were the first to carry the search for unknown life to the stars. Or have you forgotten?”

  Caliban still showed faintly on the monitor. The light from its engines reminded Agnes of a newborn star.

  And for Shi’en, that fading gleam was herself in another life—a solitary figure trekking slowly across a desert, carving a new destiny through the badlands of Mars.

  THUS HUMANKIND took their first steps toward the stars. Was it accident or necessity? There is more than one way to answer this question. After all, we are not omniscient.

  We can say this much: these first steps enabled humans to encounter nonhuman intelligences. Without these steps, humanity would never have been able to achieve empathy with entities such as ourselves. Contact with humans has taught us that there are more ways to perceive the universe than via mass and gravity waves alone. We now perceive light and sound, just as humans perceive gravity waves.

  Of course, many complications, many twists and turns were required to reach this point. Differences in the structure of consciousness brought AADD and the inhabitants of Earth to the brink of violence, despite the fact that they were members of the same species. And ironically, the same differences allowed humans and nonhumans to communicate successfully. That success will become the necessity of the future.

  We know this—that happenstance is necessity in disguise.

  AFTERWORD

  I FIRST CONCEIVED THE IDEA of an artificial accretion disk on March 14, 1988. But it was eleven years before the first story, “The Dragons of Europa,” appeared in SF Magazine, and fourteen years before this book was published—a very long gestation period, even for me.

  I can pinpoint the date with accuracy for a simple reason. I recorded it in the book that inspired the idea: Jun Fukue’s Kōchaku Enban heno Shōtai (Introduction to Accretion Disks, Kodansha, 1988). As I turned the pages, I experienced a wave of intellectual excitement. After I finished it, I was almost a different person, and the impression it made is still fresh in my memory.

  And the idea of an artificial accretion disk was born.

  Naturally, my original concept was quite different from the stories that finally became this book. This included the construction of the artificial accretion disk as well as the organization and culture of AADD. Possibly the only ideas that survived unchanged were the concept of creating an artificial accretion disk around a small black hole, of using it to terraform Mars and create an energy transmission system on the scale of the solar system.

  In fact, there is one other element that remained unchan
ged, but I will set that aside for now. One hint, though, would be that this linked series of short stories is a history of the development of the solar system, and at the same time is planned as a work of First Contact SF. Ultimately, humanity will probably reach the center of the galaxy by one means or another. The story will probably take me several years more to write. If the reader would be kind enough to accompany me on the journey, I will be extremely gratified.

  In any event, this world of short stories about AADD was inspired by a single scientific text. While I have not conducted a survey and cannot speak in quantitative terms, I think most ideas for so-called “hard science fiction” are inspired by actual contact with the front lines of science. The inspiration might come from a book or might arise out of a conversation with a practicing researcher. Of course, a work of hard SF is neither scientific analysis nor educational text. It is strictly fiction.

  Still, basing the core of a novel on a scientific idea takes it beyond the boundaries of the concept story. Different authors will probably derive different meanings from the same idea. It may be that the act of writing hard SF is itself a search for meaning. In my case, that search will probably occupy the rest of my life.

  In closing, I would like to thank Atsushi Noda, Naru Hirata, Masao Hirota, Tomohiro Araki, Jun Fukue, and Masahiro Maeno, as well as the members of the Minor Body Exploration Forum (http:// www.as-exploration.com/mef/index.html), for their invaluable suggestions and guidance. I would also like to thank the members of the Osaka Chapter of the Space Authors Club, especially Housuke Nojiri and Yasumi Kobayashi, for many stimulating discussions.

  In “Hydra’s Ice,” I dubbed the Mars orbital elevator Tsutenkaku, after the landmark tower in Osaka. As far as I know, the first writer to apply this name to an orbital elevator was Sakyo Komatsu, in his short story Tsūtenkaku Hakkutsu (The Excavation of Tsutenkaku) in the January 11, 1965, edition of Sankei Sports newspaper. (The author refers to the orbital elevator as a “space bridge.”) I obtained Komatsu’s kind permission to do the same in this work.

  From the appearance of the various stories in magazines to their publication here, I was the grateful recipient of unfailingly spot-on counsel from Yoshihiro Shiozawa, editor-in-chief of SF Magazine. In a sense, this book is a Hayashi/Shiozawa collaboration. I acknowledge my debt to him and the other individuals mentioned herein.

  Finally, I would like to thank my wife for all her help during the writing of these stories.

  —Jyouji Hayashi

  July 2002

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in Hokkaido in 1962. Having worked as a clinical laboratory technician, Jyouji Hayashi debuted as a writer in 1995 with his cowritten Dai Nihon Teikoku Oushu Dengeki Sakusen. His popularity grew with the Shonetsu no Hatou series and the Heitai Gensui Oushu Senki series—both military fiction backed by real historical perspectives. Beginning in 2000, he consecutively released Kioku Osen, Shinryakusha no Heiwa, and Ankoku Taiyo no Mezame, stories that combine scientific speculation and sociological investigations. He continues to write and act as a flag-bearer for a new generation of hard SF.