Acadie

by Dave Hutchinson

  The tunnel split into two, and then into two again, and again. I kept to the left-hand fork every time, passing side tunnels full of transport containers and powered-down machinery, and bounced along in this way for a couple of kilometres until I came to a rack of bicycles. Cycling in a sixth of a gee of centripetal gravity can be tricky, but I only fell off a couple of times before I reached my destination, a little vestibule walled with Doric columns cut out of native stone, with a simple plain archway on the other side.

  I stepped through the archway and out onto short-cropped grass. Before me was a landscape of gently rolling wooded hills and grasslands that faded off into a misty faery distance. To either side, the landscape curved gently away until it eventually hung overhead, obscured by the daylight tube that ran down the axis of the habitat. At my feet, a patch of crushed white stone led off to become a path that wandered away into the landscape. Some distance away, figures were approaching me along the pathway.

  I sighed and shook my head. This was what happened when a bunch of Tolkien geeks got the power of life and death over an entire solar system, and I was almost exactly the wrong generation to appreciate it.

  The line of figures moving along the white path resolved themselves into about a dozen elves dressed in silver armour and carrying bows and swords. They stopped just in front of me and their leader broke into a huge grin.

  “Wotcher, Duke,” he said. “Wassup?”

  “Got a situation,” I told him. “Need to talk to the Council.”

  His grin went away and he nodded soberly. “Yah, been keeping an eye on that. Council’s expecting you.”

  “Excellent,” I said, with more than a touch of irony. “Take me to your leaders.”

  * * *

  Isabel Potter was the bogeyman. She was Baba Yaga, the Wicked Witch of the West. I actually once knew someone who invoked her name to make her children go to bed. She was Legend.

  She’d started out as a professor of molecular biology at Princeton—bright, overachieving, cultishly popular with her students. Then she had moved into research into gene therapy for congenital conditions, and had made a breakthrough which even now was a closely guarded secret. Whatever it was, she had had the simple, glowing epiphany that the human body was infinitely—and desirably—hackable, and she had begun to hack it.

  It was not a good time to be doing stuff like that. The US was being run by what was in effect a right-wing theocracy, which had banned experimentation on the human genome on ethical grounds. After a couple of years of banging her head against a brick wall, Potter had lost patience and simply gone ahead and produced what turned out to be the first of the Kids.

  The experiment was a success, but word got out and Potter barely escaped ahead of various law enforcement agencies. On the run with a dozen or so of her graduate students, who would have taken a bullet for her, she finally settled in China, where there were no real qualms about experimenting on anything which took anyone’s fancy, and for a decade she thrived. Word began to filter out of Beijing of some very odd variations on the human baseline.

  The US authorities have long, bitter memories and they’re prone to vindictiveness, and one night a SEAL team parachuted into the heavily guarded compound where Potter lived, took her into custody, and whisked her back to Washington, pour décourager les autres. Some of her students were killed in the operation.

  The rest, fuelled by righteous anger, broke Potter out of Federal prison, got her offplanet, and stole a Bureau colony transport by the simple expedient of boarding it and switching on its hyperdrive motors. Which would have been more than enough to win everyone involved a death sentence, probably, but there were more than forty thousand colonists already on the transport, waiting in suspension for a trip to one of the new Bureau worlds.

  For more than five hundred years, Isabel Potter and her companions had been at the very top of the Bureau’s Most Wanted List, and for more than five hundred years nobody had the faintest idea where they had gone.

  * * *

  The Council was elves and dwarves and hobbits and goblins and God only knows what all else. I hadn’t read the right books or seen the right movies to be able to identify them all, but there were lots of Klingons there, too. Attending a Council meeting was like being at the Masquerade at a science fiction convention. Having founded the Colony, the Writers were mostly about having fun, and if that fun involved rewriting themselves as characters from late-twentieth-century popular culture, that was okay by me. They mostly left the Colony to run itself, which meant my contact with them was limited. Unfortunately, there were situations where, because they were, after all, the Founders, they were the final arbiters. I’d done this four or five times during my Presidency—although never for a situation as serious as this—and it was always like giving a presentation to an audience of toons.

  The stadium where we held the meeting was a big grassy depression surrounded by trees. There was a little knoll at one end with a rough wooden podium on it, and there I stood with a huge infosheet behind me, doing the audiovisual thing. I showed them footage of the probe, told them what Ernie had done, spoke about the apparent failure of the dewline, my assessment of the situation. I laid out my arguments as clearly as anyone could when faced with a massed audience of elves, werewolves, orcs, vampires, ghouls, zombies, Jedi, several iterations of Tom and Jerry, Itchy and Scratchy, and Roadrunner and Coyote, assorted superheroes, too many Darth Vaders to count, and at least two colossal lions. To preserve my sanity and my dignity, I kept my eyes on the ground and talked quickly.

  “It’s my assessment,” I finished, “that this probe represents a clear and present danger. It got past the dewline somehow, which either means the dewline itself is faulty—and we’re still assessing that at the moment—or it was designed with the intent to infiltrate systems with passive perimeter defence, which suggests to me that it was looking for us.” I looked up, and wondered, not for the first time, what kind of person had themselves rewritten as a zombie. I took a breath.

  “You’ve examined the probe?” asked a Wolverine.

  I sighed. There’s always one . . . “As I said in my presentation,” I reminded the audience, “the probe’s a mess. Its main engine has made it fantastically radioactive. It’s so radioactive that, if we were anywhere else, I’d be advising you right now to sue the Bureau for dropping it into the system.”

  Silence. Tough room. The Writers loved jokes, so long as it wasn’t someone else making them.

  I said, “Anyway. We can’t get near it. In fact, to my mind it’s suspiciously radioactive, as if it was deliberately poisoned. Also, Ernie seriously damaged it. If it was carrying stealth technology, we may never be able to reconstruct it.”

  “It’s also old,” mused one of the lions. “That design of fission motor dates back hundreds of years.”

  “Doesn’t mean the probe’s that old,” said a Klingon. “As Duke says, they could have deliberately used a dirty design to stop anybody looking too closely at it.”

  “Why would they do that?” asked an elf.

  “To stop us seeing what kind of stealth tech it’s using,” said the Klingon. “Duh.”

  “Fuck off,” said the elf. “It was a reasonable question.”

  Someone else disagreed. Then someone else disagreed with them, and all of a sudden everyone was shouting. I sighed. I’d been here a little over a century and if I had learned nothing else in all that time, it was that very very bright people just love to argue.

  I raised a hand for quiet. When that didn’t work, I found a gavel on a shelf under the podium and banged that for a while. When that didn’t work either, I shouted, “Excuse me!”

  That lowered the general volume in the amphitheatre enough for me to start banging the gavel again with some expectation of being heard, and little by little the arguing stopped.

  When I had everyone’s attention again, I said, “Notwithstanding the probe’s radioactive state and the uncertainty of whether it contains stealth and/or surveilla
nce technology, my assessment is that we should look very seriously at enacting Option One.”

  Complete silence.

  I looked out over the expectant faces and I said, “We all knew this was a possibility. The Bureau has never given up looking for us. That’s why we have Option One. I’m not saying this lightly. I really think we’re in trouble this time.”

  More silence.

  Finally, a voice said from near the front of the crowd, “Thank you, Mr. President. We’ll go away and discuss the issue.”

  “Okay, I said. Thank you.”

  “Could I have a private word with you, though?”

  I felt a thrill of expectation. “Sure.”

  There was a little bower behind the amphitheatre. The person who joined me there was still recognisably human. She was slim and elegant and red-haired and she seemed to be in her midthirties, but you had to constantly remind yourself that nothing in the Colony was how it seemed.

  “Mr. President,” she said.

  “Professor Potter,” I said. “Nice to meet you finally.”

  She smiled. “If I went around personally greeting every new arrival I’d never get anything done.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’ve only been here a century.” And it wasn’t as if there was a constant stream of tourists passing through the Colony.

  There were a couple of sunloungers on the grass on the other side of the bower. Potter sat down on one and motioned me to sit beside her.

  “You do appreciate what you’re asking us to consider doing,” she said when I was seated.

  “As I told you, I’m not suggesting it lightly. I showed my working out as well as I could; can you think of another course of action?”

  “Collapsing the habs, loading the populace into ships, going somewhere else.”

  “Professor, I think it’s more than likely that the Bureau has found us. We can’t fight them. We have to at least think about making a run for it.”

  “Can’t we?” she pondered. “Fight them, I mean?”

  “Well, yes, we can,” I allowed. “But there are always going to be more of them than us, with more resources. If we resist they’ll eventually just stomp all over us. Lots of people will get hurt.”

  “I could just give myself up, go quietly.”

  “With respect, you don’t really mean that.”

  She chuckled sadly. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t.” She looked about her. “I’m rather flattered they’re still looking, to be honest. It’s been five hundred years.”

  “For all they know, you’ve been on a ship with really inefficient motors the whole time,” I told her. “Also, they’ll want the colonists back.”

  She looked at me coolly. “You really are rather insubordinate, aren’t you,” she said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m rather sorry we didn’t meet earlier.”

  Because most of them had rewritten themselves so radically, it was quite easy to forget how old the Writers actually were, but Potter had remained more or less baseline human, on the outside, anyway. She might have been the oldest person in the galaxy; she had spent much of the first couple of hundred years of her exile in hyperdrive, fleeing through the night on not very efficient motors, but for the last three hundred years she had been here. She looked about thirty, coolly beautiful, but there was something about her eyes that I couldn’t quantify, something agelessly capable. She was actually a little scary.

  “How do you think the vote will go?” I asked.

  “The vote? Oh, that’s a foregone conclusion.” She sighed. “We’re going to fold our tents and light out for the Territories. It’s a shame, but as you said, we knew this was coming sooner or later.”

  “I’m going to need a lot of resources and manpower.”

  “So are we. Option One originally called for a phased and orderly withdrawal to the first Rendezvous Point within six months of enactment. That was when the Colony was a lot smaller.”

  “I need to be sure I can trust the dewline,” I said. “If the Bureau do enter the system and we don’t spot them, it won’t matter how orderly the withdrawal is. I need to make that a priority.”

  “We lost two habs the last time we moved,” she reminded me.

  “I know.”

  “I won’t let that happen again. These people trust me—they trust us, Mr. Faraday. They’re here because they believe in what we’re doing, and they rely on us to make the right decisions. I will not let them down.”

  “With respect, Professor, this conversation is all very well sitting here in a great fuck-off big colony transport that can pop out of the system at a moment’s notice, but there are over fourteen thousand, ships, tugs, and assorted transport solutions out there. Maybe half of them are hyperdrive-capable. I need to recall them all to their nearest hab. That’s by far the simplest part of Option One, and that alone is going to take us weeks. Months, maybe.” And that didn’t take into account the dickheads who would decide that they wanted to stay behind. “And I can’t give you any reasonable read on security until I can trust the dewline.”

  “I’ll make sure you have all the manpower and resources you need, Mr. President.” She stood up. “But as soon as I need them for the withdrawal, I’m taking them back.” She looked down at me. “Fair?”

  It was the best I could have expected, under the circumstances. “Yes. Fair.”

  She smiled. “You’ve done well; I’m proud of you. Now, we all have a lot of work to do. I want daily reports—hourly, if the situation changes.”

  “Of course.”

  “With any luck we might be able to get out of here without anyone ever being sure we were here in the first place.”

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  She looked a little sad. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  * * *

  The Colony’s solar system was a pile of junk, and that was why we lived there. About five hundred years ago, a fast-flyby probe had stormed through the system. It had taken snapshots of the two little rocky planets, the single gas giant with its single huge moon, the cometary halo, and then headed on to the next star on its target list.

  A century later, a second probe came through for a more leisurely stay. It saw that the rocky worlds were dead; their molten cores had cooled millions of years ago, their magnetospheres had dwindled to nothing, and the solar wind had patiently, molecule by molecule, blown whatever atmosphere they’d ever had off into space. The gas giant was barely large enough to be worthy of the name, its soupy methane atmosphere worthless for commercial scoop-mining—there were easier places to find methane. The cometary halo was sparse and low in useful minerals. The probe finished its tour and dropped into hyperdrive, on its way to the next stop on its itinerary.

  The system was, for the Bureau’s purposes, useless. Nobody could live on the planets—even the Bureau preferred their colonies to have an atmosphere of some kind—and it was too low in resources to make it commercially viable for mining.

  The Bureau saw junk. The Writers saw the Promised Land.

  They arrived about three hundred years ago in their hollowed-out asteroid, guided by data stolen from the Bureau of Colonisation’s database, and they looked about them and saw much to be pleased about. The Bureau had assessed the system in terms of either colonisation or a long-term resource-realisation operation, and by those measures it was a bust, too much trouble for too little return. But the Writers were thinking along the lines of an indigenous population of maybe a couple of million, and on that scale the Colony was a land of plenty. And the Bureau had already been here, dismissed the system, and moved on. They were statistically unlikely ever to come back.

  I only discovered much later that our sudden departure from the hangar beneath Probity City’s spaceport had left a tug-sized vacuum. The sudden drop in pressure as the air in the hangar rushed to fill the vacuum had caused a massive implosion, which had collapsed the little cavern. No one had been hurt, but because of Connie’s infi
ltration of the spaceport’s systems there was no record of Something Better Than That ever having been there, and the authorities were still scratching their heads over what had happened.

  She had, I realised, never intended to take me back. There was nowhere to take me back to. It was going to be almost thirty years before anyone could land on Angel’s Rest again, unless Something’s navigation systems and magic hyperdrive motors were of such exquisite accuracy that they could deposit the tug into an empty underground hangar not much larger than itself.

  “Ach, I’d have left you somewhere, Duke,” she said when I asked her about it. “Capel Dean’s nice, this time of year.”

  I strongly suspected this was bullshit, but I kept it to myself.

  It took Something Better Than That four days to make the crossing from Angel’s Rest to the destination which Connie refused to divulge to me. With the most up-to-date motors then in existence—and I really had to doubt that Something had anything approaching standard motors—that would have been a trip of about ten light-years. If you factored in time dilation, for an outside observer it would have taken us the better part of a year. For me, it was four days in zero-gee, crammed into a space far too small with a person who was already much too tall for comfort, and it seemed to last a lot longer than a year.

  I’d expected us to pop out at our destination within easy fusion-drive-reach of a planet, but instead all the displays showed when we arrived was blackness scattered with stars, and one slightly larger, slightly brighter star at the centre.

  “Patience, Duke,” Connie said when she saw the mixture of bafflement and annoyance on my face. “Patience. Magic’s happening.”

  And then something slid into view on the displays.

  It looked like a colossal Christmas tree bauble, a great translucent green sphere the size of Rhode Island, glowing from within. Through its triple-skinned surface, I could see dim green shapes, things moving about. It was like looking into a dirty aquarium.

  They couldn’t agree on what to call it, so they just called it “the Colony.” It consisted of thirty habs of varying sizes, the Writers’ stolen transport, and countless little insystem tugs and ships. The Writers had come here and found that it was good, and had proceeded to put down roots.