Learning the World

13 — Contact Clause

The summons had a priority override that lasered it through layer after layer of firewall: from the No-Trace on the recipient’s location, through the Do Not Disturb aura around his room and several subtler obstacles in his head, to finally penetrate the last barrier, sleep. Horrocks woke with heart pounding and eyes staring. In the dark a ghastly hallucination of the Oldest Man blazed in front of him, demanded his presence, and vanished.

The jolt of his awakening had disturbed Genome. She rolled, mumbling. Horrocks caressed her shoulders.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Conference call.”

“Talk quiet,” she said.

Her fingertips trailed across his back and thigh as he pushed away. He split the side of the permeable cocoon they’d shared and drifted across the still-dark room to the utility wall. The cocoon sealed itself again behind him. He docked with his clothes while sucking a hot-enough coffee. Its dim infrared lit his way to the hatch. The corridor’s daylight strip struck him like a rush, its wavelengths rebooting wakefulness faster than the black drug. He finger-thrust the wall and launched himself along; grabbed a handhold outside the first unoccupied nook, fifty metres along; swung in, braced himself against its curving walls like a child between the trunk and branch of a tree, and closed his eyes.

The summons’s track-back pulsed in front of him like a migraine. He tagged it and was yanked into a hasty telepresence. Constantine glowered from the far pole. Eleven other people were already there, of whom Horrocks recognised two by sight: Awlin Halegap, the speculator, and Amend Locke, the science-team boss for the Destiny II probe. A quick scan of their tags identified the others as team members or brokers in terrestrials. All science and finance, then; and all crew. All except himself were old hands.

“Jury is quorate,” said Constantine. “We thank the youngest member for his prompt arrival, all things considered.” The spark of humour faded as fast as Horrocks’s surge of alarm flared. A jury! And not one chosen by lot! Whatever this was, it was serious.

“We must proceed with all despatch,” Constantine continued. “Not fifteen minutes ago I learned, to my great displeasure and dismay, that the Destiny II probe has made contact with the inhabitants. More precisely, the inhabitants have made contact with it, and it has responded.”

Shouts rose all round; if it had been a real space, they would have echoed. Constantine ignored them and flashed a file into common view. The clamour died in a moment of silent study. The first picture was a white rectangle unequally divided by a jagged, curving black line with an isolated arrow-like shape well above it, somewhere about the middle. On to the rectangle, a second or two later, a coloured picture was overlain: a planetary survey photograph. Blue sea, green coast, brown desert. The jagged line fitted the coast, the arrow marked a spot in the desert. The image zoomed to the spot. Under maximum resolution it picked out a dusty polygon of low structures, which on enhancement resolved to buildings and ramps.

“The sketch-map was the signal, and the spot you’re looking at was the source,” said Constantine. The view pulled back from the first picture to include it, as a piece of white card or paper, in a raw bug’s-eye view of two of the bat people staring straight into camera. “The natives are using our own surveillance devices to communicate with us. The response from the orbiter was this…”

Horrocks almost laughed to see a prerecorded image of the Oldest Man himself in his best silk formals, announcing that the expedition came in peace and showing off a view of the interior of the sunliner, followed by a brief download of the ship’s specs and the latest news from the Red Sun system. That last was still running when Constantine flicked the view off.

“Who is responsible for this?” Constantine demanded.

“I am,” said Amend Locke. “You recorded the introduction for me about three hundred years ago. It’s the standard courtesy call to a claim-jumper or a data colony.”

“Yes, yes,” said Constantine. “I remember that. What I don’t remember is authorising its use here and now.”

“It’s a default,” said Amend Locke. “As soon as the probe detects a clear attempt to hail it, however obscure, it fires off the standard message.”

A flicker of corroborating data interchange accompanied the dialogue. Horrocks didn’t bother to do more than glance at it, but filed it for later.

“If there was a wall here,” said Constantine, “I swear I should now be banging my head against it. We knew by the time the probe went into orbit that we weren’t dealing with a claim-jump or a data colony. Why wasn’t that default… amended, Locke?”

“It was overlooked,” she said. “The responsibility is mine. The default is buried deep in the probe’s software and, well, with all the new information coming in we…”

“All right,” said Constantine, with a wave of the hand. “Next question. From a swift study of these latest pictures I see that the bugs are borne by some kind of beetle, big enough and common enough for the inhabitants to notice. How did that happen? And why didn’t we notice?”

“That’s straightforward,” said Hardcastle Wood, the biologist. “The bugs are adaptive and opportunistic. In all hitherto existing situations they’ve never had anything bigger to work with than single-celled organisms or slime moulds, and natural prominences — rocks, essentially — for their amplifiers. When the assemblers encountered a fast-breeding and ubiquitous insectoid they seized upon it. Likewise with trees. As for why we didn’t notice… the virtuality software is seamless independently of the quality of the incoming data, and, ah, the lay viewers just referred casually to ‘bugs,’ and we ourselves—”

“Defaults, defaults, everyone’s got defaults,” chanted Constantine. “Tell me about it. Don’t tell me about it. I know what fifteen thousand years of confirmed conjecture can do to harden paths and bury assumptions. And speaking of assumptions — I take it there is a size limit on these bugs? We are not talking about bat people, or even the little bat beasts, fluttering around with wires in their optics?”

“No,” said Wood. “Although if they were left long enough to mutate—” He looked thoughtful. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Good,” said Constantine. “Glad you’ve got that well in hand. Now: action?”

“We could cobble together a more comprehensible and apt message,” said Amend. “After all, now that we know they’ve detected us, we might as well talk back to them. There’s a standard CETI package somewhere deep in the vaults.”

“Riddled with defaults and assumptions, I’ll warrant,” said Constantine. “No, thank you. Let me remind you that the ship’s complement has yet to decide what we’re to do here. The matter is moot. I move that we terminate the message at once, and the surveillance.”

“The surveillance?” Hardcastle Wood asked, outraged.

“Yes. Burn out the bugs.” Constantine paused, frowning. “They do have a self-destruct mechanism?”

“Oh yes,” said Amend Locke. “It’s a default.” Constantine glared at her, but Horrocks could see in the interchange that Constantine had accepted the dig as payback for his earlier pun on her name.

“But why should we do it?” protested Wood. “Terminate the message, yes, but the surveillance?”

Emphatic nods all round, except from Horrocks and Constantine.

To Horrocks’s surprise, a prompt from Constantine flashed in front of his eyes: you tell them.

“Two reasons,” Horrocks said, before he’d thought of one. He paused and raised a finger to stall while he gathered his wits. “Ah, first, there’s no telling what the aliens will learn from studying the bugs, now that they’ve figured out what they are. They’ve grasped electronics but haven’t yet achieved miniaturized circuits, let alone nanotechnology. The bugs could inspire them to these and more, at an earlier and even less stable stage of development than our ancestors did. Second… this has more to do with us, but I think immersion in the Destiny II virtualities is becoming bad for morale.”

Constantine’s private ping flashed: Yes!!!

Which was more than Horrocks felt. He had made his second point without thinking, and without having thought of it before. But, now that he’d said it, it made sense of a lot of what he’d taken from his encounter with the Red Sun Circle, and with Atomic and Grant. It even made sense, at some still obscure level, of why he’d spent the night with Genome.

“Why do you say that?” asked Claudin Empirio, one of the scientists.

Over to you, Horrocks flashed to Constantine. He could see himself getting used to this mode of surreptitious, footnoted conversation.

“What our young colleague is driving at,” said Constantine, “is that immersion in the doubtless fascinating details of the lives of the bat people is undermining our objectivity. We are becoming fractious, my friends. We have decisions to make about what we do in this system. We already know all we need to know to make them. We already have far more data than we could process in a decade. Further immersion in Destiny II can serve only to raise the emotional temperature. Once more, I move to terminate the message and the surveillance.”

“May we take that in two parts?” asked Hardcastle Wood.

“No,” said Constantine. “If we don’t end the surveillance, it becomes the message — and one over which we have no control. Both parts stand or fall together.”

“Further point of order,” said Amend Locke. “If we burn out the bugs, other stuff is certain to burn. Damage to life and property is inevitable.”

“We must all accept full responsibility,” said Constantine. “Before the bat people themselves, if it should come to that. My whole case is that the consequences of leaving them in place could be incalculable and severe.”

This seemed to satisfy everyone, though Horrocks suspected it was because harm to the bat people did not seem real, and facing their justice — if they had such a thing, which they probably did — a remote prospect indeed.

A minute or so of discussion ensued, all electronic and too fast for Horrocks to follow. It reminded him of the final moments of the wrestling bouts he’d seen in White City. The result was as swift, and as final. The vote went nine to four in favour, with Wood, Empirio, Locke, and Halegap against.

Constantine’s finger stabbed at a virtual key somewhere the second the vote was taken.

“Done,” he said. He smiled around at everyone. “Jury dissolved. Now it is we who are on trial. Goodbye and good luck.”

The virtuality broke up. Horrocks blinked out of it and gazed for a while past his knees at the wall of the nook. Then he elbowed out of it and into the now busy corridor and joined the traffic flow in the direction back to his room. He wanted one last untrammelled fuck before he became notorious.

14 365:05:25 10:20

It’s like being jolted awake from a dream.

And then to be shown a glimpse of another dream, and to have that dashed too. The Yellow Wall is full of angry voices and quiet weeping. Not from me.

Of course I’m furious about them crashing the virtualities. I’m even more upset about them breaking off the contact. The bat people contacted us! Surely that counts for something about their maturity? Their desire to learn from us? That map with the arrow in the middle — what else could it have been but an invitation! This is where we are; please drop in! I’m shaking with rage at the jury, especially Horrocks Mathematical. I’d have expected better of him.

But I must stay calm, and so must you. A lot of you are outraged about the decision, and so am I, but we should base our arguments on facts. And one thing that is not a fact is what many of you believe: that the decision was illegal.

It wasn’t.

So to calm ourselves down, let’s think about the ship’s constitution. I started reading up about the Contract after coming across the contact clause. (Still no response on that, by the way. Don’t any of you care!) You’ll notice I said reading about. Reading the Contract itself would take years. In fact, only software can read it all and understand it, and that software is itself very old and much modified. (You see where this is going? But that’s a problem for future generations — who will of course be ever so much smarter than us. We hope.) The Contract is vast, and it’s vast for a reason, as I’ve found. I found it by starting with kids’ stuff that I learned back on the estate, and refreshing my knowledge of that and working my way up.

Forming a ship’s complement partakes both of launching a company and founding a new world. Over fourteen millennia it’s been done many, many times, and we’re all descended from people on ships whose Contract worked; or, if it went wrong, could be changed to make it work. Successful changes became incorporated in other ships’ Contracts, and so it went on. Social evolution!

That’s why the Contract is full of patches and makeshifts and amendments and exceptions, like very old software or the DNA in a natural genome, and far too long to read. But the basics are simple, robust, time-tested, and hard-wired. You start with one or two or three hundred thousand people who (hope they) are willing to spend about four centuries in each other’s company, completely isolated (apart from comms) from everyone else in the universe. They’re willing to spend that time turning a gigantic reaction-mass tank into a comfortable habitat, by means of turning it again and again into properties that inevitably end up as reaction mass. Along the way, some might do very well, and others — by bad luck or incompetence — might lose out. Which is, as you know, all well and good and the natural order of things, but for some reason people are a little unwilling to sign up for it (and when they do, in desperate situations, the ships go bad; we know that now).

Hence the Contract. What it boils down to is that nobody can end up owning nothing, nobody (no individual, no group, and no everybody) can end up owning everything, and every adult gets a say in decisions. Not all decisions (which would get you back to everybody owning everything) and not even all big decisions, but all decisions “within everyone’s competence and wherein everyone has standing” (it says here).

Such decisions, it turns out, are few. (Compared to all decisions taken, that is. The Ship’s Council is not short of work.)

Others are up to individuals and smaller groups, and one type of group is the jury.

And yes, I’m afraid it is within the competence of a jury of scientists and financiers and rocking Horrocks Mathematical to decide to trash our virtualities from Destiny II.

Which doesn’t mean we have to agree with it, or let it stand, and I for one don’t mean to do one or the other. Neither should you. Not because it’s illegal, but because it’s insincere. The reasons given in the public record aren’t those for which the decision was taken. Nor do the spoken deliberations have anything to do with the real arguments that prevailed. These, of course, remain in people’s heads, where not even a Council subpoena can get at them. We’re all watching the Council debates at the moment, but I can’t help thinking they’re debating without all the relevant information.

Look at the transcript! Do they really expect us to believe that the probe team didn’t know about the prerecorded message? That they didn’t know the bugs would parasitise large organisms? That the aliens would find the bugs? Or, for that matter, that they decided so casually to start fires on Destiny II? What really went on at that jury was not what we’ve been told.

Horrocks Mathematical’s head rang with incoming messages. Filtering them made it ache. A scanty sampling had determined him to ignore most of them. He now knew what Atomic had meant by “hate mail.” The strange thing was that here in the Engineer’s Dream, where he’d taken refuge, he was the toast of the company.

“This’ll get the little breeders back to work,” someone had said. The sentiment was general. Micro-gee trainers had seen a significant slackening of business as the alien virtualities had gripped the ship generation. Constructors’ orders for seeding vessels had dried to a far lower level than even the preliminary trickle that would be expected at this stage of the process.

Horrocks closed his eyes and shook his head. He suspected he had drunk too much. When he opened his eyes he found Genome looking at him with curiosity and concern. “You can turn it off, you know,” she said.

“What?”

“Your headphone. The messages will just reroute to your externals.”

“Oh, right. Of course.”

He’d never had so much incoming to handle; the bombardment itself had prevented him from recalling how to cope with it. He closed his eyes again, focused his mind, searched his options, found the choice and made it. For some reason the cutout presented itself to his natural sensorium as an aural hallucination of a distinct clunk. The silence was joyous, the relief ecstatic. “It’s like when you’re a little kid,” said Genome, “and you bang your head on the wall just for the feeling you get when you stop.”

“You did that?” said Horrocks, baffled.

“When I was very small,” said Genome. She looked like she wanted to change the subject. “Speaking of kids, your favourite flatfoot has been badmouthing you again.”

Horrocks swigged. “I’m not surprised. Nor interested.”

“Take a look anyway,” said Genome. She sent him a ping and outlined with her forefingers a rectangle in the air; the ping carried the data, the gesture evoked the page for him. As he scanned the text a cross-reference niggled at his mind, too persistent to brush away. There was some real urgency there, of the kind that most people would blush to attach to a mere angry note.

“She sent me a call, too,” said Horrocks. He grinned at Genome. “Mind if I share it? I might need some moral support.”

She squeezed his shoulder. “Go ahead.”

Horrocks sent a tightly specified query into his log of stored calls. It returned as text. Atomic had wasted no bandwidth on voice, let alone video. That was what he thought first; then he noticed the heavy cladding of encryption around the message: she’d had no bandwidth to waste.

“Hello Horrocks,” she’d written. “If I know you, what went on in that jury went right over your head, just as it would have gone over mine. The difference is, that you have it in your head. I urge you to take some time to take a look at it. When you’ve done that, I’m sure you’ll know what to do, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to influence you. But do please take a look. Regards, Atomic Discourse Gale.”

“At least she’s polite,” said Genome.

“There is that,” said Horrocks. “I expected my ears to burn.”

“Are you going to do what she asked?”

“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.)

So, on this issue, the crew are on the same side as the ship generation.

The Destiny II virtualities became an arena of that conflict of interest. Remember I warned that we would get very frustrated without something to channel our energies and urge to explore? The virtualities were on the way to becoming just that: we were all slacking off on our projects and exploring Destiny II. It’s not just that the founders want us immersed in virtualities until the bat people are set on some kind of stable path. It’s not just cynical. By understanding the bat people and the planet in more depth, we’d be better prepared to contact them, communicate with them, and if necessary intervene when the time came to do so. Who knows how long that would be — years? decades? But until then, the founders want to avoid contact, and any too obvious activity in the system, at almost any cost.

Some well-placed people in the crew, I suspect, have done their best to rock this.

What I can’t understand is why they summoned Horrocks to the jury, unless they knew he’d leak the proceedings — the real ones — and wanted him to do so. They must want the founders and the Council to know. Why?

Send me your ideas.

14 365:05:26 00:00

To the reader: This message was not posted by the author of this biolog. It is being posted to all channels of live communication simultaneously. This biolog and all other private one-to-many channels are temporarily suspended with immediate effect. Private (one-to-one) communications are not affected or monitored. For the next twelve hours, only emergency calls are being routed. A state of emergency exists. The contact clause has been invoked. For documentation and Contract verification, query ship memory on relevant phrases. For further information, please locate and use regular public news channels. Expect service interruptions.