“Me, for a start,” said Halegap. “I hope nobody has thought of it already. Excuse me…”
His virtual presence vanished with a sound effect of rubbing hands. Over the next seconds Horrocks watched with his inner eye and virtual vision an entire financial sector flare out of nowhere like a nuclear explosion in the void. He grinned at Genome and turned to the crowd of ship kids behind him. The telemetry room was an irregular shape and strung with lianas. Water bubbled through transparent piping. A score or so of former settlers hung in the organic mesh at all angles. Others were no doubt watching from elsewhere, or following other probes.
“What was all that about?” asked a young fellow with a cockatoo-crest of blue plumes. They had seen the devastation on their own interfaces, but most of them hadn’t been able to follow the swift spectral byplay with Halegap.
“Speculation,” said Horrocks. “The guy’s a friend, and I’m no adviser, but… I’d advise you to keep your options open if somebody offers to buy your compensation claims any time in the next, oh, week or so. By then you might get a good price for them.”
“I don’t want compensation!” somebody else shouted. “I want my habitat back!”
Rattlings of lianas, drummings on the bulkhead, shouts.
“Yeah, everything’s ruined!”
“We should go back and kick out the Council!”
“Rip some stuff off the old ship!”
“What about the crew? It’s all their fault in the first place!”
Horrocks blinked and shrank back from the hubbub. Genome pushed forward.
“Shut up!” she yelled above the din. Her pitch and volume made Horrocks flinch. A startled silence fell. “That’s better,” she went on. “I know you’re upset. I’m upset. Horrocks is upset. We helped build these habitats. We don’t like seeing them wrecked any more than you do. It’s terrible. But the fact is that they are badly damaged and there’s no easy way to get them back. We can salvage some of what’s down there, but it’s going to be hard, heartbreaking work. And we’re millions of kilometres away from the old ship. We’re not going anywhere near it until we’ve struck enough deals to make ourselves safe. One of these deals will be compensation, OK? There are people willing to give you money now, or next week as Horrocks says, just on the off chance that we’ll make these deals — who knows when! That’s your good fortune. We’re heading for the asteroid belt and when we get there you can get busy on some real settlement, right out in free space. That’s what you all want, right? And until then, don’t let me hear anyone talking about ‘the crew’ as if the crew are some other group of people. When you agreed to carry out the Order of the Day, you joined the crew. You’re all crew now, as long as you’re in this ship. And for the moment, this cone is the ship. We’re all in it together — literally. So rocking well grow up, OK?”
Her gaze swept the room like a spotlight, stopping here and there. “Everybody happy?” she asked.
Silence.
“Anybody not happy?”
More silence.
“Good,” said Genome. “See you around, crewmates.”
She arrowed to the exit hatch. Horrocks followed, looking straight ahead. Outside in the corridor and out of earshot he caught her ankle and pulled up to face her. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.
“I guess I’ve had younger trainees than you in the past,” she said.
“That yell—”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s the training-habitat voice.”
“How do you know we’re going to the asteroid belt?”
“Aren’t we?”
14 366:02:28 17:20
One advantage of being detached from the ship is that we can skip around the system like a flea on a griddle. Right now we’re headed for the asteroid belt at such a clip I doubt we show up as even a streak on long-exposure photographs. Even so, we won’t be there for weeks. In the meantime—
I think the crew are at a bit of a loss as to what to do with us. They must have expected the settlements to survive the separation, with any repair work to be quite enough to keep us occupied until the rocks could be decanted into independent orbit. Right now we’re poor, idle and fending off investors offering rock-bottom (hah!) prices for our compensation claims. Exploring crew quarters is fun but after a while that’s bound to pall. Salvage… I don’t have the heart for it, though Grant does. He enjoys the challenge.
But there’s one thing we can do that is more than just killing time. We can go into the new virtualities, the ones uploading data from the slaves — the trudges, as I gather we’re now supposed to call them.
I’m surprised the crew haven’t suggested it. Maybe they think it’s too reminiscent of how the founders tried to keep us occupied. Maybe they want to make any decisions about intervention without any pressure or clamour from us. I take their point. But we are, after all, the ones who are going to have to live with the consequences, long after the crew have gone. So I think we should at least know on what basis the decisions are made.
Another thought: I miss those of us who were left behind. I miss, in particular, my three-quarter-sister Magnetic. We used to talk and write to each other a lot. It’s not something I ever mentioned here. It was private. But I miss her, and I’m saying so now because it’s about time someone did. There’s been a lot of tough talk about how the kids who didn’t make it to the cone settlements are ones who were slackers or birth-righters anyway. This is nonsense. Most of them were just too young, or had you forgotten that? And cut out the talk about how we don’t need them anyway. There are enough of us here to make viable settlements, for sure. But we need the rest of the ship generation to fulfil our plans and hopes — and theirs. There are tens of thousands of our younger brothers and sisters stranded back there in the habitat. We are not going to abandon them.
So don’t give up. Don’t turn into a new kind of slackers. Get stuck into those virtualities, try to observe what is going on down there, and keep up the pressure on the crew to come up with an explanation of how we are going to get the rest of our generation back.
“It’s time to reopen contact,” Synchronic had said, two days ago at a meeting of the Red Sun Circle at the villa in White City. The others around the pool had, to all appearances, engaged in glum counsel with the mullets, or divination with the wrack. Then one by one they had looked up and nodded. The Council had, after a likewise unfathomable deliberation, come around to the same decision.
But as she sat in the estate garden, real thumb poised over a virtual switch, Synchronic found herself hesitating. When you’d lived long enough, she’d sometimes reflected, when certain habits had become ingrained no matter what refreshment of the neural pathways the immortality genes could bestow, ethics and etiquette became ever less distinct. Hitherto the involuntary equation had read one way, in disproportionate pangs of conscience over a small breach of manners. Now the terms had been inverted, and she felt over the Council majority’s horrible, criminal, potentially murderous mistake the sort of acute embarrassment that might have been appropriate for some ghastly faux pas. Dreadfully sorry, I’m such a ditz about these nuclear attack protocols…
Oh well. A week had passed since the separation, a day since the decision. She had deliberately not followed the exchanges between crew and Council. She presumed any initial awkwardness had been got over, and negotiations opened. The full brunt would have passed. Constantine, at least, would have calmed down.
She sighed and opened the channel. There was a moment of light-speed lag.
“You’ve got a rocking nerve,” said Constantine. “Showing up here.”
He lounged in some real-world environment beside a centrifugal wheel of water. In the background she could see people swimming, up and over, around and around. The Man was naked. Discarded drink-bulbs drifted around him. It had been a long while since she’d seen him like that.