Bruno felt a moment of dizziness as Boat Gods pulled itself toward the whirling baton that was Newhope. But he had, at various times in his youth, found himself trapped in the ertial supervaccum of a ring collapsiter, or standing on the windblown surface of the very first neutronium-cored planette, or falling into a hypermass somewhere. Hell, one of him had fallen into the sun itself, and never returned. A bit of spinning wasn’t going to stop him!
In the last few meters of closure, Boat Gods itself began to spin. And because it too was ertial, it matched the rotation of Newhope in no time at all, and with almost no sensation.
The airlock knew its business, too; once the two hulls had kissed, it commenced tearing an opening in the wellstone plates of Newhope, shuffling the atoms aside into a sort of docking collar. From the inside of Boat Gods, this activity sounded like the crack of billiard balls followed by a light rainfall. And when it came time to leave, the airlock could just as easily pull the atoms back again, restoring Newhope’s wellstone to something very like its original condition.
Bruno had invented this technique long ago. Bruno had invented a lot of things. Why, then, must something as truly useful as a wormhole generator elude him? Perhaps he was getting old and slow, alas. He didn’t even throw off his safety harness and fling open the airlock to see what lay behind it. Instead he studied his scans again, more intently.
The results were not encouraging; living people would show up as hot spots, of which he detected none. They would require atmosphere, of which he detected none. This was not surprising; at 29 Kelvin—barely above the four-degree cosmic background—every gas but helium would have condensed out as liquid or settled as a frost. But he didn’t detect liquids, either; the ship’s crew compartments had leaked or been deliberately evacuated. There might of course be stored human beings in a temporary fax buffer somewhere. These would show up as dense charge patterns in a wellstone matrix, and he found a few of those behind a structure that might be some sort of low-quality print plate. But over hundreds of years the cosmic-ray flux would have scrambled much of the data into total nonsense. If those were human patterns, the people they represented were dead. To survive the journey, any stored human images would need to reside in shielded memory cores, of which Bruno detected none.
What he did detect, in the cargo pods attached to Newhope’s midsection, just aft of the crew quarters, were cylindrical masses of water ice, roughly three meters long and one meter wide. Thousands of them; tens of thousands. The ice was shot through with complex organics which he couldn’t identify from here, and by tuning his sensors to a calcium channel he was able to pick out fine, solid structures within the cylinders. Human skeletons, surrounded by greasy envelopes of frozen human flesh, drowned in ice-filled tubes of glass and metal.
Twenty-five thousand frozen people. Interesting. Troubling. There would be a lot of bureaucrats busy on this one.
Freezing was not considered a lethal event in the Queendom of Sol, any more than heart failure or drowning were lethal events. A few people had even been reanimated after hundreds of years of cold storage. This was one of those “civic-duty” things Tamra had enacted in the Queendom’s earliest days—hunting down from the Age of Death all the frozen and mummified and pickled bodies which might conceivably be restored to life. Most of these efforts had been pro forma, mainly an archaeological exercise with little chance of medical success, but a few—twenty or thirty, Bruno thought—had been resurrected, and were brief celebrities in that heady time when anything seemed possible. Look, look! We can bring history itself to life!
Ah, but there were limits to human achievement. Painful limits, as Bruno and Tamra had learned through the blood and toil of their exiled subjects. Projects could fail; lives could end. Whole star colonies could suffer economic collapse so severe that the air tankers stopped running, their scattered habitats suffocating one by one while the Queendom stood helplessly by. Indeed, whole civilizations could lurch from seeming health to agonizing death in less time than the signals took to reach Mother Sol. Theirs was a hard universe, which granted no clemency.
In many cases, the only “survivors” of a colony’s demise were those who had managed, by hook or by crook, to have a summary of their neural patterns transmitted back to the Queendom. Hardly more than interactive mail—just a few petabytes, or a few hundred petabytes. They were not people, though they sometimes believed they were. But their transmission consumed precious energy and transceiver time which an ailing colony could ill afford.
And even if they were people, didn’t the Queendom have enough already? Was there room for more? Copy-hour restrictions had been tightened and retightened, to the point where most individuals—even those who’d once sent whole herds of themselves out into the world—counted themselves lucky to be plural at all. The waiting list for a birth license was now five hundred years long. And yet the cities grew taller and wider every year, encroaching not only on the precious primordial wildernesses of Earth, but the invented ones of Mars and Venus, which were far more delicate. Half the population was living in caverns and domes, dreaming in vain of fresh air. Should these very citizens be expected to fund the creation of an expensive new person from the tatters of a dead one?
So the messages remained, for the most part, in the limbo of quantum storage, against the day when resources might exist to birth and house them properly. If, indeed, such a day could be expected at all.
And here before Bruno was a similar question: what were the rights of a frozen, cosmically irradiated corpse from outside the Queendom? Doctors would have to be consulted before any decisions were made here—certainly before anything was vaporized by the navy. But why had someone gone to the trouble of bringing these corpses here, across the vastness of interstellar space? To be resurrected? Had the Queendom of Sol become a kind of afterlife, a dream of heaven for the children of the colonies?
Alas, there was almost nothing else onboard this ship. She was oversized for the job, her crew quarters mostly empty. The only other feature of note was a much smaller cluster of bodies—four, in fact—just forward of her engine control rooms, in a space that looked like a workshop or laboratory of some kind. For what? For whom? This ship had seen heavy modification in its long years abroad.
The chamber was not far from Bruno’s own docking site. And presently, the sound of rain ceased; the burrowing airlock had gently punched through. Bruno threw off his restraints and rose from his couch.
“Sire,” Boat Gods said, in a basso voice rich with gravitas. “You’ll want your helmet on.”
“Ah!” Bruno said, eyeing the transparent, nearly invisible dome tucked under his arm. “So I might! I’d’ve opened this hatch on hard vacuum.”
“Hardly, Sire.” The ship could not truly be offended, but it managed to sound that way. It would not have allowed the hatch to open.
“Well,” Bruno said, popping his helmet in place and listening to it crackle itself sealed, “do please open it now.”
“Aye, Sire.”
It would take a steady, hundred-kilowatt feed to wake up Newhope’s higher functions, and given the level of cosmic-ray scrambling and the long absence of functioning maintenance routines, the wellstone was inclined to take this process very slowly indeed. Still, unseen and unsensed by Bruno, the starship’s running lights came on, and its interior began, gradually, to warm.