“Yes,” said Horrocks, dreading the prospect of wading through screen upon screen of elliptical, high-density discourse. “When I’m sober.”
Genome ran a hand along her bandolier of inhalers and extracted a slim green cylinder.
“Snort this,” she said, holding it up in a billow of blue sleeve. It smelt like pine.
Horrocks felt as if he’d wakened from a deep, refreshing sleep eager to tackle an absorbing job of work. The room became sharp and clear, a tawdry hang of red-tinged light and lolling bodies and loud, empty talk.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Genome.
“Sorry,” said Horrocks. “It isn’t you, it’s—”
“I know,” said Genome. She gave him a conniving smile and a hard shove. “Go away and read your transcripts before it wears off.”
Her push sent him to the exit. He caught the jamb on the way through, swung around and thrust off, looking for somewhere quiet. The corridor was wide, elliptical in section, and heavy with colour-coded utility piping and small bulk transport conveyor belts. A practice-habitat component a couple of metres across moved past him, its glum owner straphanging behind. It was heading away from the locks that led to the main cylinder. Horrocks drifted, kicked, drifted again. He noticed an unobtrusive tag marking an access tube that went off to one side in an inward direction. It labelled it as leading to the engine vault.
The engine vault was a place for quiet contemplation and discreet assignation, a place where people tended to go when they were very young or very old. Like the rare transparent panels in the outside of the cone where one could look at the stars as directly as it was possible to do through metre upon metre of flawless sheet diamond, and experience — or at any rate, appreciate — the very photons from the stars themselves impact upon one’s very own retinae, the engine vault was a site of natural wonder, and one whose awe few presumed to blunt with undue familiarity.
He jackknifed in to the tube and pushed along it. After twenty metres he reached the open far end. He jammed his hands against the sides and moved forward so that his head projected out into the vault. He found himself somewhere near the middle of the wall of the vast space, a couple of hundred metres above the floor and as much below the ceiling. Other such pinprick holes were visible here and there on the inward-curving sweep of the wall below as black dots. A few tens of metres from his face, the engine loomed like a cliff, stretching off into a blue-hazed distance half a kilometre on either side. In its complexity too it looked like a cliff-face, but Horrocks knew that every curve, every hollow, every flange and protrusion, every minute pit in it was not the random result of weathering but features whose function he could not guess, but might some day centuries hence aspire to learn.
Sublime as the sight was, it took a knowledge of what it did to take the full measure of its magnificence. Like its polar counterpart in the rearward cone, the titanic engine was a cosmogonic machine. At its core was a process that — second by second when it powered the ship’s flight, hour by hour when, as now, it powered only the sunline — compacted the equivalent of a multi-megaton nuclear explosion into a space the size of a hydrogen atom. Its primary effect was to accelerate the reaction mass to relativistic velocities. As a side effect, invisible but inevitable, it generated universes. From each compacted explosion, like a stray spark from a hammer, a new singularity exploded out of space-time and inflated in an instant to give birth to a new cosmos. Some inconceivably minute fraction of the energy of that inflation could be tapped to make the engine self-sustaining. Invented in the Moon Caves, the cosmogonic engine had given man the stars. At one level efficient beyond cavil, on another it was the most profligate of man’s devices: it blew multiple universes like bubbles, for the mere sake of moving mass, and at an average speed of 0.01 c at that.
Horrocks gave these considerations a moment of due respect, wedged himself comfortably in the hole, accessed the transcript files in his mind and settled down to read. It didn’t take him long to discover that the only thing he could reliably make sense of were the names. The actual dialogue was so elaborate, so allusive, so technical and at the same time so playful that it would have taken him years to parse it, decades to uncover evidence of a conspiracy or a hidden agenda. For all he could tell, this entire arcane undertow to the exoteric proceedings of the jury might have served only to reinforce and document what had been spoken in the open. After struggling with it for a while, he pasted the entire transcript to a call and sent it to Atomic. “Do what you want with this,” he said.
14 365:05:25 18:15
I’m in a dilemma. A fix. A trap. A cleft stick.
I have what may be incontrovertible evidence that the jury was a sham and that some elements in the crew have been less than candid with the rest of us.
I have every reason to think that I was meant to get and release this information, and that doing so will only advance the next item on someone’s agenda.
But if I don’t, then I’ll be party to something else. Some other twist. No matter which way I turn, I’m advancing someone else’s purposes, wittingly or not.
I’ll have to think about this and get back to you.
14 365:05:25 19:20
All right. Here it is. I’m releasing this to all channels and all newslines and to the Council’s live feedback. Read this if you can make sense of it.
[Link to attached documentation.]
Here’s my educated guess.
As I’ve told you before, and as you can easily see from the public record, most of the founder generation — which means, let’s be clear, most of the voting-age population, what the Contract calls the Complement — are interested in a moratorium on colonization. Most of the ship generation, to put it mildly, aren’t. What we hadn’t factored in was that the crew are on our side in this; they tend to steer clear of public debates, so it wasn’t as obvious as it should have been.
Obviously, these are crude generalizations, but the breakdown of consensus is along the following divisions:
The founders are going to be in this system a long time. They have a lot of speculative and venture capital riding on our projects, but for the long term, stability is their watchword. They want — need — to be absolutely sure things are not going to blow up with the locals before we venture forth. They also have, it’s fair to say, a genuine humanitarian — if that’s the word — concern about the locals. They don’t want some ghastly global conflict on their consciences, and nor should they, and nor do I.
We, dear readers, have a rather different calculus of concern. We want to get out there, and we’re confident we can handle the consequences. I mean, come on! In a decade or two we’ll have settled a good tenth of the asteroids, industrialised most of the moons, and have advanced projects under way around the gas giant and the waterworld. We’ll have a power station on the mercurial that’ll outshine the bat people’s global energy output every second. We’ll have started building a long tube. And with all that we can’t even intimidate them into behaving decently — to each other, and to us? Let alone what our power and example of peaceful cooperation and progress could do to show them the way.
The crew have their own interest and their own code. They want us out there, because they need us to harvest the resources and breed the replacement population for the next journey. They have no long-term investments outside the ship. They don’t plan to stick around for long, and to them — marvellous as the discovery of aliens is — our dealings with each other and with the bat people are just one more instance of the sort of intrasystem bickering they’ve made it their life’s business and the habit of centuries to walk away from. (If you already feel that way yourself, consider joining the crew. A minority of every ship generation does, just as a minority of crew become system-settlers.)