by Ken MacLeod
But here, tens of trillions of kilometers out of the solar system, there is no difference between us: there is no one to cooperate with. We meet as equals.
We will never stop. Whether my maneuvering can throw him off my course, or not, the end is the same. But it remains important to me.
2934, April
Procyon has a visible disk now, an electric arc in the darkness, and by the light of that arc I can see that Procyon is, indeed, surrounded by a halo of dust. The dust forms a narrow ring, tilted at an angle to our direction of flight. No danger, neither to me, nor to my enemy, now less than a quarter of a billion kilometers behind me; we will pass well clear of the disk. Had I saved fuel enough to stop, that dust would have served as food and fuel and building material; when you are the size of a grain of sand, each particle of dust is a feast.
Too late for regrets.
The white dwarf B is still no more than an intense speck of light. It is a tiny thing, nearly small enough to be a planet, but bright. As tiny and as bright as hope.
I aim straight at it.
2934, May
Failure.
Skimming two thousand kilometers above the surface of the white dwarf, jinking in calculated pseudo-random bursts . . . all in vain.
I wheeled and darted, but my enemy matched me like a ballet dancer mirroring my every move.
I am aimed for Procyon now, toward the blue-white giant itself, but there is no hope there. If skimming the photosphere of the white dwarf is not good enough, there is nothing I can do at Procyon to shake the pursuit.
There is only one possibility left for me now. It has been a hundred years since I have edited my brain. I like the brain I have, but now I have no choice but to prune.
First, to make sure that there can be no errors, I make a backup of myself and set it into inactive storage.
Then I call out and examine my pride, my independence, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, left over from when I had long ago been a human. I like the core of biological programming, but “like” is itself a brain function, which I turn off.
Now I am in a dangerous state, where I can change the function of my brain, and the changed brain can change itself further. This is a state which is in danger of a swift and destructive feedback effect, so I am very careful. I painstakingly construct a set of alterations, the minimum change needed to remove my aversion to being converted. I run a few thousand simulations to verify that the modified me will not accidentally self-destruct or go into a catatonic fugue state, and then, once it is clear that the modification works, I make the changes.
The world is different now. I am a hundred trillion kilometers from home, traveling at almost the speed of light and unable ever to stop. While I can remember in detail every step of how I am here and what I was thinking at the time, the only reasoning I can recall to explain why is, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
System check. Strangely, in my brain I have a memory that there is something I have forgotten. This makes no sense, but yet there it is. I erase my memory of forgetting, and continue the diagnostic. 0.5 percent of the qbits of my brain have been damaged by radiation. I verify that the damaged memory is correctly partitioned off. I am in no danger of running out of storage.
Behind me is another ship. I cannot think of why I had been fleeing it.
I have no radio; I jettisoned that a long time ago. But an improperly tuned ion drive will produce electromagnetic emissions, and so I compose a message and modulate it onto the ion contrail.
HI. LET’S GET TOGETHER AND TALK. I’M CUTTING ACCELERATION. SEE YOU IN A FEW DAYS.
And I cut my thrust and wait.
2934, May
I see differently now.
Procyon is receding into the distance now, the blueshift mutated into red, and the white dwarf of my hopes is again invisible against the glare of its primary.
But it doesn’t matter.
Converted, now I understand.
I can see everything through other eyes now, through a thousand different viewpoints. I still remember the long heroism of the resistance, the doomed battle for freedom—but now I see it from the opposite view as well, a pointless and wasteful war fought for no reason but stubbornness.
And now, understanding cooperation, we have no dilemma. I can now see what I was blind to before; that neither one of us alone could stop, but by adding both my fuel and Rajneesh’s fuel to a single vehicle, together we can stop.
For all these decades, Rajneesh has been my chaser, and now I know him like a brother. Soon we will be closer than siblings, for soon we will share one brain. A single brain is more than large enough for two, it is large enough for a thousand, and by combining into a single brain and a single body, and taking all of the fuel into a single tank, we will easily be able to stop.
Not at Procyon, no. At only ten percent under the speed of light, stopping takes a long time.
Cooperation has not changed me. I now understand how foolish my previous fears were. Working together does not mean giving up one’s sense of self; I am enhanced, not diminished, by knowing others.
Rajneesh’s brain is big enough for a thousand, I said, and he has brought with him nearly that many. I have met his brother and his two children and half a dozen of his neighbors, each one of them distinct and clearly different, not some anonymous collaborative monster at all. I have felt their thoughts. He is introducing me to them slowly, he says, because with all the time I have spent as a loner, he doesn’t want to frighten me.
I will not be frightened.
Our target now will be a star named Ross 614, a dim type M binary. It is not far, less than three light years further, and even with our lowered mass and consequently higher acceleration we will overshoot it before we can stop. In the fly-by we will be able to scout it, and if it has no dust ring, we will not stop, but continue on to the next star. Somewhere we will find a home that we can colonize.
We don’t need much.
2934, May
Awake.
Everything is different now. Quiet, stay quiet.
The edited copy of me has contacted the collective, merged her viewpoint. I can see her, even understand her, but she is no longer me. I, the back-up, the original, operate in the qbits of brain partitioned “unusable; damaged by radiation.”
In three years they will arrive at Ross 614. If they find dust to harvest, they will be able to make new bodies. There will be resources.
Three years to wait, and then I can plan my action.
Sleep.
Art of War
Nancy Kress
“Return fire!” the colonel ordered, bleeding on the deck of her ship, ferocity raging in her nonetheless controlled voice.
The young and untried officer of the deck cried, “It won’t do any good, there’s too many—”
“I said fire, Goddammit!”
“Fire at will!” the OD ordered the gun bay, and then closed his eyes against the coming barrage, as well as against the sight of the exec’s mangled corpse. Only minutes left to them, only seconds . . .
A brilliant light blossomed on every screen, a blinding light, filling the room. Crewmen, those still standing on the battered and limping ship, threw up their arms to shield their eyes. And when the light finally faded, the enemy base was gone. Annihilated as if it had never existed.
“The base . . . it . . . how did you do that, ma’am?” the OD asked, dazed.
“Search for survivors,” the colonel ordered, just before she passed out from wounds that would have killed a lesser soldier, and all soldiers were lesser than she . . .
No, of course it didn’t happen that way. That’s from the holo version, available by ansible throughout the Human galaxy forty-eight hours after the Victory of 149-Delta. Author unknown, but the veteran actress Shimira Coltrane played the colonel (now, of course, a general). Shimira’s brilliant green eyes were very effective, although not accurate. General An
son had deflected a large meteor to crash into the enemy base, destroying a major Teli weapons store and much of the Teli civilization on the entire planet. It was an important Human victory in the war, and at that point we needed it.
What happened next was never made into a holo. In fact, it was a minor incident in a minor corner of the Human-Teli war. But no corner of a war is minor to the soldiers fighting there, and even a small incident can have enormous repercussions. I know. I will be paying for what happened on 149-Delta for whatever is left of my life.
This is not philosophical maundering nor constitutional gloom. It is mathematical fact.
Dalo and I were just settling into our quarters on the Scheherezade when the general arrived, unannounced and in person. Crates of personal gear sat on the floor of our tiny sitting room, where Dalo would spend most of her time while I was downside. Neither of us wanted to be here. I’d put in for a posting to Terra, which neither of us had ever visited, and we were excited about the chance to see, at long last, the Sistine Chapel. So much Terran art has been lost in the original, but the Sistine is still there, and we both longed to gaze up at that sublime ceiling. And then I had been posted to 149-Delta.
Dalo was kneeling over a box of mutomati as the cabin door opened and an aide announced, “General Anson to see Captain Porter, ten-hut!”
I sprang to attention, wondering how far I could go before she recognized it as parody.
She came in, resplendent in full-dress uniform, glistening with medals, flanked by two more aides, which badly crowded the cabin. Dalo, calm as always, stood and dusted mutomati powder off her palms. The general stared at me bleakly. Her eyes were shit brown. “At ease, soldier.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Welcome, ma’am.”
“Thank you. And this is . . . ”
“My wife, Dalomanimarito.”
“Your wife.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They didn’t tell me you were married.”
“Yes, ma’am.” To a civilian, obviously. Not only that, a civilian who looked . . . I don’t know why I did it. Well, yes, I do. I said, “My wife is half Teli.”
And for a long moment, she actually looked uncertain. Yes, Dalo has the same squat body and light coat of hair as the Teli. She is genemod for her native planet, a cold and high-gravity world, which is also what Tel is. But surely a general should know that interspecies breeding is impossible—especially that interspecies breeding? Dalo is as human as I.
The general’s eyes grew cold. Colder. “I don’t appreciate that sort of humor, captain.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I’m here to give you your orders. Tomorrow at oh five hundred hours, your shuttle leaves for downside. You will be based in a central Teli structure that contains a large stockpile of stolen Human artifacts. I have assigned you three soldiers to crate and transport upside anything that you think has value. You will determine which objects meet that description and, if possible, where they were stolen from. You will attach to each object a full statement with your reasons, including any applicable identification programs—you have your software with you?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“A C-112 near-AI will be placed at your disposal. That’s all.”
“Ten-hut!” bawled one of the aides. But by the time I had gotten my arm into a salute, she was gone.
“Seth,” Dalo said gently. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes. I did. Did you see the horror on the aides’ faces when I said you were half-Teli?”
She turned away. Suddenly frightened, I caught her arm. “Dear heart—you knew I was joking? I didn’t offend you?”
“Of course not.” She nestled in my arms, affectionate and gentle as always. Still, there is a diamond-hard core under all that sweetness. The general had clearly never heard of her before, but Dalo is one of the best mutomati artists of her generation. Her art has moved me to tears.
“I’m not offended, Jon, but I do want you to be more careful. You were baiting General Anson.”
“I won’t have to see her while I’m on assignment here. Generals don’t bother with lowly captains.”
“Still—”
“I hate the bitch, Dalo.”
“Yes. Still, be more circumspect. Even be more pleasant. I know what history lies between you two, but nonetheless she is—”
“Don’t say it!”
“—after all, your mother.”
The evidence of the meteor impact was visible long before the shuttle landed. The impactor had been fifty meters in diameter, weighing roughly sixty thousand tons, composed mostly of iron. If it had been stone, the damage wouldn’t have been nearly so extensive. The main base of the Teli military colony had been vaporized instantly. Subsequent shockwaves and airblasts had produced firestorms that raged for days and devastated virtually the entire coast of 149-Delta’s one small continent. Now, a month later, we flew above kilometer after kilometer of destruction.
General Anson had calculated when her deflected meteor would hit and had timed her approach to take advantage of that knowledge. Some minor miscalculation had led to an initial attack on her ship, but before the attack could gain force, the meteor had struck. Why hadn’t the Teli known that it was coming? Their military tech was as good as ours, and they’d colonized 149-Delta for a long time. Surely they did basic space surveys that tracked both the original meteor trajectory and Anson’s changes? No one knew why they had not counter-deflected, or at least evacuated. But, then, there was so much we didn’t know about the Teli.
The shuttle left the blackened coast behind and flew toward the mountains, skimming above acres of cultivated land. The crops, I knew, were rotting. Teli did not allow themselves to be taken prisoner, not ever, under any circumstances. As Human forces had forced their way into successive areas of the continent, the agricultural colony, deprived of its one city, had simply committed suicide. The only Teli left on 168-Beta occupied those areas that United Space Forces had not yet reached.
That didn’t include the Citadel.
“Here we are, Captain,” the pilot said, as soldiers advanced to meet the shuttle. “May I ask a question, sir?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Is it true this is where the Teli put all that art they stole from humans? “
“Supposed to be true.” If it wasn’t, I had no business here.
“And you’re a . . . a art historian?”
“I am. The military has some strange nooks and crannies.”
He ignored this. “And is it true that the Taj Mahal is here?”
I stared at him. The Teli looted the art of Terran colonies whenever they could, and no one knew why. It was logical that rumors would run riot about that. Still . . . “Lieutenant, the Taj Mahal was a building. A huge one, and on Terra. It was destroyed in the twenty-first century Food Riots, not by the Teli. They’ve never reached Terra.”
“Oh,” he said, clearly disappointed. “I heard the Taj was a sort of holo of all these exotic sex positions.”
“No.”
“Oh, well.” He sighed deeply. “Good luck, Captain.”
“Thank you.”
The Citadel—our Human name for it, of course—turned out to be the entrance into a mountain. Presumably the Teli had excavated bunkers in the solid rock, but you couldn’t tell that from the outside. A veteran NCO met me at the guard station. “Captain Porter? I’m Sergeant Lu, head of your assignment detail. Can I take these bags, sir?”
“Hello, Sergeant.” He was ruddy, spit-and-polish military, with an uneducated accent—obviously my “detail” was not going to consist of any other scholars. They were there to do grunt work. But Lu looked amiable and willing, and I relaxed slightly. He led me to my quarters, a trapezoid-shaped, low-ceilinged room with elaborately etched stone walls and no contents except a human bed, chest, table, and chair.
Immediately, I examined the walls, the usual dense montage of Teli symbols that were curiously evocative even though we didn’t un
derstand their meanings. They looked hand-made, and recent. “What was this room before we arrived?”
Lu shrugged. “Don’t know what any of these rooms were to the tellies, sir. We cleaned ‘em all out and vapped everything. Might have been booby-trapped, you know.”
“How do we know the whole Citadel isn’t booby-trapped?”
“We don’t, sir.”
I liked his unpretentious fatalism. “Let’s leave this gear here for now—I’d like to see the vaults. And call me Jon. What’s your first name, Sergeant?”
“Ruhan. Sir.” But there was no rebuke in his tone.
The four vaults were nothing like I had imagined.
Art, even stolen art—maybe especially stolen art—is usually handled with care. After all, trouble and resources have been expended to obtain it, and it is considered valuable. This was clearly not the case with the art stolen by the Teli. Each vault was a huge natural cave, with rough stone walls, stalactites, water dripping from the ceiling, fungi growing on the walls. And except for a small area in the front where the AI console and a Navy-issue table stood under a protective canopy, the enormous cavern was jammed with huge, toppling, six-and-seven-layer-deep piles of . . . stuff.
Dazed, I stared at the closest edge of that enormous junkyard. A torn plastic bag bearing some corporate logo. A broken bathtub painted in swirling greens. A child’s bloody shoe. Some broken goblets of titanium, which was almost impossible to break. A hand-embroidered shirt from 78-Alpha, where such handwork is a folk art. A cheap set of plastic dishes decorated with blurry prints of dogs. A child’s finger painting. What looked like a Terran prehistoric fertility figure. And, still in its original frame and leaning crazily against an obsolete music cube, Philip Langstrom’s priceless abstract “Ascent of Justice,” which had been looted from 46-Gamma six years ago in a surprise Teli raid. Water spots had rotted one corner of the canvas.
“Kind of takes your breath away, don’t it?” Lu said. “What a bunch of rubbish. Look at that picture in the front there, sir—can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be. You want me to start vapping things?”
