‘That could make it worse, from our point of view,’ I said. ‘What if during their precursors’ time in virtual reality they were all along doing design-ahead work? We’ve only
assumed
that the old Outwarder macros went crazy, and that all their descendants up to now have been crazy too. We could be wrong. The ones that have now emerged into the real world could have countless generations of R&D simulation behind them, which they could implement at will.’
Clarity shrugged. ‘You’re right, it is premature to argue over how we negotiate before we know what they’re capable of, which is why the
next
highest item on most people’s agenda is finding out more about exactly that, and getting some kind of reliable access to confirm any story they give us about what they’re up to.’
‘Inspection rights? At least that strikes a note of healthy suspicion.’
‘You could put it like that.’ Clarity drained her cup and tossed it towards the big table. ‘
You
would.’
We both laughed, but I could hear the slight tension in her throat, and in mine.
The other CC members hadn’t looked up from their work when I came in, and were still absorbed in it. I didn’t interrupt. I spent the next hour or so in front of an unused interface, pulling up summaries of the night’s work, an increasing number of which were modified and updated as more people came in. The science teams, safely distant in other warrens, were evaluating the physics and chemistry of the Jovian entities: the most solid results so far
were that the bubbles were made of laminated sheets of monomolecular diamond; that the ‘wings’ were, as we’d thought, made up of a flow of ionized molecules in electromagnetic fields; that the ‘bodies’ were a combination of these with hologram projections; and that the whole display was not just decorative or expressive but a means of communication, a language of light. The core of the Jovian individual, the brain and engine of the thing, was the elaborate structure that had appeared as a jewelled breastplate on the angels. This object was itself aerodynamic, and drew its energy directly from the fast winds and vast electrical pulses of Jupiter’s atmosphere, which even at its calmest was (from a human point of view) a ceaseless violent storm.
It struck me that the Jovian body was a tough structure. Disrupting the displays, even cracking the diamond bubbles, might be as easy as the nuclear enthusiasts I’d encountered thought. Destroying their source would take exactly what we had planned.
Malley and Suze came in at 0900 GMT, with the smug, sleepy look of people who had spent a first unexpected night together. I disengaged from the interface and stood up.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
Suze smiled shyly; Malley grinned. ‘Hi,’ he said. He passed a hand over his reddened eyes. ‘God, is there coffee in this place?’
I brought over three cups and we made our way to Malley’s workstation. Suze dragged a couple of extra chairs over and we sat down. Spindly chairs; on Earth they’d have crumpled under us.
‘How have you been getting on?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ said Suze, ‘we’ve been getting on very—’
She stopped and giggled.
‘Well, yes,’ Malley said. He smiled at her again. ‘Suze has a really charming notion that getting off with a non-co is some kind of decadent perversion—’
‘I do
not
!’
‘I must say it adds something to the, ah, energy of the reaction. Not that it needs much adding to—you were right about those rejuvenation treatments. I had forgotten it was possible to feel this good.’ He sighed and stretched. ‘On the other hand—I feel very strange. Part of it’s the gravity, the conditions, and part of it is … you people. Your people. They’re not what I expected, even after spending days with all of you in the ship. The crowd out in the corridors are so …’ He shook his head. ‘You in the Division aren’t like the people in the Union, at least from what I’ve seen. The Union people seem happy enough, and free too in their way, but you out here have more
edge
, more discontent with themselves. You, Ellen, and your
crew, well … it’s hard to say, but you are different again, you seem to carry more of the past.’
‘We do,’ I said. ‘Several of us are almost your age.’
He looked at me curiously. ‘No, even Yeng has it—a sort of hardness in the eyes.’
‘Yeah,’ said Suze. ‘It’s the “old comrades” look I told you about.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. You strike me as pretty tough yourself, Sam.’ I flicked my hand sideways. ‘Another time … What I wanted to ask you was, how are you getting on with the math? Are our miracles of neural nanotech reviving your genius?’
Malley laughed. ‘That’s one of the things about you that I was talking about, Ellen. You can say something like that without cracking a smile, and yet treat other matters with the most appalling levity. Anyway, as you say. Later for psychology. The answer to your question is, yes, I am making progress, but it’s slow—and I don’t think it’s because of my brain’s age. The “engineering considerations” I once blithely summed up as beyond the wit of man are beginning to look a bit more tractable, and as for the theory of the quantum-chaotic manifold, even my own old papers are beginning to make sense to me again.’
I wasn’t sure whether he meant this ironically or not.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘You heard what the man said, last night. I’m supposed to give you all necessary practical assistance, starting this morning. That obviously includes giving you access to all the observations, all the calculating machinery you might need, and so on. But it’s more than that. If you want to observe the wormhole Gate up close, or send a probe through it, or for that matter go through it yourself—we can make it possible.’
‘I suppose it would be best to do things in that order,’ Malley observed. ‘Observation, test probes, expedition. Rather than the reverse.’ He smiled, as at a thin joke, and for a moment, despite the glowing success of his rejuvenation, looked like an elderly academic from one of those twentieth-century lecture tapes whose science has remained valid, however bizarre the diction or the clothes appear to their modern students. ‘However … it’s the practical calculation which has to be solved first, so yes, I would appreciate as much computing power as you can spare, and a walk through your available mathematical software. Oh, and a lit search, don’t want to reinvent the wheel, eh?’
I set him up with all of these and a connection to our wormhole physics team; they had decades of experience of sending probes into the wormhole, and none whatsoever of any coming back. When he was comfortably enmeshed in the virtual-reality workspace I turned to Suze.
‘There’s something very important you can do,’ I said. ‘If Sam finds a way of getting us through, we may need you to help us find our way about on the other side.’
‘New Mars?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Imagine an entire planet of non-cooperators, if you can.’ I frowned. ‘Now I come to think about it, there are only half a million or so, which is probably less than you’ve got on Earth … but this lot have a world to themselves. I’d like you to take a look at the files we’ve built up of Wilde’s accounts of New Mars, and some of the images his little spacecraft had in its storage.’
‘I’d love to,’ Suze said. ‘It’s a dream, it really is.’
‘Each to their own,’ I said.
Suze laughed. ‘You don’t like it?’
‘I don’t like what I’ve seen of New Mars, or what Wilde told us about it,’ I said, as I guided her to the most recently built workspace, at the far end of the room. Closest to the ice-face and the busy, tiny robots, it was the one least likely to be coveted by CC members. ‘For me it just confirms something I’ve thought for a long time: people in an owned world are owned.’
Suze sat down and began adjusting the workspace to her own preferences. All I could see of this process was off-centre hologram images, dim in the full-spectrum light, and subtle twitches of Suze’s facial muscles as she settled into the scene. She turned to me and smiled, as though from a distance.
‘That isn’t how they see it,’ she told me, and before I could reply she had slipped the sound system over her ears, and was away.
By about ten o’clock all the CC members had turned up. None of them looked as if they’d had much sleep, and not for the same reasons as Suze and Malley (and, for that matter, myself). They had probably collapsed into a few hours’ deep sleep after staying at work most of the night. Several of them resorted now to stimulant drugs, as well as making full use of the coffee machine.
I’d used the time until their arrival in checking out the current flightworthiness of the
Terrible Beauty
; according to the maintenance team, it was entirely sound, so all I had to do was reserve it for my own crew. There were two reasons for doing this; one was that it would be quite inconvenient, but all too predictable, to find that all the fusion-clippers were already assigned or in use just when we needed one; and the other was that, like myself, the rest of my crew were far more familiar with the handling and operation of fighter-bombers than of fusion-clippers, and our experience with the
Terrible Beauty
’s individual quirks would make our next flight in it easier.
Tatsuro took a seat at the head of the long table.
‘Why are you here, Ellen?’ he asked.
‘Doctor Malley is fully occupied,’ I said. ‘If he requires further help from me, he has only to ask. In the meantime, I would like to remain here.’
‘Very well,’ said Tatsuro. Other members began to wander back from the other end of the room, and sat down. Clarity smiled at me, and took a seat beside me; others looked somewhat reserved. Tatsuro called the meeting to order.
‘For the benefit of any who were not present last night,’ Tatsuro began, with a flash of his eye at me, ‘we’ve finalized our equipment for opening a secure communications channel. Our surface teams have arranged a narrow-beam transmitter-receiver, connected by a completely independent and isolated cable to a screen and speakers in this room. The wavelength and location with which comrade Ellen established contact yesterday will be used as the basis for our first attempt. During the contact, this room will be isolated, and anyone who doesn’t wish to participate is free to leave.’
We all looked at each other. Nobody made a move.
‘All right, comrades,’ said Tatsuro. ‘Ellen, will you please ask Doctor Malley and comrade Suze to leave.’
Malley and Suze, when I’d interrupted their respective attention-trances, flatly refused to do any such thing.
‘Wouldn’t miss this for anything,’ Malley told us. Suze just looked stubborn.
Tatsuro gave a small shrug. ‘It’s your life,’ he said. The two of them sat down together at the table, Suze beside me, Malley beside her. I squeezed Suze’s shoulder.
Joe Lutterloh, the committee’s electronics specialist, went around the room checking each news-thread camera location and disconnecting it. We could hear a murmur through the walls as the people outside, like everybody else in the Division who was watching, found their screens going blank.
The big screen was moved into position at the end of the table, and a camera was mounted on it. The isolated cable was connected up to both, via a likewise isolated computer through which the message, if any, would be filtered. A small cable was unwound and trailed across the table to a control pad in front of Tatsuro.
‘Ready,’ said Joe.
He rejoined the rest of us at the table. We all shuffled our seats around until the arrangement resembled a broad U-shape, with Tatsuro at one end and the screen we all faced at the other. Each of us could see all the others. Tatsuro gave a final glance around, as though to check that everybody was still willing to be present, and pressed a switch. The tiny light on the mounted camera glowed red. The prerecorded hailing message went out, several times, along with an image of the room and our silent, waiting selves.
Time passed, perhaps a minute; it seemed longer. Then the screen lit up with a picture. There was no fuzziness, no moment of tuning. It came into focus at once. It wasn’t any of the shapes I’d seen. Instead, it showed the head and shoulders of a young man, wearing a plain white tee shirt and apparently standing casually in the interior of one of the bubbles. I could see the hexagonal patterns of the panes, as from a great distance. The more familiar—since yesterday—forms of the Jovian entities drifted and shifted in the great spaces between the man and the domed roof, like strange birds in an aviary. The man looked like a typical North American, mainly Caucasian with a good mixture of the usual other races. His face was unexceptional: healthy, good-looking, alert and friendly. The image could have come from an old NASA commercial, and possibly did.
He smiled and waved. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Thank you for getting in touch again. To us, it’s been the equivalent of two years since your first contact, so we’ve had time to prepare our response. I’m operating at your speed, by the way—we can interact directly.’ He smiled. ‘Apart from the light-speed lag, of course. I see Doctor I. K. Malley is among you. We’re honoured, sir.’
Malley grunted something. There was a pause of a few seconds. The Jovian smiled.