‘Ah, that’s, that’s different,’ I say, waving my hands. I have genuinely never thought of it that way, never given a moment’s thought to the way of life in the settlement in which I’ve been raised—a crowded can at Lagrange called New View—or in the battlesat. ‘I mean, that’s all just among ourselves. We all know what has to be done, and what we can afford to use, so there’s no problem. What I meant—and only as a
joke
, for fuck sake—was that all this crap about who owns what was making me feel a bit …
bolshie
, isn’t that the word?’
‘I see,’ says Tony. ‘Like the Sheenisov.’
The Sino-Soviet Union, a rabble of collective farmers and Former Union and ex-PLA veterans whose ragged red armies are currently besieging—or, if you listen to their broadcasts, relieving—Sinkiang.
‘I thought they were more into restoring democracy.’
‘Yeah, for now, though I don’t know how democratic it all feels when their partisans roll into town and call a meeting. But for the long run, when the Sheenisov have conquered the world—’ we share a laugh ‘—their theorists advocate the weirdest kind of communism I’ve ever heard of: everybody owns nothing, or everything.’
‘Sounds like every dingbat communist since Munzer—’
‘No, no—every
individual
owns
everything
. The whole goddamn universe.’
‘Including every
other
individual?’
‘Only to the extent that you can.’
‘Nice if you can get it. I just want to be princess of the galaxy.’
‘Modest of you, my sweet. But that’s the catch—the universe is yours to take,
if you can
.’
‘So what’s to stop me?’
‘Only the other contenders, and your possibly reluctant subjects. And the size of the universe. If you can get around all that—go for it, gal!’
‘Oh. I see. And there was me thinking that eating people is wrong.’
Tony does glance sideways at me, now. ‘Eating people is
wasteful
… but seriously, if you think it’s wrong, fine. I entirely agree. So do something about it. Arm the prey! Set up taboos. Give them teeth! Just don’t think that announcing your moral convictions affects any part of the universe further than your voice can reach.’
‘And they want to base
communism
on this … this unlimited selfishness? What’s to stop it all degenerating into a war of all against all?’
Tony shrugs. ‘No doubt they expect we’d come to some kind of arrangement. ’
I’m telling him all the reasons why this’ll never work and he’s dividing his attention between talking to me and grumbling to himself about a Minskyite clique in cee-cubed (you’re asking
me
?) when the alarm goes off and I realise it’s me that’s done it, set it off by reflex, even before my conscious mind has registered that there’s a blip on the scope and it’s closing
fast
.
‘Shit shit shit SHIIIT!!!’ I announce, helpfully. Fingers tapping, keying the message to Command-Control-Comms (and hoping the Minskyite clique, whatever they are, knows which side of the bulkhead their air is on) and the blip is suddenly blurred by a burst of debris from the side just as the station lights dim under a power drain and the object is filling the screen then clearing it to the top right and it’s gone, as I duck and feel there should have been a
whoosh
as it passed overhead.
‘Hundred-ton rock on collision course deflected by laser burn,’ says a calm voice in my ear. Needless to say the whole process from detection to deflection has been automatic—both I on the watch, and the gunnery crew, are just there to make sure we know what’s going on. Here in a purely advisory capacity, as the US/UN grunts used to say.
The alarm cuts out and the lights come back.
‘What the fuck was
that
?’ says Tony.
I’m swinging the screen’s viewpoint, as the computer labours to patch in data from drogue cameras and other settlements. The cluster of habitats and ships at Lagrange 4 comes into sudden focus. Where each one had been was a point of actinic, atomic light—for a moment, I think they’ve been hit; that
we’ve
hit them. Nuked them.
And then I see them move. The flares are fusion torches, not fusion warheads. The Outwarder fleet is making its orbital transfer burn, heading out to Jupiter. Our comms net is buzzing. Other pictures begin to flash up:
Teletroopers bounding across the lunar surface, smashing into the mining-camps, seizing control of the mass-driver. They’ve used it to punch a few warning shots at us, and it’s still sending load after load of precious water to rendezvous with the Outwarder fleet.
Our people in the camps dying—shot or gasping vacuum. I see security-camera footage of teletroopers stooping over the dead, applying clawed devices to their skulls. My fist is at my mouth, my teeth are biting on my knuckles.
Later my parents’ names appear on the list of the missing.
The face of David Reid, the owner of the bonded-labour supply company, looms on our screens in a final message from the Outwarder fleet. It’s like a hostage video—face haggard, stubbled; voice stumbling, eyes glancing now and then to the side.
Some apology, some expression of regret.
Then the smooth, confident face of one of the Outwarders cuts in. They were still human, then. If you call that human. He tells us what they’ve done.
My knuckles begin to bleed.
The Outwarder spokesman told us what had happened to our people in the mining-camps. The lucky ones had been killed outright. The rest had been brain-scanned before their bodies were left to gasp vacuum. The Outwarders left us the details of their claim to the mines: they had records of having bought up the front-company years ago, something we could no longer check, and which they’d hitherto neglected to tell us. Our use of the mines had been theft, according to them, a crime aggravated by our resistance to their teletroopers. They claimed compensation, which they were going to recover as labour from the people whom they’d ‘uploaded.’ They’d use their recorded and rerun brain-states to operate their robots: much cheaper and quicker than AI.
They never did tell us which of the dead had been scanned, and the desiccated corpses we recovered later didn’t show up traces that could answer the question. For years after, I had nightmares about its being done to my parents. They’d appear anachronistically in dreams of other times, speaking to me on television screens. After the conflict, I didn’t just have an ideological dislike, and aesthetic distaste, for the Outwarders. Hatred was flash-burned into my brain.
Which is one reason why I wasn’t too worried about the Command Committee’s
decision to negotiate with the new Jovians. The night after the decision I now and again found myself lying awake in the dark, cuddled up beside Boris’s obliviously sleeping bulk, thinking about it all. No matter how beautiful the Jovians appeared, no matter how specious their messages might turn out to be, there were still enough people alive who remembered, and who would never forgive. That was not, of course, the rational reason for destroying the Jovians—but it was related to it. The brief experience of what can happen to those at the mercy of superior power had left me, and many others, with the implacable resolve never to allow the existence of any power superior to the power which we shared. There can only be one dominant species, and humanity was not about to relinquish that position. (Or, if it was, I was not about to let it.) But the emotional memory of what the Outwarders had done to us, and what their Jovian descendants had done to Earth during the computer crash, should help to harden hearts when it came to the crunch.
When it came to the crunch … I smiled to myself, and went back to sleep.
I got up before Boris, in the slowly increasing daylight-spectrum light of an artificial morning, and checked my e-mail. (Electronic bandwidth was far too precious, and too laden with multiply-redundant safety measures, to be squandered on anything less than urgent news or real-time links. Hence, chemical mail.) Some of it was practical, some personal or sentimental: these days, I didn’t exactly have a family, beyond the intertwined relationships of the crew, but I had descendants. I replied to those letters that needed a reply, sending the little coded molecular message-bearers swirling off down the capillaries, into the circulation of the base; and beyond it, to the crater towns: Skuld, Trindr, Igaluk, Valfodr, Loni … There was nothing in the mailbox as urgent as my current work, so I left a coffee percolating for Boris and headed for the operations room.
It was a slow progress for me. The corridors were crowded, and everybody I met seemed to want to talk to me. The committee’s discussion and decision, and the images from the probes, had all been flashed around Callisto’s fibre-optic network. Every forum for argument, from screens to streets, was overloaded with nothing else.
‘—you’re right Ellen, we should hit them and not waste any more time—’
‘—waited long enough—’
‘—wait and see—’
‘—sorry to say this, Ellen, but I think your position is way off beam—’
‘—forget the comets, we can rig some nukes that’ll disrupt them, they look pretty delicate—’
‘—give them a chance, it’s not as if
they
did it—’
‘—magnetic fields, right? Well, a polar hit with one good EMP burst—’
All the time my senses were bombarded by the colourful clothes, the beautiful faces (how right we had been, back at the start, to call ourselves the beautiful people); their insistent, vigorous voices, the absolute confidence of all the conflicting opinions; the eager, earnest children literally jumping up to have their say. I had my say too, but I avoided argument. I was happy with it all, not annoyed. Even those who disagreed with me strengthened my conviction that I was right: that this self-chosen people, this fractional distillation of humanity was worth more than anything or anybody else in the universe. There has to be some source of value, some measure, some criterion, someone for whom ‘good’ means ‘good for us’—and we were it. There was more vitality in our one million than in all Earth’s billions together, more beauty in us than in any pretty pictures the Jovians could project.
Still, entering the relative quiet of the operations room was a relief. Since yesterday it had lost its newly hacked look. With the instinctive biophilia of all space settlers, people had brought fast-growing plants whose leaves and tendrils were already spreading across the nutrient-rich insulation. A coffee machine had been set up, and cleany-crawlies—those cockroaches of cleanliness—were burrowing into the inevitable drifts of discarded plastic cups. The robots at the ice-face had extended the room by at least ten yards overnight, and the racks and rows of machinery had kept pace. Cameras for the news-threads were present and active, according to the suit.
A few members of the Command Committee were present. Some had just arrived, one or two had been there all night. Clarity Hardingham, the youngest CC member, younger even than Yeng, looked up at me. She was interfacing with one of the computer banks, evidently through a virtual-image display: I could see the focus of her eyes, and the apertures of her green irises, changing moment by moment. Judging by the dark areas around her eyes, she had been up all night. She flicked her auburn curls back from her temples and blinked away the display.
‘Good morning, Ellen,’ she said. ‘Grab me a coffee, will you?’
I passed one over to her. ‘You look like you should be drinking cocoa,’ I told her.
‘Ah, sod it,’ she said, knocking back a drug tablet, followed by a sip of coffee. ‘This is too exciting for sleep. For me, anyway. I’ve been more or less holding the fort since about four.’
‘Doing what? Comms protocols?’
‘Aagh! I wish! Well, I was working at that earlier, so I can’t complain. No, what I’ve been doing for the past four hours is sampling opinion—we’ll run a proper poll nearer the time, when we have to make a decision. This is just preliminary, sounding out what the comrades think our negotiating position
should be.’ She grinned quirkily, scratching her ear. ‘That’s if we have one. There’s a lot more than two in twelve agree with you out there, Ellen.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘Well, me neither. But of those who do want to negotiate, I reckon the biggest issue is putting an end to the viral assaults. Next, coming to some agreement on … spheres of influence, if you like.’
‘Literal spheres,’ I smiled.
Clarity nodded. ‘Yes! Most comrades seem keen on the idea that the Jovians should have Jupiter, and we’ll have the rest.’
I stared at her gloomily. ‘That is so stupid. All right, let’s just say
premature
. We know the Jovians have gone from nothing to some kind of culture in a matter of weeks, their powered flights are increasing all the time—’
‘No, Ellen, we’ve been tracking that further while you’ve been away. The flights haven’t increased, nor the number of clusters. They may have reached some plateau in their progress. After all, remember they may have inherited all their technological information from their precursor entities, and are now simply implementing it, so their earlier rapid ascent needn’t indicate that they’re, oh, recapitulating human development from the stone age up on a faster platform.’