‘Yes,’ said Reid. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
There was a lot wrong with that, but we did it anyway.
The questions we set the fast folk were these:
What is the way through the Malley Mile, back to the Solar System?
The answer to that was downloaded to the on-board computer of a standard spacecraft, the kind that on New Mars they use for herding comet-fragments.
What can be done to alter the orbital position of a Malley nonexotic-matter wormhole gateway?
The answer to that was downloaded to a hasty extension of the spacecraft’s on-board computer.
Is there a cure for the condition indicated in this blood-simple?
The answer to that was downloaded to a standard medical kit, and injected into Ax.
How can we recover and resurrect the minds and bodies of the stored dead?
The answer to that was downloaded to equipment which we lugged down the treacherous steps to the shore of the cometary lake.
The whole process took us the rest of that night – but then, we were all slow folk. When we had made sure we’d isolated the memory-stores, to repeat the exercise if necessary, we dropped the Blue Goo into the tanks where the fast folk lived. They didn’t see it coming, and I’m sure they didn’t feel anything.
‘Standard computing practice,’ Reid told Tamara and Ax. ‘Save the source-code, and blow away the object-code.’
Meg and I departed from Dee’s mind, down a fibre-optic cable under the canal, and (via various transfers that I still wake up cold thinking about) into the control module of a probe standing on a laser-launch gantry on the other side of Ship City – the same probe to which we’d downloaded the wormhole co-ordinates. Meanwhile, one of Reid’s men took a helicopter across town, with a handful of molecular construction-machinery which we could, if necessary, parley into a whole manufacturing-complex. He packed it into the ship’s tiny hold. We made sure our genetic information was loaded with it.
There wasn’t much room in the control module for VR. We experienced through the ship’s senses, but we did have an optical television link, and through it we watched the people in the cave, and by the shore. Reid and Dee and Tamara and Ax were engrossed in argument, with each other and with people in the city. That Twoday morning, Circle Square was the focus of what sometimes looked like a spill-over of its central island’s wild parties, and sometimes looked like some kind of mass democracy, and now and again broke out in a riot. Various courts – Talgarth’s, and others with more conventional procedures – were in session on the numerous lawsuits that had arisen from the last few days’ events. One Anderson Parris (temp. dec’d.) was suing Reid for the actions of his gynoid, Dee Model.
Reid abruptly stopped arguing, and started mobilising what resources of money and charity there were in Ship City for disaster relief. New Mars had no famines, no wars, and just enough industrial accidents to sustain the need for such organisation. What they now faced was a disaster in reverse.
We cut to the cameras and remotes overlooking the shore of the cometary lake. In that dark, nutrient-rich water, the process by which we’d resurrected Wilde was repeated and multiplied, with the terrifying speed of smart-matter processing. Bodies formed, by the hundreds, then the thousands, to drift or thrust themselves towards the raw, recent shelf of the lake’s beach. Dripping, coughing fluids from their new lungs, they hauled themselves blindly onto the shore and lay for a while in the sunlight. After a few minutes they’d look up at the circling aircraft, the hovering helicopters, and wonder where the hell they were.
The last we saw of Wilde he was far along the shore, searching among the naked and shivering bodies for Annette, whom he had counted, and who had counted him, among the dead.
The lasers boiled us into orbit, then our chemical rockets took over. We let the guidance-systems do the work – I rather fancied trying out my rocketry reflexes again, after all this time, but Meg talked me out of it. We talked a lot, in that long topple to the daughter wormhole: about what we might find, and what we could do if there was no-one left to warn, or able to act on a warning. The fast folk had come up with a few suggestions. Our first priority, on arriving in the Solar System, would be to find the resources of matter and energy to carry them out. The real constraint was the resource we couldn’t be sure we had – time.
We fell through the wormhole gate.
What we saw almost made me flee back into it.
We emerged, as predicted, in orbit around Jupiter – a high orbit, which had not been been predicted. For the first time I saw the Ring from above. It was nothing to Saturn’s, but it was spectacular nonetheless. Concentric white rings, divided by smaller black rings which must have been scribed over the centuries by the orbits of Jupiter’s remaining moons. Jupiter itself had changed, its coloured bands now tamed, channelled into up-wellings that formed hexagonal cells, with a sketchy hint of more solid structures dividing them.
‘It’s like a honeycomb!’ Meg whispered, behind my mind.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And we don’t want to meet the hive.’
Meg’s reply was to magnify my forward view. A hundred kilometres ahead, along the same orbital path, was a swarm of the nastiest-looking spacecraft I’ve ever seen. They had a perfection of mechanism, a finished look to their huge articulated extensions of gleaming brass and steel. Their multiple eyes and probing antennae were turned on us. Their missiles and lasers moved into combat-ready position like unsheathed stings.
Our own antennae were instantly battered with hailing-frequencies. I felt the feathery touch of radar on my hull.
‘Firewalls up?’ I asked Meg.
‘Yes.’
I cautiously opened an incoming video link, and sent an identifying burst of microwave to the orbital forts – or fighters – ahead.
On the video-screen in the visual centres of my mind, hazy through the protective firewalls of anti-virus software, appeared a woman’s face. A young woman, with braided locks, epicanthic eyelids, broad cheekbones, coffee-coloured skin and thin lips and wide teeth…it’s hard to say just what elements went to make up the conviction, but I was certain she was of a new race, one different from any I’d encountered before: human, I guess is the word I’m after.
‘Spayk Angloslav, robot?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘English?’
She smiled. ‘Yays, Ehnglish. You pick it up from old transmissions, yays? Language has changed. Much has changed.’
Much has changed.
The fleet that awaited us was that of the crack Cassini Division (as they proudly call themselves) of the Solar Defence Group, seconded to the Jovian Anomaly Research Committee. Their sole mission is to guard the Malley Mile, and shoot down anything that rises off the Jovian surface. At first they thought we were aliens, or spawn of the fast folk. They were not pleased when we told them we didn’t trust their transmissions either – even if their ships, unlike ours, were big enough (we grudgingly allowed) to support organic life. Eventually they swarmed out, surrounding us like space-suited South Sea islanders, pressing their face-plates to our lenses and (some of them) their tongues to the insides of their faceplates.
Meg took spectroscopic analyses of their tongues and the fog of their laughing breath, and assured me they were of human flesh and blood all right. Then it was our turn to reassure them. They interrogated us for days, and then they relented, and grew us in pods. They kept the pods isolated and at the focus of a laser-cannon battery.
I think they were more relieved than we were when we emerged in human bodies. Generations of viral radio messages from the successive civilisations of the fast folk on Jupiter have left them very cautious about electronic computers. Most of the computing in the Solar System is done on machines that Babbage would have recognised – from his wildest dreams. I have seen these calculating-machines. They fill hollowed mountains. They are powered by dams, cooled by rivers. They are used to solve millions of equations.