Montrose was aghast. “Not proud! I ’spect not! You were supposed to obey the Captain, even if he ordered you to die.”
Del Azarchel spoke softly, reluctantly. “He did.”
“He did what?”
“He ordered our deaths.”
“Pox on that! Not Grimaldi, he was not like that kind of man!”
“Years and decades fled while you slumbered. You know nothing of what he was like.”
“I know Grimaldi was the finest officer alive.”
“So I knew as well, for so he was—when you knew him. Those days were past. I told you, he was under pressure. It affected his judgment.”
“Insane? The ship’s doctor could have made a ruling.”
“Dr. Yajnavalkya was a malnutrition victim. During the hunger watches. The quarter-rations could not sustain him, not at his age. I do not say the Captain went mad. But he did order us to halt the star lifting.”
“What? But that means—”
He saw from the look in Del Azarchel’s eyes that there was no need to finish the sentence. They both knew the facts.
There was no return trip without the antimatter to use as fuel. The whole expedition plan turned on the idea that the robotic mining ship Croesus could power a braking laser to stop the incoming Hermetic, and power up that laser to accelerate her to interstellar velocities again.
Space near the Diamond Star had been swept clear of normal matter, of course. There was one superjovian in a far orbit, farther from V 886 Centauri than Pluto was from Sol, a terrene-matter body called Thrymheim. That was all. There was nothing else in the system. No uranium-bearing asteroids. Nothing for the Croesus to use as a power source for the launching laser to propel the Hermetic on her silvery sails back across the widest abyss—over a light-century—mankind had ever crossed.
And even that would not have been enough. The expedition plan included making up the marginal loss in sailing efficiency with onboard fueclass="underline" The dangerous contraterrene was to be carried in a double-zoned magnetic “nozzle” generated well to the aft of the hull, and bombarded with pellets to produce reaction thrust.
Del Azarchel shook his head, this time with wonder and sorrow. “Had we obeyed, the whole expedition, all for which we had sacrificed, would have been for naught. Without the antimatter, we could not even have powered the radio-laser to narrowcast our findings back to Earth, and so no history would remain to tell of us, or what had become of us. Without the antimatter, without the promise that we were carrying antimatter, the ungrateful generation that ruled the strange Earth to which we had returned would not have been convinced to shoulder the expense of orbiting a braking laser of their own. The Golden Age we ushered in, a time of unimaginable plenty, wealth, and abundant energy, all would have been stillborn. The tribes and nations of the world would still be consuming each other in wars: instead, at long last, at long and long last indeed, the universal dream of man has come to fruition, carried in on the wings of the Hermetic! The world is one: and all the princes, republics, parliaments, and wardenships are under our feet. At long last: peace! Peace on Earth. Surely that was worth it!”
Montrose said nothing.
Del Azarchel leaned back in his chair, looking saddened. “But even so, I would not have allowed the Conclave to relieve him of command, had I known how despondent he was, or what would follow.”
Montrose did not like the sound of that. “What followed?”
“He took his own life. I do not have your admiration for the heathen religion he joined: They are prone to burning themselves, these Brahmins, when they crave their fabled return on the wheel of reincarnation.”
“But he was a Frenchy.”
“Monegasque. And yet ideas have no race: He was Brahmin because he thought as Brahmins do. Captain Grimaldi dressed himself in splendid garb, adorned with liquid-crystals as with jewels, turned up the oxygen gain in his chamber, and sealed the hatch. He was thoughtful enough to evacuate the surrounding chambers of air, so the blaze could not spread. It was a gaseous fire, since there was nothing else to burn except lightweight plastic cabin-fixtures, and so smothered itself as quickly as it flared up—almost more like an explosion than a fire, burning in all directions at once in a confined, perfectly insulated space. I sorrow to think that he condemned himself to a more eternal fire, and have said more than one mass for his soul. I may say another tomorrow, before dawn. You are welcomed to join me. I have the Pope on my staff.”
Montrose was about to say no thanks, that he was no sort of praying man, but then again, he remembered how he once thought it was not right to have a man not buried proper with no words said over him, as if he was a dead dog or something. “Yeah. I think I will join you.”
7
Posthuman Technology
1. The Cold Gray Room
Technicians in parkas were trooping out of the chamber as they entered. More than a few minutes were spent in introductions, explanations of the procedures, and some consultations with Del Azarchel over technical matters meaningless to Montrose.
The chamber was hollowed out of the middle of a molecular rod-logic diamond the size of a warehouse: The walls, ceiling, and floor were paneled in absorptive fabric the color of a pigeon’s wing. Out from the walls came bundles of colored fibers, which where stapled to black cylinders occupying the center of the room. The whole thing had a surprisingly clumsy, half-finished look.
Menelaus stood in his parka, his breath a cloud of steam before him, aching. Del Azarchel sat impassively behind him, his hands tucked into a muff, his legs covered with a white coverlet.
“Where’s the brain?”
“We’re inside it.”
“Not as tidily packed-up as a human brain, then. Where’s the controls?”
Del Azarchel wheeled over to the nearest wall, and tapped on the surface, to bring up an image of a standard key-screen and scratch pad. “The wall surface is motion-sensitive and follows standard finger-gestures. You can extend the range from contact to the middle of the room. Make fists to null the monkey-see-monkey-do. Otherwise you will flip the view each time your scratch your nose. If you rub your thumb against your index finger, the walls-sensors interpret that as a trackball. Draw your fingers apart to expand the view. If you’d like a stool, the technicians keep them piled in a corner, along with elbow-rests.”
“I’ll stand. Before I start it, how do I stop it?”
“Spoken like an astronaut. Salute with two fingers for the Halt gesture. Clasp your hands palm to palm to crash out of the program.”
Montrose made the standard library-gesture for Open, which was to touch all four fingers to his thumb, making a circle. Immediately the four walls, and the ceiling, vanished into a pearly gray void. The floor was like a raft on an endless ocean of dizzying fog. Montrose realized all four walls, plus the ceiling, were coated with library cloth.
“Neutral setting is giving me a headache,” said Montrose.
“Cross your fingers for R. That gives you the Review command.”
Suddenly one part of the ocean of nothingness was painted with a system of diagrams.
It was a diagram of a neural process. Menelaus found he could finger-snap through the views and magnifications, or slide the screens left and right with a handwave. At highest magnification, he could see the specific equations generating the lines of code that were compiling into a symbolic matrix. There were hundreds of matrices, thousands, millions, intertwined like some vast tree, or, rather, like the circulatory system of some irregular cloud.