Tony Daniel (41 page)

Empty space can be polarized, and you can “make” a particle out of nothing.

A good way to picture the process is this: Think of space as a string on a musical instrument. Now pluck that string. Normal space is a very long string, and its “vibration” corresponds to the lowest energy state there can be. Now if you “fret” the string—say, with our two mirrors—you necessarily exclude certain vibrations. The only vibrations that will occur between the mirrors are those whose wavelengths fit exactly into the distance separating the mirrors. This is precisely how a fretted guitar string produces different notes, and how, in a sense, it “contains” all notes.

Now you will remember that all elementary particles are not actually particles, but are wave-particle entities that have properties associated with both phenomena. With our mirrors we might “play” an electron upon the nothingness, or, more easily, a photon. But when we “play” one virtual particle, the others are all necessarily excluded. In effect, there are “more” possible particles on the outside of our mirrors than there are between them. There is less pressure, therefore, pressing them out than pressing them in. The mirrors move together. Remember that this has
nothing
to do with gases or liquids being between or outside the mirror surfaces. We are speaking of empty space.

This is the Casimir effect.

The movement of the mirrors is precisely related to the wavelength of the type of particle you are trying to produce. It is, in fact, the energy equivalent of that particle, as was found in experiments done in the twenty-first century on the moon. You must “put in” energy in the form of setting up the mirrors, so that the law of the conservation of energy is obeyed, but the energy that comes out is precise and focused. If you “fret” the vacuum correctly, the energy produced can be extracted in the form of a stream of antiparticles, which can then be lased into a beam, or used to produce an annihilation reaction with matter. This is the operation that is at the heart of a cloudship.

All of this is done on a nanometer level by the grist. The mirrors we use are conducting plates of material that is a single molecule thick. Our lasers are of a similar dimension. We can enact this process anywhere on the ship where there is grist. To a cloudship, it feels very much like moving a finger or blinking an eye. If you are watching from space, it appears as if a bolt of raw energy has erupted from the ship’s surface (provided, of course, that that energy interacts with something along its path, and so become visible). When we energize a large portion of our surface in this manner it is, let me assure you, a sight to behold.

Unless we are aiming at you.

These, then, are the basic makeup and capabilities of the ships that were opposing one another in the war. At the beginning of the hostilities, Tacitus and I had long been in residence in the Oorts. We had set up a school, as a matter of fact, a kind of outer-space equivalent to Bradbury University, where we were educating the young cloudships after they had reached university level. We had obtained good results, and I was content, at that stage in my life, to continue this activity for many decades to come. It was a challenge to which I was suited by temperament, and there I was in my paradise—a long, long way from the sun.

Then Tacitus, who always kept one ear cocked toward the inner system, got wind of troubles that were rising to storm levels back sunward. He took this information to the Council of Ships, where he got a cool response. As I said, we were rather a snobbish lot at the time, and much given to internal politicking and long—long—argumentation on every conceivable point of self-governance. Tacitus brought up the fact that most of our wealth and energy—and as a result, our autonomy—was based upon a stable and free solar system, but his logic fell upon deaf ears. I would have been enraged by such treatment—after all, this was Tacitus, the great-grandfather of all cloudships. But Tacitus took it with his usual aplomb and decided to take matters into his own hands for the time being.

Leaving me in charge of the Ships’ School, he journeyed to Triton, where he arrived just in time to tilt the balance of the initial conflict in favor of the outer-system forces. He returned forthwith with firsthand intelligence, and then went about setting off a real debate in the Council. But this was a momentous time indeed, and one to which I must devote another chapter.

Amés was present when Captain Meré Philately suddenly rushed into Admiral San Filieu’s cabin to report that something strange was happening on the
Jihad
, something unaccounted for and horrible.

“What?” said San Filieu, but it was Amés speaking through her.

“Some sort of grist has got into the troop hold from outside. It’s run through the
Jihad
before I could stop it. We have to leave, ma’am!”

“Are you insane?” said San Filieu. “What about the troop transfer?”

“There isn’t going to be a transfer,” said Philately. Her voice cracked for the first time. San Filieu could see that the captain was deathly afraid. She was trembling. “Admiral, it’s a jungle. The whole moon’s infected. I don’t understand it exactly—some kind of bioengineering grist, run wild. We don’t have this one in the data banks at all. It isn’t based on any standard military grist models, and we don’t have a counteragent. It’s remaking every living thing that it touches.”

“Are you telling me that the
Jihad
is lost?”

“It is full of vines. The soldiers have been suffocated. Or transformed. I can’t say. There wasn’t time to pull most of them out of suspension. My senior staff alone has escaped.”

“Bruc!” yelled San Filieu.

Instantly the captain of the
Montserrat
was with her in the virtuality. “Yes, Admiral?”

“Take us out of here, now!”

“But Admiral—”

“Do it!”

Captain Bruc looked at Philately, who was still flustered and continually glanced over her shoulder. He turned back to San Filieu. “Aye, aye, Admiral,” he said, and went to do his duty.

Within moments, the
Montserrat
was taking off from Nereid and streaking into space as fast as her antimatter engines would react with matter. Though the merci was jammed locally, Amés had his own methods of finding out what was going on. He momentarily abandoned San Filieu and had a look at the moon’s surface. The entire human population was infected with this grist strain, whatever it was. All of Nereid’s citizens were blooming. He watched as they contorted in death throes—in their homes, at their workplace. Men, women, and children—vine runners bursting from their mouths and eyes. Fingers turning to leafy tendrils. All of the Met soldiers taken along with the populace. It was a ghastly, but compelling sight. Any exterior-adapted person who caught the grist plague immediately froze and shattered, turned to ordinary plant material on a world that was almost as cold as interplanetary space.

What had done this? Who had done this? And where had that person gotten the grist?

This would require study. Amés returned to his mistress’s consciousness and found her terrified. She ought to be. This was an absolute failure, and Carmen San Filieu was responsible. She had been stupid, and she must be made to pay for that.

“Isn’t that right, my dear?” His voice was a shock wave throughout the spread of her mind.

“Yes, sir,” she answered meekly.

“What shall it be?” Amés said. “Shall I kill you? Wipe all of you out? I can do that, you know. Or shall I demand that you fall upon your own sword?”

“I am yours,” Carmen San Filieu said. “You know that.”

“Yes, you are.” Amés withdrew from her and went to sit at the piano once again. He began to play a single note, again and again. San Filieu didn’t know the piano, but it was a black key that her lover was playing.

“I want you to withdraw from the Neptune local system, and wait for further orders,” he said. “I want you to study that grist and tell me what it is.”

Carmen lay in bed trembling as she listened to Amés’s commands. He continued to strike the same piano note.

“I am afraid,” he said, “that you must settle a fortune upon young Josep Busquets. Say five hundred million?”

Carmen couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She curled into a ball upon the bed, as if to protect herself from being physically struck.

“No,” she whispered. “If I buy him back, I will be the laughingstock of New Catalonia.”

“Yes,” Amés said. “Won’t you just.”

“Please,” Carmen said. She was begging now, really begging. “Let me die.”

“No,” said her lover sternly. “You may not.”

She buried her head in the covers and sobbed.

And now, dear reader, I must part the curtain for a moment and take my first part in this drama. While I am your humble narrator and chronicler, it is also true that I had a hand in the events that I describe. For, you see, it was I who brought the bioplague to Nereid.

I came like a sneak thief in the form of a cloud of asteroids, and sent down to Colonel Sherman a message with the recipe for the bioplague encoded in it. I thence took up residence dispersed among the rings of Neptune until such time as I might be of further assistance. There had been pacts to wipe certain forms of grist from the knowledge of humanity, and it was true that this particular variant was stricken from the merci. But those who depend upon the merci for all their information are fools indeed, especially if they want to be thorough and historical about it. Things are lost from electronic and quantum storage devices that still survive in those old chemical bondage machines, the books. I have plenty of books, let me tell you. Great rooms full of them, and, yes, I have read them all. You can do a great deal of reading in one thousand years. Where was I?

My point was that along about the time when nanotechnology was first coming into its own, before the time of the Met, even, there was an effort to use nano to improve farming methods on Earth. In this case, the effort consisted of substituting certain animal genes for DNA in plants on a cell-by-cell basis. This was mostly done with mammals and beans, and was an attempt to make those bean plants “warm-blooded” to an extent. I shan’t go into the technical details, although I can point you in the right direction should you want to look them up (one might start, for example, with Psyche Toomsuba’s comprehensive
Artificial Speciation and the Genesis of Mammaliform Brachiation in the Legume Family
. Or take up Peter Ober’s
Mouseflowers,
which is intended for a more general audience (already I digress and there can be no end to it if I do not arbitrarily close the parenthesis)). Someone suggested that human DNA might just as well be used as that of any mammal, and a paradigm was suggested, but the suggestion was laughed out of the journals—only to be taken up by the military.

The stuff—with human DNA in the mix—was eventually made and tested in Guatemala. A group of volunteer soldiers quickly became part of the jungle as a result, literally. The stuff was infectious, it seemed, and did not obey the usual grist “harm not human life” overrides, since it was designed to reengineer exactly the human genome. The tests were discovered five years later by a Russian journalist, who published a full account in the Russian tabloids of the time. This caused a furor, but was not believed until the story was independently confirmed by E.U. military whistleblowers (the original experiment had been a joint German-French venture called Project Alsace-Lorraine). There was a big sensation, and the then E.U. Parliament voted on the information ban. This was, incidentally, one of the “containment principles” that later led to the Information Consortiums of the 2400s, to the genesis of the ECHO Alliance, and which had repercussions until recently, being the precedent for the reproduction and expiration constraints put on free converts in the Met.

So, as a result of the E.U. decision, the mammaliform-legume grist specifications were deleted from all known databases. But, of course, someone had written them down, and, of course, I happen to have run across a copy of that notebook at a yard sale in Fountain Valley, California, put on by the surviving children of a Caltech professor to get rid of their dad’s old nonnegotiable leavings. I haunt such affairs, let me assure you. (The professor’s name was Elton Rigor, by the way, and I was, at one time, tempted to name the bioplague grist the Rigor Mortise, but settled, instead, upon PAL, for Project Alsace-Lorraine.)

But “proto-PAL,” as it were, was created before the advent of grist as we now know it, and modern grist, with its quantum-computing and information-storage properties, allows for the creation of a PAL strain that is reversible and nonlethal. This was the information and sample that I sent down to Sherman on Triton. But the
reason
that I was fairly certain that this biogrist might be effective where a more advanced and lethal form might not be, is its archaic lineage. Modern military grist had been developed from very different directions. The effect, I reasoned, was somewhat like throwing smallpox-ridden blankets upon a population from which the disease had been wiped out and for which no one received inoculations anymore.

So the humans on Nereid were not dead—except for the few unfortunates who had managed to be caught outside by the PAL infection—but were put into a stasis. Each new “plant” cell had an additional set of DNA held in a protein capsule. The individual’s brain had not been compromised by the grist, but was sustained by a fluid delivered by the plant growth. It was all run, I later learned, by photosynthetic energy conversion using the moon’s muon-exchange fusion power plant. This would have to be eventually supplemented by energy from the Mill, or some other source, or dieback, and actual human death on a large scale, would begin. The real problem was not the threat of mass death, which was slight, but the fact that the people were not unconscious. They were merely fixed in place and cut off from all sensation—other than certain vegetable ones. There are actually several survivor accounts, and at their best, they make for interesting reading if one ever wanted to develop an idea of how a plant feels. Most of the survivors went on to be excellent gardeners, further enhancing Triton’s reputations in that regard. But I am getting ahead of my own story.