But there was a catch. This was a quantum process. The uncertainty principle dictated that it was impossible to clone quantum information: it could be swapped around, but not copied. For the daughter to be born, the mother’s genotype had to be destroyed. Every birth required a death.
To human eyes this would seem tragic; but humans worked on different assumptions. To the spacetime fauna, life was rich and wonderful, and the interlinking of birth and death the most wonderful thing of all.
As consciousness arose, the first songs ever sung centered on the exquisite beauty of necrogenesis.
Chapter 40
The senior representative of the Guild of Engineers at Arches Base was called Eliun. He arrived for the review of the failed test flight with two aides. The review was held in a shabby conference room deep in Arches’ Officer Country. Eliun immediately made his way to the head of the table and sat comfortably, hands folded over his belly.
Nilis bustled among his data desks and Virtuals, his movements edgy and nervous. The scratch crew of the lost Earthworm were here: Pirius, Torec, and Darc. All had survived the ordeal intact, save for Commander Darc, whose broken wrist was encased in bright orange med fabric.
Pila took her place beside Pirius. Even after working closely with her Pirius couldn’t read the expression on her beautiful, pinched face. Perhaps she thought that with this latest failure, this embarrassing and awkward project would be terminated at last, and she could return to the comforts of Earth, and her slow, complicated ascent through the ranks of the Coalition civil service.
And, in one corner of the room, a Silver Ghost hovered, a sensor pack strapped to its equatorial line. It was the Ambassador to the Heat Sink. Two blue-helmeted Guardians, who had been assigned to it since Sol system, stood at its side, weapons ever ready. Nobody commented, as if having a Ghost here at a Core base was an everyday event. But the Navy guards posted at the door couldn’t help but stare.
The Guild-master was sleek, only a little plump, and his skin glistened as if he treated it with unguent. He wore a peculiar outfit covered with pockets, insignia, and little readout displays. It turned out to be a stylized skinsuit, of a very archaic design. This commemorated a time when the Engineers had always been the first on the scene in case of some disaster. Those days were long gone, though, and Pirius Red learned that Eliun’s suit wasn’t even functional.
Though he was a master engineer, Eliun didn’t seem at all perturbed to be summoned to a review of a catastrophic engineering failure. But Pirius knew Eliun need defer to nobody here. The Engineers were independent of the Navy and the Green Army, and in particular of Training and Discipline Command, the powerful interservice grouping that ran this base. In fact, the Engineers were independent all the way to the top, to the Grand Conclave of the Coalition itself. And in the comfortable form of Eliun, Project Prime Radiant had found yet another institutional opponent.
Darc glowered at Eliun with undisguised hostility, and even Nilis seemed coldly angry. The atmosphere was tense, and Pirius suspected uneasily they were in for some fireworks.
He was restless himself. Since the test flight two more days had worn away, two days of no progress toward the goal.
Nilis called the meeting briskly to order. “You know why we’re here.” He clapped his hands to call up a plethora of Virtual displays — far too much information, Pirius thought; it was typical of Nilis. “Let’s start with the basics.”
Once again the doomed Earthworm slid past the patient face of the target. Once again it blew apart, three fragile crew blisters careening out of the wreckage only just ahead of the main fireball. Pirius winced from embarrassment at having lost a ship, and at the uncomfortable memory of the breakup itself. Two days later, he was still chipping bits of solidified impact foam off his skinsuit.
Nilis ran the failure again and again, at one-thousandth speed, then one ten-thousandth, then slower still. “You can see that the black-hole cannon did fire, successfully,” he said. “But the structural failure occurred at that moment of firing.” He nodded to Torec, the ship’s engineer.
Torec walked through key moments in Nilis’s Virtuals, picking out freeze-frame images and referring the audience to bits of technical detail. “Firing the black-hole shells places the greatest stress on the ship’s systems as a whole.” To provide a stable platform when the cannon fired, the greenship’s inertial adjustors had to keep the ship anchored in spacetime. But the recoil of these spacetime bullets put far more strain on the adjustors than they had been designed for. “Remember, each shell has the mass of a small mountain. The energy drain is huge, the momentum recoil enormous. And unless the structural balance is exactly right, you get a failure. As in this case.”
She spoke well, Pirius thought with a mixture of envy and nostalgia. She had grown so much. The mixed-up cadet who had been press-ganged into flying with him to Earth just a few months ago could never have made such a presentation.
Eliun spoke for the first time. “Show me the point of failure.” His voice was like the man, oily, unperturbed.
Torec ran through a series of stop-motion images of the greenship at the moment of its terminal catastrophe, magnified so heavily they broke up into crowding cubical pixels. She showed the first instants of failure, using two bright red laser-pointer beams which intersected on the ship’s Virtual image. The point they picked out was just a flare of light, right at the junction of the cannon pod with the main hull. In that first moment the failure looked harmless, but the ship hadn’t held together for another half-second. Skewered neatly by the crisscrossing beams, the point in space and time when the Earthworm had died was unambiguous.
Pirius knew that all this was irrelevant, to some extent. For him, the greatest failures of the test flight had been navigation and accuracy. Even if they could overcome the problem of the damn ship blowing itself up in the moment of firing, to get the one-hundredth-of-one-percent accuracy of positioning Nilis was demanding, the navigational control of the ships was going to have to be improved by an order of magnitude.
Idly Pirius glanced over his shoulder at the source of the laser pointers. They came from light globes that drifted at the back of the room. The beams’ location of the failure point on the Virtual had been precise to well within the size of a pixel on that much-magnified image. An idea hovered at the back of his mind, elusive. He tried to relax his thinking -
“…Pirius.”
Nilis was calling his name. Commander Darc was glaring at him.
“Sir, I’m sorry. I was just thinking that—”
“Yes, yes,” said Nilis impatiently. “I asked if you as pilot had anything to add to Torec’s expert presentation.”
“No. I’m sorry,” Pirius said.
Nilis harrumphed. Now he turned to Commander Darc, as the Earthworm’s navigator.
Darc had clearly been waiting for this moment. His strong face blank and threatening, he turned on Eliun, who had been looking faintly bored. “I have no report, Guild-master. Only a question.”
“Go ahead, Commander.”
“You’ve seen the report. You saw the summary before you walked into the room. How will you help us resolve this issue of structural integrity?”
Eliun spread his fingers on the table. “I’m sure your analysis, if sufficiently deep, will—”
“Our analysis,” Darc cut in. “Ours. But the Commissary’s Project is a scratch operation that has been running on a shoestring for a matter of weeks. Whereas you have been running greenships for millennia.” He leaned forward and glared. “I would like to know, Guild-master, why the Engineers have obstructed this project from the day Nilis came here.”