Bethany Maria Caesar called her murdered lover a visionary, but compared to her he was blind. As soon as she began her work on biononic systems back in eighteen fifty she had realized what would happen should she eventually be successful. The self-replicating biononics she envisaged would be the pinnacle of molecular engineering machinery, organelle-sized modules that could assemble single atoms into whatever structure an AI had designed and, equally important, disassemble. Cluster enough of them together like some patch of black lichen, and they would eat their way through any ore, extracting the atoms you required for whatever project you had in mind. They could then weave those atoms into anything from quantum wire and pentospheres to iron girders and bricks. That included food, clothes, houses, starships . . . Quite literally, anything you could think of and manage to describe to your AI.
The human race stopped working for a living. Just as she said. Or prophesied, depending on your opinion of her.
The human race had stopped dying, too. Specific versions of biononic modules could travel through the human body, repairing damaged cells. They could also reset DNA.
Amongst all the upheaval, it was our view and attitude towards commodities which underwent the most radical of all our revisions. From valuing all sorts of gems and precious metals and rare chemicals, we had switched to valuing just one thing: matter. Any matter. It became our currency and our obsession. It didn’t matter what atom you owned, even if it was only hydrogen – especially hydrogen if you were a Caesar. Fusion could transform it into a heavier element, one which a biononic module could exploit. Every living person in the solar system had the potential to create whatever they wanted, limited only by personal imagination and the public availability of matter.
And the Caesars had the greatest stockpile of unused matter in the solar system: Jupiter. That’s how far ahead they were thinking once Bethany spurred them on. The population pressures we’d been facing were nothing compared with what was about to be unleashed. A race of semi-immortals with the potential to increase their numbers at a near-exponential rate simply by using the old-fashioned natural method of reproduction – never mind artificial wombs and cloning techniques.
To think, when I was young, I used to worry that our early petrol engine cars would use up all the oil reserves. Within weeks of Bethany’s biononic modules coming on-line family spaceships charged off across the solar system to lay claim to any and every chunk of matter a telescope had ever detected. The most disgraceful, shameful year of post-Second Era history. A year of madness and greed, when all our rationality seemed to crumble before the forces of avarice. The Crisis Conference of ’65 managed to calm things down a little. Thankfully, every family rejected the Rothschild claim on the sun. And the rest of the solar system was apportioned almost equally. We Raleighs came out of it with Titan as well as a joint claim – with fifteen other families – on Saturn. But the Caesars still had Jupiter, consolidating their position as the foremost human family. And the FTL starship project was born, the agreement most accredited with easing the tension.
The function of family councils changed to that of resource allocators, enabling us to enforce the original legal framework that underpinned civilization. Controlling the distribution of raw matter was economics stripped down to its crudest level. But it worked, after a fashion, allowing us to retain order and balance. Given the circumstances, it was a better outcome than I would have predicted.
The last of the compression drive’s scarlet light drained away from the sky, taking with it the strange double shadows cast by the oak. I began instructing the FAI to contact a senior representative of the Lockett family.
*
Christine Jayne Lockett was a stark reminder that I really ought to get myself reset. Men always suffer from the same casual illusion that we simply became more handsome as we matured, and were increasingly desirable as a result. What tosh.
When she walked into my office in the Meridor Manor all I could see was the bitterness leaking from her face. It spoiled her features, a near-permanent scowl highlighting the wrinkles accumulating around her eyes and across her cheeks. Her hair was still long, but not cared for with any great enthusiasm. And the clothes she wore were at least a century out of date; they looked handmade, and badly at that. Paint flecked her hands, lying thick under short, cracked nails.
The small file of personal data which my AI had collected for me told of how she now lived out in the countryside in a naturalist community. They grew their own food, made their own utensils, smoked their hallucinogenics, and generally avoided contact with the rest of their family. No biononics were allowed across the threshold of their compound, although they did have a net interface to call for medical help if any of their number had an accident.
She stalked over to my desk and thrust her face up against mine. ‘Oppressive bastard! Who the hell do you think you are? How dare you have me arrested and forced away from my home like this. I’ve done nothing wrong.’ It was almost a scream.
The Lockett family representative who was accompanying her gave me a tired grimace. Apparently Christine Jayne Lockett had refused point blank to use an airpod, insisting she travelled by groundcar. It had taken them eight hours to drive to the institute from northern England.
‘Oh yes you have.’
My voice was so cold she recoiled.
‘You and Carter Osborne Kenyon are the only people left on my suspect list,’ I said. ‘And now I’m finally going to discover the truth.’
‘But Carter was with me for the whole evening.’
I directed a mirthless smile at her. ‘Yes.’
It took a moment for the implication to sink in. Her mouth widened in astonishment. ‘Holy Mary, you think we did it together, don’t you? You think we killed that poor, poor boy.’
‘The rest of the alibis all check out. You two provided each other’s alibi. It’s the only weak link left.’
‘You utter shit!’ She sat down heavily in my visitor’s chair, staring at me with malice and disbelief. ‘So you wait all this time until you’re some super-duper big shot, and exploit your position to pressure my family into handing me over to you, all so you can erase a blemish on your record.’ Her gaze switched to her family representative. ‘Gutless coward!’ she snarled at him. ‘The Locketts aren’t this feeble that we have to kiss Raleigh arse when they tell us. You’re supposed to protect me from this kind of victimisation. I’ve got strong links to the elder council, you know. Give me a bloody telephone, I’m going to hang you bastards out to dry.’
‘Your family council agreed to my interviewing you,’ I said.
‘Then I’m taking this to the Roman Congress itself. I have rights! You can’t throw me in prison because you’ve failed to pin this on anyone else. Why didn’t you bring Carter here, eh? I’ll bet the Kenyons wouldn’t stand for being shoved around by the likes of you.’
‘Firstly, Carter is on the Aquaries, they’re out exploring stars twenty light-years away, and won’t be back for another year. Secondly, you’re not under arrest, you’re here to be interviewed. Thirdly, if what I suspect is true, Carter will be arrested the moment he docks at New Vespasian.’
‘Interview me? Mary, how dumb is this? I did not murder Justin. Which part of that don’t you understand? Because that’s all I’m saying.’
‘It’s not that simple any more, not these days.’
My FAI floated over to her, and expanded to display a sheet of text. She waved dismissively at it. ‘I don’t use them. What does it say?’
‘It’s a ruling from the Neuromedical Protocol Commission, clearing a new design of biononic for human application. This particular module takes direct sensory integration a stage further, by stimulating selected synapses to invoke a deep access response.’
‘We all stopped speaking Latin at the end of the First Era.’
‘All right, Christine, it’s really very simple. We can read your memories. I’m going to send you down to our laboratory, wire you up to a great big machine, and
watch exactly what happened that night on a high-resolution, home-theatre-sized colour screen. And there’s not a thing you can do to stop me. Any further questions?’
‘Bloody hell! Why, Edward? What do you believe was our motive?’
‘I have no idea, although this procedure will enable me to trace it through associative location. All I’ve got left to go on now is opportunity. You and Carter had that.’
Her stubborn scowl vanished. She sat there completely blank-faced for a couple of seconds, then gave me a level smile. ‘If you believe it, then go right ahead.’
On a conscious level I kept telling myself she was bluffing, that it was one last brave gesture of defiance. Unfortunately, my subconscious was not so certain.
The family’s forensic department had come up in the world over the last century. No longer skulking in the basement of Hewish Manor, it now occupied half of the third floor. Laboratories were crypts of white-gloss surfaces, populated by AI pillars with transparent sensor domes on top. Technicians and robots moved around between the units, examining and discussing the results. The clinic room which we had been allocated had a single bed in the middle, with four black boxy cabinets around it.
Rebecca greeted us politely and ushered Christine to the bed. Strictly speaking, Rebecca was a clinical neurologist these days rather than a forensic doctor, but given how new the application was she’d agreed to run the procedure for me.
As with all biononic systems, there’s never anything to actually see. Rebecca adjusted a dispenser mechanism against the nape of Christine’s neck, and introduced the swarm of modules. The governing AI guided their trajectory through the brain tissue, controlling and regulating the intricate web they wove within her synaptic clefts. It took over an hour to interpret and format the information they were receiving, and map out the activation pathways within her cerebrum.
I watched the primary stages with a growing sense of trepidation. Justin’s murder was one of the oldest active legal files the Raleighs had. The weight of so many years was pressing down on this moment, seeking resolution. If we couldn’t solve this now, with all our fantastic technological abilities at my disposal, then I had failed him, one of our own.
Rebecca eventually ordered me to sit down. She didn’t actually say ‘be patient’ but her look was enough.
An FAI expanded in the air across one end of the clinic room, forming into a translucent sheet flecked with a moiré storm of interference. Colour specks flowed together. It showed a hazy image of an antiquated restaurant viewed at eye level. On the couch Christine moaned softly, her eyes closed, as the memory replayed itself inside her skull, a window into history.
‘We’re there,’ Rebecca said. She issued a stream of instructions to the AI.
That March night in eighteen thirty-two played out in front of me, flickering and jerking like a home movie recorded on an antique strip of film. Christine sat at a table with her friends in the middle of the Orange Grove. Young, beautiful, and full of zest, their smiles and laughter making me ache for my own youth. They told each other stories and jokes, complained about tutors, gossiped about students and university staff, argued family politics. After the waiter brought their main course they went into a giggling huddle to decide if they should complain about the vegetables. More wine was ordered. They became louder.
It was snowing when they collected their coats and left. Tiny flecks of ice adding to the mush of the pavement. They stood as a group outside the restaurant, saying their goodbyes, Christine kissing everybody. Then with Carter’s arm around her shoulder, the pair of them made their way through Oxford’s freezing streets to the block where she had her artist’s garret.
There was the baby-sitter to pay and show out. Then the two of them were alone. They stumbled into her studio, and kissed for a long time, surrounded by Christine’s outré paintings. There wasn’t much to see of that time, just smears of Carter’s face in badly blurred close-up. Then she went over to an old chest of drawers, and pulled a stash of cocaine out from an old jewellery box. Carter was already undressing when she turned back to him.
They snorted the drugs, and fondled and groped at each other in an ineffectual manner for what seemed an age. The phone’s whistling put an end to it. Christine staggered over to answer it, then handed it to Carter. She watched with a bleary focus as his face showed first annoyance then puzzlement and finally shock. He slammed the handset down and scooped up his clothes. A clock on the studio wall said twenty-six minutes to twelve.
I couldn’t move from the clinic seat. I sat there with my head in my hands, not believing what I’d just seen. It had to be faked. The Locketts had developed false memory implantation techniques. They’d corrupted our institute AIs. Christine had repeated the alibi to herself for so long it had become stronger than reality. Aliens travelled back in time to alter the past.
‘Edward.’
When I looked up, Christine Jayne Lockett was staring down at me. There was no anger in her expression. If anything, she was pitying me.
‘I wasn’t joking when I said I knew people on our elder council,’ she said. ‘And let me tell you, you arrogant bastard, if this . . . this mental rape had been in connection with any other case, I would have kicked up such a stink that your whole family would disown you. The only reason I won’t is because I loved Justin. He was my friend, and I’ll never forget him for bringing a thread of happiness into my life. I wanted his murderer caught back then, and I want it just as bad now.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered feebly.
‘Are you going to give up?’
My smile was one of total self-pity. ‘We’re reaching what Bethany called the plateau, the end of scientific progress. I’ve used every method we know of to find the murderer. Every one of them has failed me. The only thing left now that could solve it is time travel, and I’m afraid our physicists are all pretty much agreed that’s just a fantasy.’
‘Time travel,’ she said contemptuously. ‘You just can’t see beyond your fabulous technology, can you? Your reliance is sickening. And what use is it when it comes down to the things that are genuinely important?’
‘Nobody starves, nobody dies,’ I snapped at her, abruptly infuriated with her poverty-makes-me-morally-superior attitude. ‘I notice your happy stone-age colony isn’t averse to using our medical resources any time something nasty happens.’
‘Yes, we fall back on technological medicine. We’re neither ignorant, nor stupid. We believe technology as sophisticated as ours should be used as a safety net for our lives, not as an integral part, or ruler, as you choose. The simple way we live allows us to return to nature without having to endure the struggle and squalor of the actual stone age. For all things there is a balance, and you have got it badly wrong. Your society is exploiting the universe, not living in harmony with it. The way we live allows our minds to prosper, not our greed.’
‘While the way we live allows dreams to become reality. We are a race without limits.’
‘Without physical limits. What use is that, Edward? What is the ultimate reason to give everyone the power of a god? Look at you, what you’re doing – you hoard entire planets in readiness for the day when you can dismantle them and fabricate something in their place. What? What can possibly need building on such a scale? Explore the universe by all means, I’m sure there are miracles and marvels out there just as great as the one we’ve created for ourselves. But at the end of the day, you should come home to your family and your friends. That’s what’s truly important.’
‘I’m glad you’ve found a way to live with what we’ve achieved. But you’re in a minority. The rest of us want to grab the opportunity this time has gifted us with.’
‘You’ll learn,’ she said. ‘After all, you’ve got eternity.’
FIVE
EARTH ORBIT AD 2000
My flyer ripped up through the ionosphere like a fish leaving water. The gravitonic and magnetic flux lines which knotted around the little craft tugged a braided haze of auror
al streamers out behind us, looking for all the world like some ancient chemical rocket exhaust. Once clear of the atmosphere’s bulk, I increased the acceleration to twenty gees, and the slender scintillating strand was stretched to breaking point. Wispy photonic serpents writhed back down towards the planet as we burst free.
I extended my perceptual range, tracking the multitude of flyers falling in and out of the atmosphere all around me. They blossomed like silver comets across my consciousness, dense currents of them arching up from the Earth in a series of flowing hoops with every apex reaching precisely six hundred miles above the equator. The portal Necklace itself, which occupied that orbit, was visualized by nodes of cool jade light sitting atop the hoops. Each of them was nested at the centre of a subtle spatial distortion, lensing the light outwards in curving ephemeral petals.
The flyer soared round in a flat curve, merging with the traffic stream that was heading for the Tangsham portal a thousand miles ahead of me. Africa’s eastern coastline drifted past below, its visual clarity taking on a dreamlike quality, perfectly resolved yet impossibly distant. I watched it dwindle behind the flyer as all the wretched old emotions rose to haunt me again. Although I’d never quite had the courage to deactivate the Justin Ascham Raleigh file in the wake of the debacle which was Christine’s memory retrieval, I’d certainly abandoned it in my own mind. I couldn’t even remember giving my cybershadow the order to tag all the old suspects and watch for any status change within the global dataspace.
Yet when the information slipped into my mind as I awoke that morning I knew I could never ignore it. Whatever would Francis have said?
I kept the flyer’s forward perception primary as we approached the portal. The circle of exotic matter had a breadth of nine hundred yards, the rim of a chasm that could be seen only from one direction. Its pseudofabric walls glowed green where they intersected the boundaries of normal space-time, forming a tunnel that stretched off into middle-distance. Two lanes of flyers sped along its interior in opposite directions, carrying people to their new world and their hoped-for happiness.