“We’ll be home soon,” Camphvis reassured me with a friendly shoulder pat. I was only wearing a tank top—it can get warm in Sally—and Camphvis’s suckers stuck to my skin, releasing with a gentle pop. Banititlans are very tactile, as a rule. “Oops, sorry about that. And once we’re back at Core General, there are specialists standing by. You don’t have to solve this on your own.”
“What a mess,” said Loese.
I picked up another strip of steak. “You’re telling me.”
CHAPTER 10
IN AN INFINITE UNIVERSE, WHAT’S the single most important thing?
Well, I can tell you. The most important thing in the universe looks like a vast, leafy, lumpy oval, a greenhouse in space. From the outside, it’s the galaxy’s biggest terrarium: a semitransparent jewel embraced by a setting of rare metals, the filigree of jet and platinum threads, catching and softening all the lurid light of the Core’s crowded sky into the warm, precious glow of life.
So much life, crowded into hundreds of levels and dozens of biomes. An engineering challenge for the ages; a triumph of ingenuity and collaboration; a symbol of everything right about the Synarche and a rebuke of all the things we still don’t have figured out.
I’d told Tsosie I didn’t have a relationship with faith, but it occurred to me that that wasn’t entirely true.
I believed in this thing.
It was a good thing, Core General. It was good through and through, top to bottom, coming in and going out. Unreservedly good.
Difficult to navigate sometimes, absolutely. Full of creatures so accomplished in their trade and so confident that they could help that no one would have been able to rightmind away enough of the arrogance to keep it from occasionally permeating the atmosphere and straining the enviro filters, sure. You needed a certain amount of arrogance to slice somebody open and try to fix what’s wrong with them.
And Core General was not immune to mistakes, failures of protocol, and plain glitches.
Not perfect. Nothing is perfect.
But I believed with all my heart that Core General was good. That it meant well.
What did we do here? We saved lives. We alleviated suffering, and I’ve lived with enough suffering to know that any time you can take the edge off it, repair it for even one creature, you are creating a net good in the universe.
Not because the universe cared. The universe was vast and didn’t even care enough to be called implacable. But because life cared, and life had ethics and morals and obligations to one another.
Core General was the concretization of those ethics. It was a place where we ameliorated tragedies, healed victims, comforted survivors. It was a place where we told them not to count the cost in resources, because the Synarche believed that there was no price on a life.
You could never know in advance what a person might become or accomplish, given time. And even if they accomplished nothing, their life was still a life.
It wasn’t our place to judge them. It was our place to save them.
I believed in that so hard it choked me up. And I’d never admit it to Tsosie. But when I opened my eyes to compare the image on the screens to what Sally was feeding into our foxes from her own enormous sensorium, I caught him grinning at me. Just a little.
I shook my head and sighed. He rolled his eyes.
Core General. This vast habitat—the largest constructed biosphere in the galaxy—seemed strangely inevitable against a brilliant and bottomless night. There was no darkness in space here. There was no velvet black between the stars for this small artificial world to rest on as if it were a tumbled aventurine.
There was, in fact, virtually no “between the stars” to speak of. The Core was a gigantic, claustrophobic stellar cocktail party. If there had been any darkness, it would have been lost in the glare of the Saga-star’s accretion disk. The disk alone, though distant, wiped out a swath of the sky. It was so huge and fast-spinning that I could clearly see the redshift sloping along the trailing side. From the slight elevation of my perspective—above its equator—the blueshift along the edge that was rushing toward me glowed bright and true.
The Saga-star’s jets angled and flashed as it spun, whipping about in a terrible turmoil that only seemed stately because the scale was so gargantuan. Everything constructed in the Core required extreme radiation shielding. The couple of planets here that supported life had notoriously powerful magnetic fields and thick atmospheres, not to mention radiation-tolerant biospheres. Even the Delyth—little leggy systers composed mostly of animate metallic structures, who obtained their metabolic needs by soaking up radiation and who treated refined uranium like snack chips—had to use protective hardware in the Core, lest they die of overeating. And they were so hot that if I were to stand next to one, unshielded, my skin would redden and then bubble off after minutes of exposure.
Some of the photosynthetic systers had similar problems relating to too much light among all these stars: it could cause uncontrolled growth, even cancers. It’s not always as restful being a plant as you might imagine. And it’s definitely not easy to be an extremophile. Though honestly, every species is some kind of extremophile by somebody else’s standard.
Afar was well-shielded against the death rays that, from the perspective of his crew, saturated all of space. We still kept Sally’s bulk between him and the Saga-star. She was well-shielded, too, and a little bit extra couldn’t hurt.
We closed with Core General at a good but respectful clip, staying in the shipping lane. Sally didn’t run the emergency transponder: this was a routine approach even though we were full to the gills with casualties. We weren’t coming in hot and covered with ichor for once, and I was content with that.
We were all strapped to our couches in the command module—even Camphvis, whose rest period it was. Sally let her get away with it: nobody wants to miss the first glimpse of home. Sally had halted her spin for docking, so for the time being we had no rotational gravity.
Helen was with us, sitting on the spare couch. She wasn’t strapped in, merely holding herself in place… but she was an android, and acceleration really didn’t seem to bother her.
She was twisting her hands together so hard the golden material of her fingers creaked. It surprised me that an android could manage to register that much anxiety. A lot of people don’t realize that AIs aren’t built to register emotion only in order to make the evolved types feel more comfortable around them. They’re built to feel because, as far as anyone can tell, emotion is a critical part of cognition, and trying to build A-life without it never results in emergent sapience.
So her having emotions didn’t surprise me, antique though her design was. What surprised me was that she was as deregulated as I would expect an unrightminded human to be.
I guess the expectations of reasonable behavior were different back then?
A tug came out and relieved us of Afar, pulling him around toward the chill and dark of the methane section, which was located behind the bulk of the hospital, relative to the Saga-star and the Core. We zoomed along on another vector, toward our assigned ox airlock in the Emergency Department. It was all so terribly, weirdly routine.
A private ambulance zipped past us on a priority course. Sally changed vector to accommodate. Tsosie made an irritated noise.
“It could be a critical patient,” I said.
“I suppose that happens occasionally,” he replied, with a significant expression.
It happened more often than not, but I didn’t feel like arguing with him. We were currently nonemergency traffic, which meant other traffic took priority. Though Tsosie wasn’t wrong that some nonemergency traffic was more equal than others: the Synarche guaranteed everybody a humane subsistence, care, and an income, but it didn’t promise to allocate resources beyond that unless you could show societal benefit for that allocation, potential or real.