Persepolis Rising

by James S. A. Corey

  At the door, his two guards stopped him, then spread out, one on each side. Paolo fancied he could feel the tickle of X-rays and millimeter waves bouncing off his body as they scanned him head to toe. After a long moment one of them said, “The high consul is waiting for you in the medical wing,” and then they turned and walked away.

  “Technically, yes. The dreams have stopped,” Duarte said as Paolo slid a hypodermic port line into a forearm vein and taped it down. He knew from experience that Duarte was distracting himself to keep from looking down and seeing the needles go in. It was endearing that the most powerful human in the universe was still a bit squeamish about needles.

  “Have they?” Paolo asked. It wasn’t a casual question. The side effects of the incredibly experimental treatment Duarte was receiving were something to be kept close track of. “How long ago?”

  Duarte sighed, and closed his eyes. Either relaxing as the first of the sedative mixture hit his veins, or trying to remember the exact date, or both. “The last one was eleven days ago.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” Duarte said with a smile and without opening his eyes, “I’m sure. Eleven days ago was the last time I slept.”

  Paolo nearly dropped the IV line he was connecting to the port. “You haven’t slept in eleven days?”

  Duarte’s eyes finally opened. “I don’t feel tired at all. Quite the opposite. Every day I feel more energetic and healthy than the last. A side effect of the treatment, I’m sure.”

  Paolo nodded at this, though it wasn’t anything he’d anticipated. His stomach gave a tiny spasm of worry. If there was an unexpected side effect this extreme, then what else was waiting for them? He’d asked Duarte to wait until they had more data, but the man had demanded they move forward, and how could he argue?

  “I see that look, old friend,” Duarte said, his smile even wider. “You don’t need to worry. I’ve been monitoring it myself. If anything were out of balance, I’d have called you a week ago. But I feel fantastic, I’m not building up fatigue poisons, and the blood work promised I’m not psychotic. And now I get an extra eight hours every day to work. I couldn’t be happier.”

  “Of course,” Paolo replied. He finished hooking the IV bag filled with its payload of protomolecule-modified human stem cells into the port. Duarte gave a tiny gasp when the cool fluid started to enter his vein. “But please, do remember to send along these sorts of details, even if they don’t seem to be a problem. Animal models are never perfect, and you’re the first person to receive this treatment. Tracking the effects is incredibly important to—”

  “I will,” Duarte replied. “I have full confidence that your lab has everything working exactly as it’s supposed to. But I’ll make sure my personal doctor sends you all his daily notes.”

  “Thank you, High Consul,” Paolo said. “I’m going to draw some blood as well and have my people do a workup. Just to make sure.”

  “Whatever you need,” Duarte said. “But as long as we’re alone, please don’t call me ‘High Consul.’ Winston’s fine.” Duarte’s voice had grown mushy, and Paolo could tell the sedatives were taking effect. “I want us all working together.”

  “We are working together. But a body needs a brain. Leadership, yes?” Paolo replied. He let the IV bag empty, used the line to draw a small sample of Duarte’s blood and put it in the metal briefcase, and quietly went about the process of doing a full body scan. The treatment had begun growing a small number of new organs in Duarte’s body that had been designed by the best experimental physiologists on the planet and implemented using lessons taught by the eternal protomolecule bloom. But there were still so many things that might go wrong, and tracking the development of the changes in Duarte was the most important aspect of Paolo’s job. Despite Duarte’s warmth and the genuine friendship he showed, if anything happened to the Laconian ruler, he would be executed shortly thereafter. Tying Paolo’s safety to his own was how Duarte could guarantee the scientist’s best efforts on his behalf. They both understood this, and there was no ill will attached. Paolo’s death wouldn’t be punishment, exactly. Just a clear disincentive to letting his patient die.

  As relationships went, it was probably the most honest one Paolo had ever had.

  “You know, Winston, that this is going to be a very long process. There may be imbalances small enough that they don’t appear for years. Decades.”

  “Centuries,” he said, nodding. “It’s imperfect, I know. But we do what we have to do. And, no, old friend. I’m sorry, but I haven’t reconsidered.”

  Paolo wondered if the ability to read minds was yet another unexpected side effect of the treatment. If so … well, that would be interesting. “I wasn’t suggesting that—”

  “That you should undergo the treatment too?” Duarte said. “Of course you were. And you should suggest it. Make the best argument you can. I don’t believe you’ll change my mind, but I’d like it very much if you did.”

  Paolo looked at his hands, avoiding Duarte’s eyes. Defiance would have been easier for him. The melancholy in the man’s voice was disturbing in a way he found hard to understand.

  “The ironic thing?” Duarte said. “I’ve always rejected the great-man idea. The belief that human history was formed by singular individuals instead of broad social forces? Romantic, but …” He waved a hand vaguely, like he was stirring fog. “Demographic trends. Economic cycles. Technological progress. All much more powerful predictors than any one person. And yet here I am. I would take you with me if I could, you know. It’s not my choice. It’s history’s.”

  “History should reconsider,” Paolo said.

  Duarte chuckled. “The difference between zero and one is miraculous. But it’s as miraculous as it ever will be. Make it two. Three. A hundred. It becomes just another oligarchy. A permanent engine of inequality that will breed the wars we’re trying to end.”

  Paolo made a small sound that could have been mistaken for agreement.

  “The best governments in history have been kings and emperors,” Duarte said. “The worst ones too. A philosopher-king can manage great things in his lifetime. And his grandchildren can squander it.”

  Duarte grunted as Paolo pulled the hypodermic port out of his arm. He didn’t need to place a bandage over the wound. The hole closed up before a drop of blood could escape. It didn’t even scab.

  “If you want to create a lasting, stable social order,” Duarte said, “only one person can ever be immortal.”

  Chapter One: Drummer

  The habitation ring of the transfer station at Lagrange-5 was three times the diameter of the one Drummer had lived in on Tycho, half a lifetime ago. TSL-5 had a small city’s worth of offices with the same fake-marble walls and soft, full-spectrum lighting as the one they’d given her, the same crash-couch beds and water showers as her quarters there. The air had a constant smell of terpene compounds, as if the station were the largest chrysanthemum in the universe. The dome in the center of the station had berths for hundreds of ships and warehouses that seemed so numerous and deep that filling them would leave Earth as empty as a squeezed-out bulb. All those berths and warehouses were at rest now, but starting tomorrow, that would change. TSL-5 was about to be open for business, and even as tired as she was, as annoyed as she felt at having to haul herself halfway across the system for what was ultimately a ribbon-cutting ceremony, there was also an excitement to it. After three decades of struggle, Mother Earth was open for business.

  The planet glowed on her wall screen, whorls of high white clouds and glimpses of the still-greenish sea beneath it. The terminator crept across, pulling a blanket of darkness and city lights behind it. The ships of the Earth-Mars Coalition Navy floated around it, dots of darkness swimming on the high sea of air. Drummer had never gone down that well, and now by the terms of the treaty she’d signed on the union’s behalf, she never would. Fine with her. Her knees bothered her sometimes as it was. But as an objet d’art, Terra was hard to beat. Humanity had
done its level best to kick the shit out of the slowly spinning egg. Overpopulation, exploitation, atmospheric and oceanic imbalance, and then three military-level meteor strikes, any one of which would have fucked up the dinosaurs. And here it still was, like a soldier. Scarred, broken, reimagined, rebuilt, and remade.

  Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter. Or at least not the way she’d thought they did.

  Time, plus the combined expertise of a Martian terraforming project staggering under the loss of its mandate, the ruthless administration of Earth’s political sector, and the huge market of thirteen-hundred-odd worlds all in need of biological substrates to grow food that people could actually eat had hauled Earth, slow and staggering, up to functional again.

  Her system chirped, a polite little pop like someone snapping bamboo. Her private secretary’s voice followed like a drink of whiskey.

  “Madam President?”

  “Give me a minute, Vaughn,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. But Secretary-General Li would like to speak with you before the ceremony.”

  “The Earth-Mars Coalition can wait until after cocktails. I’m not opening this station by jumping every time the EMC clears their throat. Bad precedent.”

  “Copy that. I’ll handle it.”

  The system made the little woody tock that meant she had her privacy again. She leaned back in her chair, looked over at the images set into the wall behind her desk. All the previous Transport Union presidents before her: Michio Pa, then Tjon, Walker, Sanjrani, and her own thin, stern face looking back at her from the end. She hated that picture. It made her look like she’d just eaten something sour. The first version of it looked like something off a singles forum. At least this one was dignified.

  For most of the Transport Union’s members, this image was all they’d ever see of her. Thirteen hundred worlds, and within a decade most if not all of them would have their own versions of the TSL-5. Hand-off stations that marked the bubble of void where the planet’s sphere of control ended and the union’s began. Anything that the colonies needed from humanity’s first home or from each other went up the gravity wells. That was the inner’s problem. Moving it from one system to another belonged to the Belt. Old terms. Inners. Belters. They stuck because language held on to things that way, even when the reality around them had shifted.

  The Earth-Mars Coalition had been the center of humanity once—the innermost of the inners. Now it was an important spoke on the wheel whose hub was Medina Station. Where the weird alien sphere sat in the middle of the not-space that linked all the ring gates. Where her civilian quarters were when she wasn’t on the void cities. Where Saba was, when he wasn’t on his ship or with her. Medina Station was home.

  Except that even for her, the blue-black disk of Earth on her screen was home too. Maybe that wouldn’t always be true. There were kids old enough to vote now who’d never known what it meant to have only one sun. She didn’t know what Earth or Mars or Sol would be to them. Maybe this atavistic melancholy just behind her breastbone would die with her generation.

  Or maybe she was tired and cranky and needed a nap.

  The bamboo broke again. “Ma’am?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But we have a priority message from traffic control on Medina.”

  Drummer leaned forward, her hands flat against the cool of the desk. Shit. Shit shit shit. “Did we lose another one?”

  “No, ma’am. No lost ships.”

  She felt the dread loosen its grip a little. Not all the way. “What, then?”

  “They’re reporting an unscheduled transit. A freighter, but it didn’t have a transponder.”

  “Seriously?” she said. “Did they think we wouldn’t notice it?”

  “Couldn’t speak to that,” Vaughn said.

  She pulled up the administrative feed from Medina. She could get anything from her realm here—traffic control, environmental data, energy output, sensor arrays in any slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. But light delay made all of it a little more than four hours old. Any order she gave would come through eight, eight and a half hours after the request for it was made. The vast alien intelligence that had engineered the ring gates and the massive ruins in the systems beyond them had found ways to manipulate distance, but the speed of light was the speed of light, and seemed like it always would be.

  She scrolled through the logs, found the relevant slot, played it.

  Medina here. Conferme. Traffic Control’s usual calm.

  The responding voice had a little interference. An artifact of the gates. This is the freighter Savage Landing out of Castila on approach, Medina. Transferring our status now.

  A new window popped up. The ship status of a light freighter. Martian design. Old, but not antiquated. It took a few seconds for Traffic to come back.

  Visé bien, Savage Landing. You are clear to transit. Control code is—fuck! Abort, Savage Landing! Do not transit!

  A sudden spike on the safety curve and the alarm status blinked to red. A new drive signature appeared on Medina’s control board, the plume sweeping through the starless dark of the slow zone.

  It was done. All of it over with hours ago, but Drummer still felt her heartbeat pick up. Traffic was shouting for the new ship to identify itself, the rail-gun emplacements clicked to active. If they’d fired, everyone on the unauthorized ship was dead already.

  The safety curve decayed, the disruption created by mass and energy passing through the ring dropping until it passed the threshold. The intruding ship spun, burning hard, and zipped through a different gate, kicking the curve back up again as it escaped.

  Traffic cursed in several languages, sending stand-by messages to three other inbound ships. The Savage Landing was quiet, but the feed from their system showed a bruisingly hard burn as they peeled away, breaking off the approach to the Castila gate.

  She rolled back, the near calamity reversing itself. The reckless asshole had come in from Freehold and passed out into Auberon. Because of course it had. The leaking radiation from the Auberon gate showed that the ship had made it. As close as it had cut the safety curve, it hadn’t gone dutchman. But if the Savage Landing had gone through as scheduled, one or both ships could have vanished into wherever ships went when their transits failed.

  In the short term, it would mean slotting Savage Landing in later. There’d be a bunch of pushbacks. Maybe dozens of ships that had to change their burns and coordinate new transits. Not a threat, but a pain in the ass.

  And not a good precedent.

  “Should I respond,” Vaughn asked, “or would you rather deal with this personally, ma’am?”

  It was an excellent question. Policy was a ratchet. If she pulled the trigger, gave the order that the next unauthorized ship through was going to be turned into scrap metal and regrets, it wasn’t something she could pull back from. Someone much better at this than she was had taught her to be very careful doing something if she wasn’t ready to do it every time from then on.

  But, Christ, it was tempting.

  “Have Medina log the transit, add the full cost to Freehold and Auberon’s tabs, and penalties for the delays they caused,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. “Anything else?”

  Yes, she thought, but I don’t know what yet.

  The conference room had been designed for this moment. The vaulted ceiling looked as grand as a cathedral. Secretary-General Li of Earth stood at his podium, shifting his grave but satisfied countenance out at the cameras of dozens of different, carefully selected newsfeeds. Drummer tried to do the same.

  “President Drummer!” one of the reporters called, lifting a hand for attention the same way people probably had in the forums of Rome. Her podium told her the man’s name was Carlisle Hayyam with Munhwa Ilbo’s Ceres office. A dozen others had started clamoring for h
er attention too.

  “Hayyam?” she said, smiling, and the others quieted down. The truth was, she sort of liked this part. It appealed to some long-forgotten ambition to perform on a stage, and it was one of the few places where she felt like she was actually in control. Most of her work felt like she was trying to stuff air back into a leaking balloon.

  “How do you respond to Martin Karczek’s concerns about the transfer station?”

  “I’d have to listen to them,” she said. “I’ve only got so many hours in my day.”

  The reporters chuckled, and she heard the glee. Yes, they were opening the first hand-off station. Yes, Earth was about to stagger up out of years of environmental crisis to ramp up its active trade with the colonies. All anyone really wanted was a couple politicians being snippy at each other.

  And that was fine. As long as they kept looking at the little stuff, she could work on the big things.

  Secretary-General Li, a broad-faced man with a lush mustache and a workman’s callused hands, cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind,” he said. “There are always people who are wary of change. And that’s a good thing. Change should be watched, moderated, and questioned. But that conservative view shouldn’t rein in progress or put a damper on hope. Earth is humanity’s first and truest home. The soil from which all of us, whatever system we now inhabit, first grew. Earth will always, always, be central to the greater project of humanity in the universe.”