Galactic North

  He shivered. It was the only appropriate response.

  “Even if the network processes information . . . there’s no reason to think it could ever become conscious.”

  “Why not, Nevil? What’s the fundamental difference between perceiving the universe via electrical signals transmitted along nerve tissue, and via fracture patterns moving through a vast block of ice?”

  “I suppose you have a point.”

  “I had to save them, Nevil. Not just the worms, but the network they were a part of. We couldn’t come all this way and just wipe out the first thinking thing we’d ever encountered in the universe, simply because it didn’t fit into our neat little preconceived notions of what alien thought would actually be like.”

  “But saving the worms meant killing everyone else.”

  “You think I didn’t realise that? You think it didn’t agonise me to do what I had to do? I’m a human being, Nevil—not a monster. I knew exactly what I was doing and I knew exactly what it would make me look like to anyone who came here afterwards.”

  “But you still did it.”

  “Put yourself in my shoes. How would you have acted?”

  Clavain opened his mouth, expecting an easy answer to spring to mind. But nothing came; not for several seconds. He was thinking about Setterholm’s question, more thoroughly than he had done so far. Until then he had satisfied himself with the quiet, unquestioned assumption that he would not have acted the way Setterholm had done. But could he really be so sure? Setterholm, after all, had truly believed that the network formed a sentient whole; a thinking being. Possessing that knowledge must have made him feel divinely chosen; sanctioned to commit any act to preserve the fabulously rare thing he had found. And he had, after all, been right.

  “You haven’t answered me.”

  “That’s because I thought the question warranted something more than a flippant answer, Setterholm. I like to think I wouldn’t have acted the way you did, but I don’t suppose I can ever be sure of that.”

  Clavain stood up, inspecting his suit for damage; relieved that the scuffle had not injured him.

  “You’ll never know.”

  “No. I never will. But one thing’s clear enough. I’ve heard you talk; heard the fire in your words. You believe in your network, and yet you still couldn’t make the others see it. I doubt I’d have been able to do much better, and I doubt that I’d have thought of a better way to preserve what you’d found.”

  “Then you’d have killed everyone, just like I did?” The realisation of it was like a heavy burden someone had just placed on his shoulders. It was so much easier to feel incapable of such acts. But Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.

  And Setterholm had definitely had a cause.

  “Perhaps,” Clavain said. “Perhaps I might have, yes.”

  He heard Setterholm sigh. “I’m glad. For a moment there—”

  “For a moment what?”

  “When you showed up with that pick, I thought you were planning to kill me.” Setterholm hefted the pick, much as Clavain had done earlier. “You wouldn’t have done that, would you? I don’t deny that what I did was regrettable, but I had to do it.”

  “I understand.”

  “But what happens to me now? I can stay with you all, can’t I?”

  “We probably won’t be staying on Diadem, I’m afraid. And I don’t think you’d really want to come with us; not if you knew what we’re really like.”

  “You can’t leave me alone here, not again.”

  “Why not? You’ll have your worms. And you can always kill yourself again and see who shows up next.” Clavain turned to leave.

  “No. You can’t go now.”

  “I’ll leave your rover on the surface. Maybe there are some supplies in it. Just don’t come anywhere near the base again. You won’t find a welcome there.”

  “I’ll die out here,” Setterholm said.

  “Start getting used to it.”

  He heard Setterholm’s feet scuffing across the ice; a walk breaking into a run. Clavain turned around calmly, unsurprised to see Setterholm coming towards him with the pick raised high, as a weapon.

  Clavain sighed.

  He reached into Setterholm’s skull, addressing the webs of machines that still floated in the man’s head, and instructed them to execute their host in a sudden, painless orgy of neural deconstruction. It was not a trick he could have done an hour ago, but after Galiana had planted the method in his mind, it was easy as sneezing. For a moment he understood what it must feel like to be a god.

  And in that same moment Setterholm dropped the ice pick and stumbled, falling forward onto one end of the pick’s blade. It pierced his faceplate, but by then he was dead anyway.

  “What I said was the truth,” Clavain said. “I might have killed them as well, just like I said. I don’t want to think so, but I can’t say it isn’t in me. No; I don’t blame you for that; not at all.”

  With his boot he began to kick a dusting of frost over the dead man’s body. It would be too much bother to remove Setterholm from this place, and the machines inside him would sterilise his body, ensuring that none of his cells ever contaminated the glacier. And, as Clavain had told himself only a few days earlier, there were worse places to die than here. Or worse places to be left for dead, anyway.

  When he was done, when what remained of Setterholm was just an ice-covered mound in the middle of the cavern, Clavain addressed him one final time.

  “But that doesn’t make it right, either. It was still murder, Setterholm.” He kicked a final divot of ice over the corpse. “Someone had to pay for it.”

  A SPY IN EUROPA

  Marius Vargovic, agent of Gilgamesh Isis, savoured an instant of free fall before the flitter’s engines kicked in, slamming it away from the Deucalion. His pilot gunned the craft towards the moon below, quickly outrunning the other shuttles that the Martian liner had disgorged. Europa enlarged perceptibly: a flattening arc the colour of nicotine-stained wallpaper.

  “Boring, isn’t it.”

  Vargovic turned around in his seat, languidly. “You’d rather they were shooting at us?”

  “I’d rather they were doing something.”

  “Then you’re a fool,” Vargovic said, making a tent of his fingers. “There’s enough armament buried in that ice to give Jupiter a second red spot. What it would do to us doesn’t bear thinking about it.”

  “Only trying to make conversation, friend.”

  “Don’t bother—it’s an overrated activity at the best of times.”

  “All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?”

  “I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature. ”

  But Mishenka was right: Europa was an encrypted document; complexity masked by a surface of fractured and refrozen ice. Its surface grooves were like the capillaries in a vitrified eyeball; faint as the structure in a raw surveillance image. But once within the airspace boundary of the Europan Demarchy, traffic-management co-opted the flitter, vectoring it into a touchdown corridor. In three days Mishenka would return, but then he would disable the avionics, kissing the ice for less than ten minutes.

  “Not too late to abort,” Mishenka said, a long time later.

  “Are you out of your tiny mind?”

  The younger man dispensed a frosty Covert Ops smile. “We’ve all heard what the Demarchy does to spies, Marius. ”

  “Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?”

  “I’ll leave being psychotic to you, Marius—you’re so much better at it.”

  Vargovic nodded. It was the first sensible thing Mishenka had said all day.

  They landed an hour later. Vargovic adjusted his Martian
businesswear, tuning his holographically inwoven frock coat to project red sandstorms; lifting the collar in what he had observed from the liner’s passengers was a recent Martian fad. Then he grabbed his bag—nothing incriminating there, no gadgets or weapons—and exited the flitter, stepping through the gasket of locks. A slitherwalk propelled him forward, massaging the soles of his slippers. It was a single cultured ribbon of octopus skin, stimulated to ripple by the timed firing of buried squid axons.

  To get to Europa you either had to be sickeningly rich or sickeningly poor. Vargovic’s cover was the former: a lie excusing the single-passenger flitter. As the slitherwalk advanced he was joined by other arrivals: businesspeople like himself, and a sugaring of the merely wealthy. Most of them had dispensed with holographics, instead projecting entoptics beyond their personal space: machine-generated hallucinations decoded by the implant hugging Vargovic’s optic nerve. Hummingbirds and seraphim were in sickly vogue. Others were attended by autonomous perfumes that subtly altered the moods of those around them. Slightly lower down the social scale, Vargovic observed a clique of noisy tourists—antlered brats from Circum-Jove. Then there was a discontinuous jump: to squalid-looking Maunder refugees who must have accepted indenture to the Demarchy. The refugees were quickly segregated from the more affluent immigrants, who found themselves within a huge geodesic dome resting above the ice on refrigerated stilts. The walls of the dome glittered with duty-free shops, boutiques and bars. The floor was bowl-shaped, slither-walks and spiral stairways descending to the nadir where a quincunx of fluted marble cylinders waited. Vargovic observed that the newly arrived were queuing for elevators that terminated in the cylinders. He joined a line and waited.

  “First time in Cadmus-Asterius?” asked the bearded man ahead of him, iridophores in his plum-coloured jacket projecting Boolean propositions from Sirikit’s Machine Ethics in the Transenlightenment.

  “First time on Europa, actually. First time Circum-Jove, you want the full story.”

  “Down-system?”

  “Mars.”

  The man nodded gravely. “Hear it’s tough.”

  “You’re not kidding.” And he wasn’t. Since the sun had dimmed—the second Maunder Minimum, repeating the behaviour the sun had exhibited in the seventeenth century—the entire balance of power in the First System had altered. The economies of the inner worlds had found it difficult to adjust; agriculture and power-generation handicapped, with concomitant social upheaval. But the outer planets had never had the luxury of solar energy in the first place. Now Circum-Jove was the benchmark of First System economic power, with Circum-Saturn trailing behind. Because of this, the two primary Circum-Jove superpowers—the Demarchy, which controlled Europa and Io, and Gilgamesh Isis, which controlled Ganymede and parts of Callisto—were vying for dominance.

  The man smiled keenly. “Here for anything special?”

  “Surgery,” Vargovic said, hoping to curtail the conversation at the earliest juncture. “Very extensive anatomical surgery.”

  They hadn’t told him much.

  “Her name is Cholok,” Control had said, after Vargovic had skimmed the dossiers back in the caverns that housed the Covert Operations section of Gilgamesh Isis security, deep in Ganymede. “We recruited her ten years ago, when she was on Phobos.”

  “And now she’s Demarchy?”

  Control had nodded. “She was swept up in the brain-drain, once Maunder Two began to bite. The smartest got out while they could. The Demarchy—and us, of course— snapped up the brightest.”

  “And also one of our sleepers.” Vargovic glanced down at the portrait of the woman, striped by video lines. She looked mousy to him, with a permanent bone-deep severity of expression.

  “Cheer up,” Control said. “I’m asking you to contact her, not sleep with her.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just tell me her background.”

  “Biotech.” Control nodded at the dossier. “On Phobos she led one of the teams working in aquatic transform work—modifying the human form for submarine operations. ”

  Vargovic nodded diligently. “Go on.”

  “Phobos wanted to sell their know-how to the Martians, before their oceans froze. Of course, the Demarchy also appreciated her talents. Cholok took her team to Cadmus-Asterius, one of their hanging cities.”

  “Mm.” Vargovic was getting the thread now. “By which time we’d already recruited her.”

  “Right,” Control said, “except we had no obvious use for her.”

  “Then why this conversation?”

  Control smiled. Control always smiled when Vargovic pushed the envelope of subservience. “We’re having it because our sleeper won’t lie down.” Then Control reached over and touched the image of Cholok, making her speak. What Vargovic was seeing was an intercept: something Gilgamesh had captured, riddled with edits and jump-cuts.

  She appeared to be sending a verbal message to an old friend in Isis. She was talking rapidly from a white room, inert medical servitors behind her. Shelves displayed flasks of colour-coded medichines. A cruciform bed resembled an autopsy slab with ceramic drainage sluices.

  “Cholok contacted us a month ago,” Control said. “The room’s part of her clinic.”

  “She’s using Phrase-Embedded Three,” Vargovic said, listening to her speech patterns, siphoning content from otherwise normal Canasian.

  “Last code we taught her.”

  “All right. What’s her angle?”

  Control chose his words—skating around the information excised from Cholok’s message. “She wants to give us something,” he said. “Something valuable. She’s acquired it accidentally. Someone good has to smuggle it out.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere, Control.”

  The muzak rose to a carefully timed crescendo as the elevator plunged through the final layer of ice. The view around and below was literally dizzying, and Vargovic registered exactly as much awe as befitted his Martian guise. He knew the Demarchy’s history, of course—how the hanging cities had begun as points of entry into the ocean; air-filled observation cupolas linked to the surface by narrow access shafts sunk through the kilometre-thick crustal ice. Scientists had studied the unusual smoothness of the crust, noting that its fracture patterns echoed those on Earth’s ice shelves, implying the presence of a water ocean. Europa was further from the sun than Earth, but something other than solar energy maintained the ocean’s liquidity. Instead, the moon’s orbit around Jupiter created stresses that flexed the moon’s silicate core, tectonic heat bleeding into the ocean via hydrothermal vents.

  Descending into the city was a little like entering an amphitheatre—except that there was no stage; merely an endless succession of steeply tiered lower balconies. They converged towards a light-filled infinity, seven or eight kilometres below, where the city’s conic shape constricted to a point. The opposite side was half a kilometre away, levels rising like geologic strata. A wide glass tower threaded the atrium from top to bottom, aglow with smoky-green ocean and a mass of kelp-like flora, cultured by gilly swimmers. Artificial sun lamps burned in the kelp like Christmas tree lights. Above, the tower branched, peristaltic feeds reaching out to the ocean proper. Offices, shops, restaurants and residential units were stacked atop each other, or teetered into the abyss on elegant balconies, spun from lustrous sheets of bulk-chitin polymer, the Demarchy ’s major construction material. Gossamer bridges arced across the atrium space, dodging banners, projections and vast translucent sculptures moulded from a silky variant of the same chitin polymer. Every visible surface was overlaid by neon, holographics and entoptics. People were everywhere, and in every face Vargovic detected a slight absence, as if their minds were not entirely focused on the here and now. No wonder: all citizens had an implant that constantly interrogated them, eliciting their opinions on every aspect of Demarchy life, both within Cadmus-Asterius and beyond. Eventually, it was said, the implant’s nagging presence faded from consciousness, until the act of democratic participation became near-i
nvoluntary.

  It revolted Vargovic as much as it intrigued him.

  “Obviously,” Control said, with judicial deliberation, “what Cholok has to offer isn’t merely a nugget—or she’d have given it via PE3.”

  Vargovic leaned forward. “She hasn’t told you what it is?”

  “Only that it could endanger the hanging cities.”

  “You trust her?”

  Vargovic felt one of Control’s momentary indiscretions coming on. “She may have been sleeping, but she hasn’t been completely valueless. She’s assisted in defections . . . like the Maunciple job—remember that?”

  “If you’re calling that a success, perhaps it’s time I defected. ”

  “Actually, it was Cholok’s information that persuaded us to get Maunciple out via the ocean rather than the front door. If Demarchy security had taken Maunciple alive they’d have learned ten years of tradecraft.”

  “Whereas instead Maunciple got a harpoon in his back.”

  “So the operation had its flaws.” Control shrugged. “But if you’re thinking all this points to Cholok having been compromised . . . Naturally, the thought entered our heads. But if Maunciple had acted otherwise it would have been worse.” Control folded his arms. “And of course, he might have made it, in which case even you’d have to admit Cholok’s safe.”

  “Until proven otherwise.”

  Control brightened. “So you’ll do it?”

  “Like I have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice, Vargovic.”

  Yes, Vargovic thought. There was always a choice, between doing whatever Gilgamesh Isis asked of him and being deprogrammed, cyborgised and sent to work in the sulphur projects around the slopes of Ra Patera. It just wasn’t a particularly good one.

  “One other thing . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “When I’ve got whatever Cholok has—”