‘Running Dog!’
Our ship shook as the thousand-tonne mass passed through, simultaneously subtracting the same amount from the virtual mass of the Gate. A cable broke, lashing across the forward view. For an entire second, as I cut from the now-blank internal screen to an outside camera which Yeng had instantly and reflexively patched in, I watched in frozen shock as the huge ship rose from the wormhole Gate like a missile from a silo, with the wreck of the
Turing Tester
crumpled across its prow.
As soon as it cleared the Gate, its attitude jets fired with far greater precision than its earlier efforts had shown. Its new mind had mastered its controls, and it was turning its main drive away from us, and its blunt forward shield towards us.
‘Andrea!’ I tried to shout, but she’d already engaged the drive. The most violent acceleration I’d ever felt slammed down, crushing my shout to a grunt. The
Running Dog
vanished instantly from view, then reappeared as the camera swung to track.
‘Boris,’ I groaned. ‘The nuke.’
‘Can’t,’ his stronger voice came back. ‘No time to program its course.’
‘OK,’ I breathed. ‘Just send
Carbon Conscience
with it, kamikaze run.’
‘Hope you mean kamikaze
autopilot
.’
‘Don’t—waste—breath …’
He wasted neither breath nor time, but it was a long minute before he’d punched the instructions through, and our very own fighter-bomber sprang from our side and flashed away, instantly outrun by our acceleration.
Yeng switched to its nose-camera, and—in less than a minute, its fuel burned off in one final sprint—we saw what it saw as it closed for the kill. We saw
Running Dog’s
bulk loom again. We saw the silent, shocking sphere of the fifty-megaton nuclear explosion … but not in that camera.
I swear we saw it through our hull.
The white afterimages of everything faded slowly, to be replaced by the red pulse of pain. I wasn’t breathing—the suit was doing that for me—and the
pinprick tubules of the suit’s oxygen-supply were forged to hot blades stabbing through my almost-collapsed lungs.
Going for the short fast run
, Andrea’s message spelled out, in green letters on the wavering scarlet screen of my visual field.
Free fall in 20 mins, first encounter in a further 20
.
Can’t you run it longer more speed?
Boris asked.
Outa gas
, replied Andrea.
Out of reaction-mass, to be precise. Nobody had any more questions. I hoped Andrea had allowed some reserve to get us home, wherever home was now, but I hadn’t the heart or the strength to ask.
Jaime flashed up data about our target comet-stream: a long, rich train of fragments, nicely lined-up long ago by the New Martians’—or ultimately, ironically, the Outwarders’—automated machinery, far out in the system’s vast cloud of unconsolidated ice and organics: still gigantic and irregular flying icebergs hundreds of yards across, each mined with chemical explosives synthesized
in situ
by the smart-matter that infiltrated it. These explosives were primed to detonate before its final fall on New Mars, breaking the masses into manageable morsels for the planet’s atmosphere to ablate and its surface to absorb.
Something was troubling me, something I’d forgotten. I struggled for the elusive thought, crushed as I was in that press of acceleration, and suddenly it seemed I had it—what if they broke up before hitting
Jupiter
? I dismissed it as unlikely—the nanomachines on the comet-chunks wouldn’t mistake a gas-giant for a small and rocky world.
And anyway, there was nothing we could do about it, nothing at all. This was, in every sense, our last throw.
The crushing pressure ended. We all drew a first breath, and let it out in a common howl of pain just before the suits mainlined opiate derivatives into our blood, metered out precisely to cancel the agony and not to overshoot us into euphoria. Not that there was much risk of that.
‘OK,’ said Andrea, her voice shaking. ‘We have twenty minutes to get clear and get this thing lined up. Stay in your seats.’
A quite redundant instruction, I thought, as I strove to twitch my fingers and call up screens. After about a minute, I succeeded. The suit’s infiltration of my body was not withdrawing, this time; it still had work to do, as had everyone else’s—the first screens I pulled in showed their physiological readouts. They were all alive, and conscious, and undergoing massive assistance and repair.
And I was not.
I stared at the screens, hardly believing what I saw, hardly believing that I was not seeing with my own eyes, or nerves, or brain. My brain had not shut down completely: it was keeping my body going, all right; but what Dee had called the cost of sustaining consciousness, of maintaining selfhood, had been passed elsewhere. The suit had shunted my mind straight into itself, running me as an update of the model it had taken, days earlier, for my back-up before the first Jovian probe.
So now I knew. I knew how a simulated mind experienced the world. There was no difference whatsoever.
At least, none that I, as a simulated mind, could tell.
Why had the suit done that? Why to me?
At that point I found a difference in my experience. I had an acute awareness of the suit’s presence, its own awareness, as a loyal, living thing; and of its answer.
There is not only you
, it said.
Potentially, there is another here. You are carrying a foetus. I optimize, based on your implied preference. The choice remains yours. You can override mine if you wish
.
I did not so wish.
As from a great distance, I watched Yeng disengage the grappling lines, Andrea boost us to a stable position a couple of miles from the wormhole Gate, and Jaime play the Gate’s clamped-on attitude jets to bring it all to precisely the right angle for the oncoming comet-stream.
‘That’s it,’ Jaime said. ‘Just made it, the drones are almost out out of gas themselves.’
‘Three minutes to go,’ said Andrea.
The comets were closing so fast that, even at this late moment, they were still invisible to the forward telescope. Even if their reflected light could have been picked up, they’d show no proper motion against the background of stars, until the last few seconds before interception. Only the deep-space radar clocked their approach. I lay still, my fingertips keying in codes to flip through outside views: the system’s sun—small compared to how ours had looked from Earth, big and burning in my Callistan eyes; the distant ochre disc of New Mars; and the paradoxical ellipse of the gate.
‘Two minutes.’
She counted down the last minute. As she said ‘Two!’ I saw, in one of my screens, something moving against the stars: the first comet, seen with—not quite—the naked eye.
‘One!’
‘Ze—’
Cherenkov backwash flooded all our sight.
The other fragments followed with less than a second between them.
Blue light strobed. Ten cometary masses, each of them weighing in at hundreds of thousands of tonnes. Four passed through the Gate, adding their mass to our side of it—and subtracting it from the other.
‘We must be into negative mass, now,’ Malley said. ‘I wish I could see what it’s like.’
We were in free fall, but we all stayed in our couches, too exhausted to move, and perhaps afraid to. We had nothing to do but wait, and watch the process by which we hoped to accomplish the destruction of a world. I knew, now—now that I too was a copied mind running in smart-matter—that the Jovians were not flatlines; that they were, indeed, a superior species not just in the reach of their power, but in the depth of their minds. They, like us, had infinite space within, subjective worlds; they were not just entities, but beings.
And at this moment—no, at another moment, ten thousand years in the past—our first shots at them were crashing down, smashing those subjective worlds; our crude rocks were bashing in thinner skulls and deeper minds than ours. If, that is, we had succeeded in our aim.
It came to me, then, that what we
were doing
now had
already been done
, that the interactions of the Gate and the comet fragments in our immediate future had consequences in the far past—that, in some sense, the battle was already over. The universe within ten thousand light years of the Sun was already being colonized by our descendants, or theirs. There was no way of telling, of course—they, or we, might ‘already’ have near-lightspeed Malley Drive ships, dragging new wormhole gates, but if they ‘had’ penetrated further than New Mars, they wouldn’t arrive until so many years in our future. The thought gave me an odd, fatalistic reassurance, when it wasn’t twisting my mind in knots that only Malley, perhaps, could have unravelled.
I lay there and waited. What would be would be.
The Gate was still open; still hurtling along the orbital path of the other incoming comets, ready to intersect the next stream—as it did, half an hour later. These were larger, less shaped, but still small enough to go through. As was the next stream, and the next, until finally, ten hours and countless cometary fragments later, we reached the limit of the wormhole structure’s capacity to sustain a negative mass.
Malley grunted, as if some calculation had been confirmed.
‘Now we know,’ he said.
The remaining fragments we encountered passed through where the Gate had been.
No longer held together by the tension of the Gate, its rim broke up into sections: dull arcs that drifted apart and then, very slowly, together, under
the attraction of the enormous, invisible mass of some exotic matter which was all that remained of the warped space they had contained. It continued to move outwards, against the infalling stream of comets, out towards their source.
Move or copy?
The suit’s query could, for me, have only one answer. I had no wish to leave a second self hanging around in the suit’s circuitry. Nevertheless, my second self had second thoughts. Was I—the real me, existing now, at this moment, about to die? About to commit suicide, for the sake of another person, who would wake with my memories, back in the presently unconscious meat? Or was I—the copy—about to murder
my real self
, who would otherwise awaken, with no memory of what had transpired between the loss of her consciousness and its recovery?
Once you start thinking like that, I realized, there is no end to it.
‘Move,’ I said.
Something happened then, in that brief, eternal moment when I sparked across the gap between the suit and the skull. I saw a hundred billion stars, as they might be after a hundred thousand years. It was, of course, a vision, a hallucination; or an intention, a programme, a plan; but what I do not know to this day is whether it was mine: whence it came, and to whom it was vouchsafed.
I saw a galaxy of green and gold, its starlight filtered through endless, countless habitats; the federation of our dreams. And behind it all, in the walls of all our worlds, an immense but finite benevolence, a great engine of protection and survival; a god on
our
side, a terror to our enemies and a friend to us, worlds without end.
A god who smiled, its work to see; and who now smiled on mine.
Someone was shaking me. I struggled, in too-solid flesh.
‘Ellen!’ Boris was asking. ‘Are you all right?’
I opened my eyes and cracked an awful smile (I know, because I’ve seen the recording that Boris’s eye made).
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I just … passed out for a moment.’
‘Situation report,’ said Andrea, briskly. ‘We’re almost out of reaction-mass, although of course we can still get all the power we need from the drive. We’re in an orbital couple with the dark matter, or whatever, where the Gate was, and heading rapidly outwards towards the local comet-cloud. We don’t know if New Mars has fallen to any final transmissions from the
Running Dog
, and we don’t know if our bombardment did in the Jovians. It was a lot weaker, after all, than the massive comet-strike we had set up in the Solar System.’ She paused, gazing at the star-speckled forward view. ‘And now the Gate is gone, we’ll never find out.’
‘Until the first Malley Drive ships turn up,’ I said, grimly. ‘Ours or theirs.’
‘Why ships?’ Malley asked. He seemed amused.
I stared at him. ‘Well,’ I began, ‘assuming somebody can reinvent the virtual-mass drive you postulated, and which the first fast folk built for their probe, it can travel at close to lightspeed, and we’re ten thousand light years away but ten thousand years in the future, so—’
I stopped, suddenly feeling stupid, as everybody got the point at the same time, and laughed.
That ten thousand years was time enough for any radio signals from the Solar System to reach us; signals that originated immediately after we left.
‘It won’t be easy to pick up,’ said Yeng. ‘I’ll have to build a radio
telescope
.’
‘How long will that take?’ I asked.
Yeng frowned. ‘Some time,’ she said. ‘I’d have to dig out our last parachute, which is of course not much use to us now, and rejig some hull-maintenance robots to paint it with a monomolecular foil mesh. It’s half a mile across, so it should be sensitive enough, especially as we know where to point it.’ She mentally calculated. ‘It’ll take several hours, at least.’
‘
That
long?’ snorted Malley. ‘Good grief, woman, I thought you were talking about
years
.’
I’d been reckoning on months, but I didn’t say it. I smiled at Yeng and said:
‘OK, that’s great. But I think the
first
thing we have to find out is if New Mars is all right. Because if it isn’t, we could be in real trouble, real soon.’
Despite protests—somehow, the thought of waiting was even more intolerable, now that we knew we could find out—we went ahead and re-ran the procedure to check the New-Martian radio traffic. Yeng worked her way through her entire armoury of defences, and found them all clear, relaying the same insistent and wholly human commerce as she had found before. The incidents of the past hours were being analysed by many loud and conflicting voices. Nobody knew we were still in the system, and we had no intention, just yet, of telling them.
New Mars, at least, was safe. We left the radio on, in celebration. The New Martians’ old music, with its perverse celebration of strange sad yearnings and desperate desires, began again to infiltrate our own minds like a viral meme. It formed the soundtrack as we all pitched in to help Yeng deploy and adapt the bubble-thin parachute, a process we called our STI project—the search for terrestrial intelligence.
It was a nervous joke. We didn’t know what we’d find. We didn’t speak of our fear that what we’d find would be the incomprehensible—or all too comprehensible—voices that told us that our exile, and our great proud crime, had been for naught.
When the telescope was completed, we all hung in the air around Yeng, on the command deck. Every sound was loud: the air conditioning, the murmur of the ship to itself, the ping of the radar, our breathing. Yeng ignored them all, working through the first faint signals her great dish aerial had picked up. She ran them through every check, through her hardware and software, the analyser fixels flickering in their game of life. For long minutes, she studied them, then without a word, without looking around, she flicked the speakers on and rotated a dial.
The command deck filled with the sounds of human beings from the far past: talking, singing, arguing, squabbling, claiming and disputing—a sound immediately redoubled by ourselves, doing much the same, but louder. Then we stopped yelling, and listened again. Most of the broadcasting was still being done by non-cos, and there was—just as on New Mars—a lot of ill-informed speculation, but it was obvious that our strike had been a success. The Division’s internal messages were, as we could have expected, narrow-beamed, and nothing so far had leaked in our direction.
We drank a lot of alcohol that shift.
Some time later I found I’d eaten a pizza topped with synthesized anchovies, olives, banana and pineapple. I had never eaten such a revolting combination before, and I vaguely wondered about it as I licked a final ice cream before falling asleep. I slept for hours, longer than anyone else. I woke up among them all, still on the command deck, and was promptly and quite publicly sick.
Suze looked at me with a funny, speculative grin.
‘Comrades,’ I said, ‘I have something to tell you.’
It was a month or so later that Yeng’s telescope picked up the first signal directed at us: a television signal, open and unencrypted. The call sign had us all leaving whatever we were doing, literally in midair, and rushing to the nearest screen. Tatsuro’s face appeared. He was sitting in a virtual conference-space, with some of the Command Committee members, a group of people in New-Martian commercial uniforms, and, to my surprise, Jonathan Wilde. (The copy of … but I’d stopped thinking that way. I had reformed.)
‘I feel very strange saying this,’ Tatsuro began. ‘This message is to be sent by the most powerful transmitter we currently have, and will be repeated, on more powerful transmitters as they become available, for at least some years to come. It will not, of course, reach its intended recipients for ten thousand years. If you’re receiving this, you know how strange the circumstances are. But I have to assume that you’re there, in the future, and that to you this message seems almost immediate. So—
‘To the crew of
Terrible Beauty
, we all send our thanks. Your comet-strike was just sufficient to disrupt the Jovian post-humans. To the best of our knowledge, they are extinct, not only from your actions, and ours, but also from fighting amongst themselves. You need not worry that you destroyed entities which might have been friendly to us—any that were, I’m afraid, were destroyed by other Jovians, who were in the process of a frantic race to upload copies of themselves into anything they could reach. Strangely enough, the target of their outbreak was the New-Martian trading ships rather than ourselves. Our computers were almost impervious to the Jovian viruses, whereas theirs were, ah, rather more vulnerable, as it turned out. Our latest investigations and reconstructions show that the Jovians were aiming for the Malley Mile, from which they could have mastered the entire span of the wormhole, and with it a large part of the universe. You saved more than you knew.
‘Whether you saved the humans and post-humans of New Mars, we don’t know. If you have not, or if this message is being received by our enemies, I hope the destruction of the Jovians is a sufficient warning of the terrible acts of which our species is capable. For we are going to build new virtual-mass quantum-fluctuation drive ships, and new wormhole gates, as soon as we have the capacity. We will re-establish contact with New Mars. And now, I’ll wish you well, and pass the transmission to the survivors of the New-Martian trading expedition, who have messages of their own.’
One by one, the New-Martian men and women came up, each speaking
a heartfelt, and heart-rending, personal message—some, in a way that struck me as strange, addressed to their own copies as well as to friends and relations. One of them finished by saying:
‘This is just a general message to all of you out there. We’ll do our best to maintain one-way communication—we’ll keep in touch, until they build the ships. Of course, unless they build another gate as well, the ships will be one-way, too, as far as getting back to this place and time is concerned—but we’re coming home. And you don’t need to worry about how the Solar Union people will treat us—Wilde here has lived off their hospitality for years, according to his needs, as they say. But what most of us want is to do some business, with the non-cooperators if no one else—but I think we’ll find more trading partners than that. There are a lot of energetic people on Earth, and now they can use electronics as they please, they are going to
boil off
. Things are going to change around here. We
will
see you again.’
Wilde had learned from the traders about the survival of his other self and his resurrected wife. He had messages for them, and for me.
‘Ellen May,’ he said, ‘I thought you could defeat the Outwarders without finding the way to New Mars. Well, I was mistaken, and you’ve done both. You know what I feared—that your people would invade New Mars, a place for which I have … a certain affection. Now, looking around me, I wonder just who has invaded whom. Life may surprise us.’
He shrugged. ‘That’s all. Good luck.’
I’m looking out of what we still, from habit, call the forward view. The sun of New Mars is a tiny, distant disc, barely noticeable against the other stars. We are in the thick of the comet-cloud, but this thickness is only visible in simulations, not in reality. All around us is what looks like empty space, apart from our very own comet, surrounded by the frail-seeming, diamond-strong structures we’ve built from its material; and the strange ruin of the Gate.
Exotic matter is useful stuff to have around. It pulled us into a close orbit with an even bigger chunk of normal matter: cometary matter, hundreds of millions of tonnes of it, rock and ice and organics. It took us five years, give or take, to get out to the cometary cloud, so by that time we were ready to appreciate our gain. These days, the remnant of the Gate has begun to acquire its own accretion disc. It is, as Malley once put it, an attractive feature.
Every home should have one.
Home … is here, in one sense. In another, it’s ten thousand light years away—and ten thousand years in the past. (Although I still find myself thinking that
we
are ten thousand years in the future.)
The solar sources grew and multiplied—at the time we first heard them,
they increased by the day and the hour. Within months they were detectable by much less sensitive receivers than ours, including those on and around New Mars.
The transmissions tell the ongoing tale of the struggle which that New-Martian trader foresaw, and whose conclusion no one can foresee: between the Union’s common ownership and the unstoppable appropriation of the Solar System’s resources by individuals and groups; a story intently followed by ourselves and by the New Martians. It has the immediacy of daily news, and the poignancy of ancient history, which nothing we can do will alter and whose ultimate outcome, if any, was settled millennia ago. It’s already the subject of numerous documentaries, frequent debates, and several completely fictitious and laughably imaginative New-Martian drama serials.
The comet-cloud is vast, and we are used to communicating by narrow, cryptic channels, by winks of laser in the void. Around us the broader, more open signals of the New Martians and their robot comet-miners fill the spectrum. We know all that they do, and they know we’re here, but little more. We keep contact to a minimum. We’re happy with that, for now: we want to build a world of our own out here, out of rock and ice and carbon-compounds and weak sunlight, before we venture back to a world owned by others.