Permanence

by Karl Schroeder

  He found the ramp (labeled N) and headed down. He found he had to crab walk because of the steepness of the descent. Michael wasn't sure why he was coming this way, but maybe it was because the chambers above were no longer his— Katz and his troupe were taking the heart-pounding excitement of Michael's discovery and transforming it into a hotel.

  Not that Herat wasn't excited. Proof that somewhere, some when, alien life had banded together in the same spirit of oneness that humanity took as its own essence… well, that had always been Herat's dream. And now it had come true.

  Michael reached the bottom of the ramp. Here was the little round room he had climbed to— exactly as it had been, save for the letter taped by the entrance: P.

  Whoever put down these letters must have been more than half asleep, Michael thought idly as he walked around the magnetic airlock. The randomness of the lettering seemed apt somehow— it was like this whole place, a purposeless jumble.

  He sat down by the airlock and rested his gloved hand on it. Soon enough they would get the air balance right and then he could take this suit off and feel these walls himself. He wasn't completely here yet, insulated as he was by the suit.

  After an empty moment Michael snatched his hand back. He knew what he was feeling: The kami of the place were calling to him— or, at least, that was how he'd been trained to describe the feeling. As a child he'd thought this feeling to be simple loneliness and maybe he had been more right then than now. But if he was going to escape the feeling, whatever its name, he no longer felt that the kami were the way.

  Which left him back where he'd started.

  The monks of Kimpurusha had their psychology; Dr. Herat had his. If Herat ever felt down he would just do something— anything, from reorganizing his files to taking a walk. Dr. Herat was rarely unhappy for long and maybe there was a lesson in that.

  Thinking of the professor reminded Michael of the explosion and before that, the murder of Dr. Ophir. And there, of course, was something he could do.

  He glanced around the chamber. If he sat down here and started to meditate, would Crisler see and send someone after him? Probably not; although the sensor clip was still on Michael's ear, there was no evidence that anyone was actually watching what he did through it. Maybe no one was; maybe the clip was inactive, just a cruel joke by Crisler— like the fact that Michael's offline datapack had not been tampered with.

  Crisler could probably monitor anything Michael did in the public inscape network through that clip. But there was no way he could monitor the private loop-back network made possible by Michael's NeoShinto implants.

  He sat down in full lotus, facing the corridor and called up his private inscape foyer.

  Instantly he was surrounded by dozens of iconic objects, slowly rotating photos and control surfaces. These would not normally be visible to anyone else, but his suspicion of inscape ran all the way back to his childhood and Michael had spent a long time adding various semilegal privacy devices to the foyer. They were stored, with the rest of his private data, in the data chip in his skull. He had novels in there, hundreds of hours of music, movies, and all the reference material he might ever need in his work. All that storage was too cramped to accommodate even a single NeoShinto kami, of course.

  With luck, Crisler's sensors would not be able to tell his connection to this data from ordinary meditation. If they could… well, he would find out when they came to arrest him.

  He sat for a while, wondering where to start. If Linda Ophir's murder had not been a crime of opportunity committed by someone still on Chandaka, then it was safe to assume that the perpetrator was also Banshee's saboteur. In that case, there were two likely motives for her murder: She'd found him out, or she knew something else that he couldn't allow anyone to learn. Michael had wondered all along what she had been about to tell him, when she asked to see him that day.

  Before the sabotage incident, Michael had uploaded all the research data and preprints done so far on the expedition. He also had a crew roster and some background on everyone.

  He would start with learning a little more about who Linda Ophir had been and go from there.

  * * *

  RUE WAS RELIEVED to see stars again. She faced away from the long oval habitat she'd dubbed 'the Hive, listening with half an ear as the others exited its rotating airlock. The scientists were all agog at what they had found, which puzzled her since what they had found was absolutely nothing: chamber after paper-wrapped chamber full of nothing. The Hive was just that: a giant, empty wasp's nest awaiting its wasps.

  "If the others pan out, then we'll have proven the Hypothesis," gushed Hutcheons. The Hypothesis, Rue knew, had something to do with whether Jentry's Envy had been abandoned or whether it had never been used at all. That didn't really interest her— she knew the answers would present themselves eventually. No, she had entered the Hive again to try to find more supplies of raw materials, like water and oxygen. They had discovered none— just a cloying methane atmosphere, dry as a bone.

  She had an inscape spreadsheet open above and to the right in her sensorium at all times; on this spreadsheet, she juggled numbers trying to guarantee their survival until they should reach Colossus. It was a familiar exercise, one she had engaged in over a year ago, the first time they reached the Envy. Max called it obsessive— but then, Max didn't take responsibility for the crew of the Envy or anything else for that matter.

  A ghostly circle blotted out some stars in the opposite direction. Evan was repositioning the cache by the lake, now that most of its cargo had been off-loaded at the Banshee. She had begun using it as her crew's primary living quarters, while the scientists had largely moved into the warrens Mike had discovered. Its carrying capacity was written in glaring reds and greens across her spreadsheet— good, but not enough. Whoever had blown up the life-support stacks had better be found by Crisler's boys, because if she got to him first, he would be out the airlock.

  "All right, gentlemen, where next?" she asked cheerily as she swung around. The science team were clambering aboard their sled; five helmets swung to face her simultaneously.

  "What do you mean?" asked one. "We've been out here for eight hours. We're going home, aren't we?"

  "The suits are good for another twelve to fifteen hours and as long as we're out here in them we're not putting a direct drain on the Banshee or the Envy," she said. "We need as much information as we can get as quick as possible. There's a whole bunch of places we could visit before we go back."

  There were groans from the team and she sympathized; they must have found it as nerve-wracking as she to spend all day crawling through those chambers, picturing huge dry insect bodies scraping through them, possibly waiting beyond the next door-slit. She no longer believed they would find living aliens on board the Envy, but that didn't prevent the imagination from putting them around every corner.

  "How about the Lasa sphere?" Hutcheons suggested hopefully.

  "Nope. You remember what Herat said: It's potentially the most fragile find here, so we leave it for him to open. That is, unless we don't find any more water, in which case we'll have to break in tomorrow and clean it out if it's got any.

  "Okay, here." She called up an exaggerated inscape view of the other habitats, which seemed to hang like moons at random across the sky. "Somebody pick a direction and let's go! We're wasting air."

  "Oh, all right… that one." Hutcheons reached out and in their public inscape, one of the habitats flashed. This one was a big rusty cube, fifty kilometers away.

  "Right. Hang on, everybody… away we go."

  • • •

  INSCAPE NORMALLY SHUT down when you closed your eyes. That had puzzled Michael when he was young; his father refused to discuss the subject, so he had asked a teacher at the seminary school. "If I closed my eyes I'd be able to see all the colors and shapes so much clearer! But every time I shut my eyes it goes away."

  "They did that because of bad things that happened to people back in the beginning,"
his teacher told him. "Men and women tried to use inscape to hide from the real world. They spun themselves fantasy worlds and then shut themselves away in little airless rooms, slowly starving to death while they built a false paradise for themselves in the Net.

  "After some people died they made it so that you could only take your senses away from reality in special circumstances. Rather than build something that appeared to be a separate reality— but isn't— they decided that everything should appear to be here, in this reality, with us. So the public and private inscapes were developed. Private inscape is made up of those things that only you can see, public ones are the windows and shows that you share with other people. They all reach you by the same means, through the implants in your sensory nerves.

  "Now, we believe that this trend has gone too far in the opposite direction; the Rights Economy has layered its version of reality on top of what everyone sees and hears— strictly in the name of economics, they claim, and the alternatives could be far worse. True— they could completely control the appearance of reality if they chose. But as it is, though they think they are being moral, they are godless people, because they have made it appear that the essence of things is money— that a thing only really exists if it can be bought or sold. When you look at a rose, you no longer see the immanence of the thing itself; all you see is a price."

  Michael contemplatively turned over the offline datapack he used to store kami. Crisler had neither taken it from him nor wiped the kami already stored in it. He was sure that was deliberate: Crisler was saying more clearly than words could express that he could take the pack away any time he chose.

  The kami of Kadesh and the terrifying kami of Dis were still in there. He knew he should erase the kami of Dis, but even with those huge files in the system there was plenty of extra storage space left. Enough for him to try something he had not done since his final days at the seminary.

  One of the reasons Dr. Herat encouraged Michael's religious activities was that the kami often revealed insights into alien places and things that Herat himself missed. The professor had a brilliant mind, but not everything could be seen with the rational faculty. On more than one occasion he had called upon Michael to scry an object using the NeoShinto AI— calling up a history half imagined, half inferred. Herat knew that the deepest engines of human thought are unconscious and he respected Michael's ability to tap those powers directly. Michael himself always found the experience disquieting.

  He had gotten nowhere with his search of the databases he'd archived from the Banshee. Terabytes of data were arrayed about him in diffuse clouds and he was certain that the right kind of analysis would show a clue as to why Linda Ophir had been killed. If there was no such clue, that was also proof of something— namely that her murder had been one of opportunity.

  His analytic powers and even those of the semilegal search tools he'd brought from Kimpurusha, weren't up to the task of finding that clue, or its absence. So he was faced with a choice.

  Years ago, when he was testing the limits of his ability to touch the kami, Michael had tried to find the kami of inscape. He had no doubt that they were there; everything that came to human consciousness as a presence held kami. So one night he had sat down in the middle of a marble floor under the wan light of Kimpurusha's faint ring and summoned the kami of Data.

  He activated the data storage unit now and held it up to eye level. He could feel a connection being made between the AI in his skull and the unit; he lowered it, closed his eyes and overrode the safety defaults of the inscape interface.

  With a wrenching twist, all his sense of place and position vanished. He seemed to be hanging in a vast ethereal space, high above the misty galaxy of data he had been exploring. The illusion was total— vision crisp, murmurs of musical pattern thrumming all around him. This place was seductive, as always, in its perfection. And already he could sense the kami here.

  When he was younger, the kami of Data had almost killed him. They were infinitely powerful and mercurial. They defied identity while greedily sucking it from everything in their domain. They embodied the spaces in between the blocks of information that were known to people using the Net. So they had come at Michael as answers to questions he'd never thought to ask; they had promised unifications of senses, like the texture of green or the sound of height. As soon as he entered their influence they fell upon him and he was trapped in their realm until his brothers found him in the morning and pulled him free.

  The Michael of today was far more disciplined and his attention more focused than that younger man. As he felt the kami beginning to swirl around him like the precincts of a hurricane, he pulled them deliberately, one at a time. He examined the towering half-minds each in its turn and discarded it. The kami of this data resembled those who had stored information here; after months or years of being constantly half-connected to inscape, everyone left tracks. The papers written by the science team were here, each hyperlinked a thousand ways to notes, observations, citations, and personal logs of the authors. Many links trailed off into private inscapes whose data were not replicated in Michael's archive; but most were public. They made a collective music that came to him as ghosts of the authors' personalities.

  He was looking for one ghost in particular and it didn't take long for him to find it. Linda Ophir lived on in her writings and in the thousands of small personal touches she had left in her public inscape galleries. The NeoShinto AI took hints of connection and spun them into personality. In seconds Michael found himself standing in front of Linda— or a composite of her whose age was indeterminate, sometimes childlike, sometimes wise and of dizzying depth. It stared back at him quizzically and opened its mouth to speak. He heard a thousand recordings of her voice— notes, voice messages, recorded lectures— blur together into a single yearning for meaning and in that yearning he understood completely why she had chosen science as her religion.

  The ghost's eyes were mesmerizing; Michael was falling into them, disoriented, overwhelmed by her voice and the force of her character. He clutched for something else to hold onto and found, strangely, the hollow emptiness of Dis. Remembering it, he was able to look away from Linda's eyes.

  "What are you hiding?" he asked her. He sensed turmoil and looked back.

  Unlike most of the scientists in the expedition, Linda had kept almost nothing private. Her whole life was open in her writings and recordings. So the single, tiny block of files that were conspicuously missing from the continuum of her work were as instantly visible to Michael as a crack in a pane of glass.

  He reached down, grabbed the absence that should have been several hours of Linda's work and pulled. As he did he shut down the NeoShinto AI. The ghosts fled and he was left holding a set of files.

  He blinked, returning to the strange little airlock and now finding it homey. For a minute he just sat there, breathing, trying to forget the ghosts and the electric power of the kami of Data. Eventually he looked up from the floor between his knees. Several files were rotating in the air in front of him— photographs, by their icons. They had been stored in a public photo archive called "Waste Disposal Systems: Schematics."

  Hidden in the open.

  This guile was suggestive— was Ophir trying to hide her data from her own people?

  When he felt ready, Michael opened the first, then, in puzzlement, another and finally all of them. This was not what he had expected— not that he knew what it was he'd expected, really.

  The images were all of the Lasa habitat, the final one being a holo globe mapped with the pictures to create a miniature model. The black sphere with its red cuneiform lettering was instantly recognizable. These images were all tagged B. G., which hyperlinked to Blair Genereaux— but they had been annotated and the annotation layer was initialed L. O.: Linda Ophir.

  He opened all the annotations. He rotated the globe; it looked like the one in the public archive all the scientists were using. Nothing odd there.

  But in the annotated version, seve
ral of the photos had some of the background stars and certain Lasa words circled. With those highlighted, it was easy to see that four of the photos were in fact duplicates. He looked closer: The coordinates on the photos were different, suggesting that they had been taken at different points in an orbit around the habitat. But no, the photos were the same.

  He looked at the globe again. The lettering formed discrete units— paragraphs— that were separated from one another by large areas of black hull. There were twelve of these paragraphs and it had already been noted by the science team that not all of them were written in Lasa. But they were all unique— except for one duplication.

  He sat back, startled. One of the Lasa paragraphs was repeated, on opposite sides of the sphere. No other text was duplicated. And that duplicated text was the text from the duplicate photos.

  So somebody had removed one or more of Rue Cassels's original photos of the habitat and reordered them to hide the fact. There were precious few reference points from which to tell what you were looking at: Every picture was identical to the others except for different letters splashed across the dark circle of the habitat. But if you looked closely enough, you could see the deception— and Linda Ophir had obviously looked close enough.

  He should be getting back; his keepers would be wondering what he was up to. He felt a surge of anger at the thought of the spy camera on his ear, and decided to defy it. He turned his attention back to the photos.

  For a while at least, Michael's attention was not on the dark ancient whisperings of the kami of Dis, but on the faint traces of another kind of more tangible spirit; those of a deadly human who hid somewhere aboard the Banshee.

  * * *

  "DON'T YOU HAVE anything to say to me?"