“I’ll tell you all about it,” said Atomic. “Walk with me.”
“Do you realise,” she said, looking up from the foot of the stairs as he made his way down, “that for thousands of years people have been living in caves?”
Horrocks didn’t answer until they were out on the street. He handwaved upward.
“This doesn’t feel like a cave. It doesn’t feel enclosed.”
“That’s just because you’re used to living in the cone. It feels open but it’s like you said, it’s the reassurance of regolith. Compared with this, standing on a planetary surface is, like, totally exposed.”
“And living in a habitat with a glass roof isn’t?”
She laughed. “It isn’t glass, it’s diamond. And it’s less exposed than a surface. Especially one like Destiny II, which doesn’t even have asteroid defence. Yet that’s what lots of us are subconsciously getting used to.”
“I don’t think so,” said Horrocks. “At a deeper level we know it’s virtual.”
“Imagination can overcome that,” said Atomic.
They walked on down Fourth. The street was quiet. Music throbbed from nodes in the air. It made Horrocks yearn for wide spaces and pioneer toil. Music could do that. “Do you imagine the bat people feel exposed?” he asked.
“I suppose they do,” Atomic said. “Those of them who understand what the sky is, at least. I guess some of them still think the sky is a roof.”
“They don’t seem that primitive.”
“Some of them are, in the backcountry.”
“All right,” said Horrocks. “What worries me is the more advanced ones. How do you think they would feel, under that open sky, if they saw us colonizing? Changing their asteroid belt, the moons of their water-world and gas giant? Some of the solar power collectors would look like new planets even to the naked eye. To say nothing of fusion reactors.”
“New stars!” Atomic laughed.
“Yes indeed,” said Horrocks. “And your diamond habitat would shine like—” Like your eyes, he almost said.
“Like an asteroid with a high albedo,” said Atomic.
“Yes.”
She walked so fast that the green shift didn’t ripple, like it had on her caremother: it shook. Horrocks thought he could see every bone and curve of her small energetic body inside it if he looked long enough. He almost tripped.
“Sorry,” he said. “Could you slow down a bit?”
She slackened her pace.
“I’ve been thinking about that too,” she said. “But perhaps the idea of other intelligent life isn’t as strange to them as it is to us. Not as alien, you might say. After all they’ll have seen the Civil Worlds for millennia. They’ll have seen the green scum on the waterworld. They might even think we come from there. Oh! And I almost forgot — they have television, so they may have detected our deep-space radar. Anything interesting shown up on their transmissions?”
“Not really,” said Horrocks. “Some grainy shots of scenery, sometimes with bat people flitting across it, then back to someone talking to camera. The heuristics think he’s talking numbers, and they’ve got some consistent results, but the rest of what’s said is as obscure as ever. The other source, funnily enough, looks very similar — scenery, talking head — but sounds somewhat different. Two languages, almost certainly.”
“Here we are,” said Atomic, stopping outside a cafe with a big front window and yellow interior walls. She lifted her hem to go up the step and Horrocks opened the door for her, almost falling through it in the process. The cafe was about half full of ship generation kids, talking loud. Horrocks blinked to a particular perceptual mode and saw the air was as filled with data-interchange streams as it was with food smells. The data streams were almost all between handheld or head-worn machines rather than heads. He closed his eyes and opened them, back to normal sight. Atomic turned at once to the table by the window, where a young ship-generation man sat drinking coffee. He stood up and smiled at Atomic, stuck out a hand to Horrocks.
“Grant Cornforth Dialectical.” Chunky muscles, firm grip, a wavy straggle of beard, wary eyes.
“Horrocks Mathematical.”
“The micro-gee trainer?”
“The same.” Horrocks turned to Atomic. “What’ll you have?”
“My treat,” she said.
“Thanks. Black coffee and whatever you recommend.”
She went to the counter and Horrocks sat down.
“So,” said Grant, “what brings you among us flat-footers?”
“Getting flat feet,” said Horrocks. He rubbed his calf muscles.
Grant laughed. “But really.”
“Delivering a personal message to Atomic,” he said.
Grant glanced down at his cup. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No, no, not at all!” said Horrocks. “Please.” He waved a hand at the rest of the clientele. “I’d have everyone around the table if I could.”
“But you can’t?” said Grant.
Horrocks tightened his lips for a moment and nodded. “Call it semiprivate. You’re her friend, you’re definitely welcome.”
“I see.” Grant didn’t sound happy.
Atomic returned with two mugs and two plates with meat pasties. Horrocks tasted. “Very good,” he said. He’d forgotten how hungry he was.
Grant leaned over and took a chunk of Atomic’s pasty. “Horrocks says he’s here to deliver a message to you.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Atomic. “I bet it’s from my rocking caremother, yes?”
Horrocks put down his mug so that it didn’t splash. “Yes,” he said. “In a manner of speaking. She convinced me of something, and asked me to convince you of it.”
“Well, what is it? That you and I are destined to be soulmates?”
“What?”
“Oh, I know her,” said Atomic. “She’s an incorrigible genetic speculator. When she sent me her used dress, I knew a boy couldn’t be far behind.”
Horrocks didn’t know where to look. He thought her very forward. It must be the city life. Only a few months ago she’d thought him uncouth for mentioning her genetic parentage, and now she talked like this! At least she hadn’t said “a used boy.” He ate another bite or two with a dry mouth, sipped coffee.
“It’s nothing like that!” he said. “Well, I can’t be sure of her intentions, but—”
“She sent you on some quite different pretext? That’s her way.” She stretched across the table to brush a crumb from Grant’s lip.
“No,” said Horrocks. “This isn’t a pretext. This is really important.”
“So spit it out”
“All right,” he said. “The aliens, the bat people, are at a stage of development very similar to that of our ancestors in the age of world wars. Internal-combustion engines, radio, the beginnings of television, airships, steamships, mass urbanisation. In at least one city, the probe has detected traces of crude attempts to concentrate radioactive isotopes.”
“Yes, and?”
“Some of the founder generation think the aliens too may be on the brink of an era of war.”
Atomic stared at him. Grant rapped a finger hard on the table.
“Speculation,” he said. “And wooden-headed technological determinist speculation, at that. We know nothing of the aliens’ social relationships, apart from the apparent slavery — which incidentally is far more widespread than at the same stage in human development, which rather undercuts your suggestion. They could be a single world empire, or a federation of anarchies, or a happy global cooperative commonwealth for that matter. We just don’t know.”
“What about the slaves?” asked Atomic. “Don’t they count?”
“We don’t even know they are slaves,” said Grant. “They could be beasts — very similar animals to the dominant species but without speech or self-awareness.”