Tony Daniel

METAPLANETARY

A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War

Tony Daniel

I am a spaceship. I am about the size of the Martian moon Phobos, although not nearly as dense. I am also a human being. That a spaceship can be a human being is a fact commonly accepted today, but there was once a time when everyone didn’t believe such things at all. Many people believed the opposite.

I am an old ship. Let me unwind my tale.

This is the story of the civil war that once tore our solar system to pieces, and of the events that led to the founding of the government that we have today. But to tell such a tale as merely a dry rattling off of facts would be to miss the point. History isn’t facts; history is people—in all the myriad forms they come.

What makes a human being? In the end, that is what we were fighting for—to determine what makeup the human race would take to the stars.

We are entering, then, upon a period of turmoil and transformation. An empire rose and fell. Democracy was put to the fire and hammered into an almost unrecognizable configuration. Low deeds were perpetrated, and it often seemed that evil had the upper hand. Heroes emerged from the obscurity, and some died gloriously, while others were beaten and broken. Children killed children, and old men and women were driven from their homes and murdered. Millions died; billions suffered. It was a hard time to be alive.

Yet it was a time of incredible ingenuity and fervent creativity. New sciences were born. Great literature was written. People who ordinarily would have never known one another came together to face a common foe. Necessity abolished prejudice, and humans became brothers and sisters—and, in some cases, lovers—with those whom they would scarcely have acknowledged as persons before.

Nobody really won. But everyone who somehow managed to live through the war achieved a kind of victory.

And, in the end, all of the horror and heroism was the reflection of the soul of an anguished poet. For the war was really the birth throes of a new sort of human, and Thaddeus Kaye was both the cause and the victim of it all.

This is the story of what humans made of the times in which they found themselves in the years after the turn of the third millennium. And since time is now proving to be exactly as malleable as the human spirit, I set it adrift upon the future and the past from these shores of my present. I do not know precisely what guise it may come to you in—perhaps only as a myth or a cautionary tale. So be it. I have faith that what it all really means, what it all comes down to, will somehow, somewhere twinkle through, at least in a glimmer here and there. That is all this old ship can rightfully hope for.

So let us begin where all history begins: in the broken heart of a poet and the contemplation of a priest.

Historical Fragments, One E-Year before the War for Republic, as Recovered from the Grist

Standing over all creation a doubt-ridden priest took a piss.

He shook himself, looked between his feet at the stars, then tabbed his pants closed. He flushed the toilet and centrifugal force took care of the rest.

Father Andre Sud walked back to his table in the Westway Diner. He padded over the living fire of the plenum, the abyss—all of it—and hardly noticed. Even though this place was special to
him
, it was really just another café with a see-through floor—a window as thin as paper and as hard as diamond. Dime a dozen as they used to say a thousand years ago. The luciferan sign at the entrance said
FREE DELIVERY
in Basis. The sign under it said
OPEN 24 HRS
. This sign was unlit. The place will close, eventually.

The priest sat down and stirred his black tea. He read the sign, backward, and wondered if the words he spoke when he spoke sounded anything like English used to. Hard to tell with the grist patch in his head.

Everybody understands one another on a general level these days, Andre Sud thought. Approximately more or less they know what you mean.

There was a dull, greasy gleam to the napkin holder. The saltshaker was half-full. The laminate surface of the table was worn through where the plates usually sat. The particle board underneath was soggy. There was free-floating grist that sparkled like mica within the wood: used-to-be-cleaning-grist, entirely shorn from the restaurant’s controlling algorithm and nothing to do but shine. Like the enlightened pilgrim of the Greentree Way was supposed to do, Andre thought. Become shorn and brilliant.

And what will you have with that hamburger?

Grist. Nada y grist. Grist y nada.

I am going through a depression, Andre reminded himself. I am even considering leaving the priesthood.

Andre’s convert portion spoke through Andre’s pellicle—the microscopic, algorithmic part of him that was spread through his body and spread out in the general vicinity. The convert spoke as if from a long way off.

[This happens every winter. And lately with the insomnia. Cut it out with the nada y nada. Everything’s physical, don’t you know.]

[Except for
you,
] Andre thought back.

He usually imagined the convert that inhabited his pellicle as a little cloud of algebra symbols that followed him around like mosquitoes. In truth it was normally invisible, of course. For most people, the tripartite division of the human personality into
aspect, convert,
and
pellicle
was a completely unconscious affair. People did not “talk” to their convert portion as Andre was able to do any more than the conceptual part of a single brain would talk to the logical part on a conscious level. But Andre had trained himself to notice the partitions in his mentality. It was one of the things a Greentree shaman learned in seminary: the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were inside as well as “up there.” The biology begat the mentality, and the two communicated by means of the grist pellicle, the technological equivalent of “the Holy Ghost.” This division of personhood was always expressed both psychologically, technologically, and spiritually. To understand oneself, one must understand the multiplicity, as well as the unity, of his personality.

[At least that’s what they taught us in Human Spirituality and Consciousness,] said Andre’s convert. [If you can believe what you hear from a bunch of priests.]

[Very funny,] he answered. [Play a song or something, would you?]

After a moment, an oboe piped up in his inner ear. It was an old Greentree hymn—Ben Johnston’s “Ponder Nothing”—that his mother had hummed when he was a kid. Brought up in the faith. The convert filtered it through a couple of variations and inversions, but it was always soothing to hear the ancient tune.

There was a way to calculate how many winters the Mars-Earth Diaphany would get in an Earth year, but Andre never checked before he returned to the seminary on his annual retreat, and they always took him by surprise, the winters did. You wake up one day and the light has grown dim.

The café door slid open and Cardinal Filmbuff filled the doorway. He was wide and possessive of the doorframe. He was a big man with a mane of silver hair. He was also space-adapted and white as bone in the face. He wore all black, with a lapel pin in the shape of a tree. It was green of course.

“Father Andre,” said Filmbuff from across the room. His voice sounded like a Met cop’s radio. “May I join you?”

Andre motioned to the seat across from him in the booth. Filmbuff walked over with big steps and sat down hard.

“Isn’t it late for you to be out, Morton?” Andre said. He took a sip of his tea. He’d left the bag in too long, and it tasted twiggy.

“Tried to call you at the seminary retreat center,” Filmbuff said.

“I’m usually here,” Andre replied. “When I’m not there.”

“Is this place still the seminary student hangout?”

“It is. Like a dog returneth to its own vomit, huh? Or
somebody’s
vomit.”

A waiter drifted toward them. “Need menus?” he said. “I have to bring them because the tables don’t work.”

“I might want a little something,” Filmbuff replied. “Maybe a lhasi.”

The waiter nodded and went away.

“They still have real people here?” said Filmbuff.

“I don’t think they can afford to recoat the place.”

Filmbuff gazed around. He was like a beacon. “Seems clean enough.”

“I suppose it is,” said Andre. “I think the basic coating still works and that just the complicated grist has broken down.”

“You like it here.”

Andre realized he’d been staring at the swirls in his tea and not making eye contact with his boss. He sat back, smiled at Filmbuff. “Since I came to seminary, Westway Diner has always been my home away from home.” He took a sip of tea. “This is where I got satori, you know.”

“So I’ve heard. It’s rather legendary. You were eating a plate of mashed potatoes.”

“Sweet potatoes, actually. It was a vegetable plate. They give you three choices, and I chose sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes.”

“I never cared for them.”

“Dislike of sweet potatoes is merely an illusion, as you know, Morton. Everyone likes them sooner or later.”

Filmbuff guffawed. His great head turned up toward the ceiling, and his eyes, presently copper-colored, flashed in the brown light. “Andre, we need you back teaching. Or in research.”

“I lack faith.”

“Faith in yourself.”

“It’s the same thing as faith in general, as you also well know.”

“You are a very effective scholar and priest to be so racked with doubt. Makes me think I’m missing something.”

“Doubt wouldn’t go with your zealous hair, Morton.”

The waiter came back. “Have you decided?” he said.

“A chocolate lhasi,” Filmbuff replied firmly. “And some faith for Father Andre here.”

The waiter stared for a moment, nonplussed. His Broca grist patch hadn’t translated Cardinal Filmbuff’s words, or had reproduced them as nonsense.

The waiter must be from far out along the Happy Garden Radial, Andre thought. Most of the help
was
in Seminary Barrel. Basis wasn’t normally spoken on the Happy Garden Radial. There was a trade patois and a thousand long-shifted dialects out that way. Most of the Met citizens were poor as churchmice there, and there was no good Broca grist to be had for Barrel wages, either.

“Iye ftip,”
Andre said to the waiter in the Happy Garden patois. “It is a joke.” The waiter smiled uncertainly. “Another shot of hot water for my tea is what I want,” Andre said. The waiter went away looking relieved. Filmbuff’s aquiline presence could be intimidating.

“There is no empirical evidence that you lack faith,” Filmbuff said. It was a pronouncement. “You are as good a priest as there is. We have excellent reports from Triton.”

Linsdale, Andre thought. Traveling monk indeed. Traveling stool pigeon was more like it. I’ll give him hell next conclave.

“I’m happy there. I have a nice congregation, and I balance rocks.”

“Yes. You are getting a reputation for that.”

“Triton has the best gravity for it in the solar system.”

“I’ve seen some of your creations on the merci. They’re beautiful. You’ve attracted quite a following.”

“Through no intention of my own. Thank you, though.”

“What happens to the rock sculptures?”

“Oh, they fall,” said Andre, “when you stop paying attention to them.”

The chocolate lhasi came and the waiter set down a self-heating carafe of water for Andre. Filmbuff took a long drag at the straw and finished half his drink.

“Excellent.” He sat back, sighed, and burped. “Andre, I’ve had a vision.”

“Well, that’s what you do for a living.”

“I saw
you
.”

“Was I eating at the Westway Diner?”

“You were falling through an infinite sea of stars.”

The carafe bubbled, and Andre poured some water into his cup before it became flat from all the air being boiled out. The hot water and lukewarm tea mingled in thin rivulets. He did not stir.

“You came to rest in the branches of a great tree. Well, you crashed into it, actually, and the branches caught you.”

“Yggdrasil? The Greentree?”

The Greentree was the basic image of Andre’s sect. It was also more than that—but
what
exactly, not even ten years of schooling had taught him. A mystical system. A psychological paradigm for understanding human behavior. A real entity that somehow actually existed and was the expression of the totality of human endeavor. All of the above.

“I don’t think so. This was a different tree. I’ve never seen it before. It is very disturbing because I thought there was only the One Tree.
This
tree was just as big, though.”

“As big as the Greentree?”

“Just as big. But different.” Filmbuff looked down at the stars beneath their feet. His eyes grew dark and flecked with silver. Space-adapted eyes always took on the color of what they beheld. “Andre, you have no idea how real this was.
Is
. This is difficult to explain. You know about my other visions . . . of the coming war?”

“The Burning of the Greentree?”

“Yes.”

“It’s famous in the Way.”

“I don’t care about that. Nobody else is listening but us priests, I often think, and that is the problem. In any case, this vision
has placed itself on top of
those war visions. Right now, being here with you, this seems like a play to me. A staged play. You. Me. Even the war that’s coming. It’s all a play that is really about that damn Tree. And it won’t let me go.”

“What do you mean won’t let you go?”

Filmbuff raised his hands, palms up, to cradle an invisible sphere in front of him. He stared into the space as if it were the depths of all creation, and his eyes became set and focused far away. But not glazed over or unaware.

They were so alive and intense that it hurt to look at him. Filmbuff’s physical face
vibrated
when he was in trance. It was a slight effect, and unnerving even when you were used to it. He was utterly focused, but you couldn’t focus on him. There was too much of him there for the space provided. Or not enough of you.

I am watching chronological quantum transport in the raw, Andre thought. The instantaneous integration of gravitonic spin information from up-time sifted through the archetypal registers of Filmbuff’s human brain.

And it all comes out as metaphor.

“The Tree is burnt out now,” Filmbuff said, speaking out of his trance. His words were like stones. “The Burning’s done. But it isn’t char that I’m seeing, no.” He clenched his fists, then opened his palms again. “The old Tree is a shadow. The burnt remains of the Greentree are really only the shadow of the other tree, the new Tree. It’s like a shadow the new Tree casts.”

“Shadow,” Andre heard himself whispering. His own hands were clenched in a kind of sympathetic vibration with Filmbuff.

“We are living in the time of the shadow. The dying past,” said Filmbuff. He relaxed a bit. “There’s almost a perfect juxtaposition of the two trees. I’ve never felt so sure of anything in my life. A new Tree is coming.”

Filmbuff, for all his histrionics, was not one to overstate his visions for effect. The man who sat across from Andre was only the
aspect
—the human portion—of a vast collective of personalities. They were all unified by the central being; the man before him was no more a puppet than was his enthalpic computing analog soaking up energy on Mercury, or the nodes of specialized grist spread across human space decoding variations in antigraviton spins as they made their way backward in time. Filmbuff was no longer simply the man who had taught Andre’s Intro to Pastoral Shamanism course at seminary. Ten years ago, the Greentree Way had specifically crafted a large array of personalities to catch a glimpse of the future, and Filmbuff had been assigned to be morphed into that specialized version of a LAP.

I was on the team that designed him, Andre thought. Of course, that was back when I was a graduate assistant. Before I Walked on the Moon.

“The vision is what’s real.” Filmbuff put the lhasi straw to his mouth and finished the rest of it. Andre wondered where the liquid
went
inside the man. Didn’t he run on batteries or something? “This is maya, Andre.”

“I believe you, Morton.”

“I talked to Erasmus Kelly about this,” Filmbuff continued. “He took it on the merci to our Interpreter’s Freespace.”

“What did they come up with?”

Filmbuff pushed his empty glass toward Andre. “That there’s a new Tree,” he said.

“How the hell could there be a new Tree? The Tree is wired into our DNA like sex and breathing. It may
be
sex and breathing.”

“How should I know? There’s a new Tree.”

Andre took a sip of his tea. Just right. “So there’s a new Tree,” he said. “What does that have to do with me?”