Learning the World

15 — Hollow Spaces of the Forward Cone

14 365:11:02 10:43

Issue 100! That’s not a number I ever expected to reach when I switched to mailing. Nor did I then hope to have more readers than I ever did when anybody could access it. So thanks to all who’ve subscribed, and to all who’ve spread the word. I still miss the biologs, though. The newslines do their job but it’s all professionals and much less exciting than the buzz. So I appreciate all the mails that come to me, and the mailing lists, and so on. And I know it’s not just me — I know there are hundreds if not thousands out there writing and speaking and performing against the emergency and the embargo, people whom I’ve never heard of and who’ve never heard of me. (How do I know? From the number I do hear about, and how I hear about them — by chance, by word of mouth, and by the people I meet when I go to other towns or who come to Far Crossing, and I find whole communities of people in the same fight. And from the songs.) It’s not the same, but it gives us heart, it keeps up our spirits, and helps us realise that this dark time will soon be over.

Nearly six months of State of Emergency; just over six months to go. Soon? It seems a long time, I know, but remember that in that time even more of us will have turned sixteen, as I did a couple of months ago, and we’ll not just be able to vote in the referendum on the emergency but petition a recall and throw out the entire Council. Throw out the Council! I want to write that in virtual letters across the sunline. It’s going to happen. It’s unfair — most of the people on the Council are good people. (I’ll get hammered for saying that, I know, but it’s true, so don’t bother.) But it’s the price you pay. If you keep your ship generation cooped up in the ship, your ship generation grows up like grass under your feet and a huge cohort of it comes of age and votes you out.

What have we accomplished in the past six months?

There are those who’ll say, nothing much. We’re still stuck here, the embargo’s still in place, the emergency’s still in place. To those — I’m thinking of S____ and H____ here, and you know who you are — who think like that, just think back to how it was that midnight when the contact clause was invoked and the boom came down. Or think about the morning after it. It was worse than when we lost the virtualities. It was as if the sunline had gone out and then the lights had gone out. We were stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly everyone was all alone. We couldn’t see in an instant what others all over the world thought. All we had was the people around us and the talking heads on the newslines.

I remember that morning. I never wrote about it at the time because it was too depressing. But look back at it now, compare it with this morning, and it’s downright encouraging. Here is how it was.

Something woke me before the sunline came out, about six in the morning or so. I really needed a bite and a brew, so I climbed into some clothes and pulled on a pair of springy shoes and spiralled down the stairs and jogged off down Windy and on to Dark (is how it felt at the time) and didn’t even pause to pick up the day’s newslines at the hotspot. In the half-light of the farside I noticed people standing in small groups on the street, talking. I didn’t know, maybe I’d missed a big all-night party or something. There was an odd sense of quiet, and I couldn’t quite understand why. I could hear voices, the sounds of early risers rising and early birds reaffirming their property rights, the hum of an engine and the hiss of tyres in the next street.

And then I noticed. The quiet was in my head. Most times of course you don’t listen to the buzz. You don’t read the chat. But you know it’s there in the background, like distant surf, like far-off lights. I stopped for a moment, my heart thumping much harder than the running justified, and closed my eyes and interrogated my inner ear. Nothing. No sound, no lights, nothing in my head but me. I could taste myself like the roof of my mouth.

Maybe I hadn’t quite woken up. I didn’t think anything was seriously wrong. A vague, half-formed thought floated through my fuzzy mind that the comms might be down due to the previous day’s bonfire of the virtualities. An even vaguer thought drifted by that it served them right; “them” being, of course, the jury who’d pulled the plug and the Council that had endorsed their decision. It may have been the first time I ever thought of the founders, the older generation, as “them” with quite that emphasis.

As I jogged along a curious thing happened, which had nothing to do with anything that happened later, and nothing obvious to do with anything that had happened immediately before. Looking back, I can see that it may have had something to do with that alone-in-my-head feeling. What happened was this. I became very much aware of being me, and it felt strange. It was as if a wider, cooler mind had found itself in my head, and was surprised to be there behind my eyes. And yet that larger mind was mine. Very odd. It passed in a few moments, leaving me a little shaken, curious, and quite unable to recapture it. I have never found a name for this experience, and though I’ve had it several times since, I can neither induce it at will nor prevent its recurrence. When I tell people about it they either look blank or say: “Oh! You mean you have that too?” But it isn’t a bond between us, not a secret, just a peculiarity, an anomaly, perhaps as random a feature of our minds as the ability to roll one’s tongue is of our bodies. It solves no problem, conveys no insight, and yet leaves me with an impression of significance. It has an aftertaste, but no taste. That impression, that aftertaste, may be its empty secret: it may be a tiny glitch in the process by which our brains find meaning in sense.

But I digress.

I pushed in to the Yellow Wall and found the place crowded. Knowing how gradually it fills up even from about seven or so, this was a surprise. It was full of people who looked like they’d been up all night, and not at a party. Nobody talked much. The place reeked of coffee and inhaler fumes and sweat. The loudest noise came from the wheezing labour of the air conditioner. It was the most squalid atmosphere I’d breathed since my microgravity training. Most people looked down at visible or invisible comms or watched the video wall. The scene came from outside the Council Hall. As I made for the percolator I twitched my ears to pick up the audio. You know what I heard. The cup I dropped was empty. Its crash made everybody jump.

Faces turned toward me.

“You didn’t know?” asked Far Sun Park. One of the New Lamarck kids. I was with her at our last big shock, when we first received news of the transmissions. (Why all those flashbacks to training?) She cried then, and she looked like she’d been crying now, for all that she’d matured in the meantime.

I shook my head. “Has it passed?”

“Ninety-eight to thirty-five,” she said. “No abstentions.”

I summoned a brave face. “Thirty-five? That’s more than we could have hoped.”

Some people looked at me as if I was talking nonsense, but most looked like they wanted to hear what I had to say.

“The emergency can only last a year,” I said. “We can design and train like we expect to go out tomorrow and by the time it’s up, we’ll be more ready to go out than we’ve ever been.”

“They won’t let us go out,” said Far.

“Who’s they?” I said. “A year from now, most of us will have the vote.”

“By that time, they’ll have convinced most of us that the moratorium is a good idea.”

“They’re not the only ones who can do convincing.”

At that point everybody just laughed. I turned away and gathered the shards of the broken cup. Then I got myself the coffee and snack I’d come for. I sat down with it and wrote my first “exile” post and sent it to everyone who’d ever contacted me. I had plenty of time to do it, because nobody wanted to talk to me.

Compare that to how it is now. This morning I rolled out of bed, leaving Grant to sleep, and grabbed my breakfast here. I went to the workshop and did a couple of hours on the habitat virtual tests. I wasn’t the first person in, and the loft filled up fast. When I looked around, the real and virtual spaces were more crowded than the desks, with projects big and wild. Grant’s waterworld resort no longer looks outrageous — there’s a scheme for farming the algae that has so far survived three feasibility studies; an even wilder project for exporting water by whipping waterspouts to escape velocity (don’t ask); some very neat work with using gas giant slingshot effects to get a head start on the long tube; all of which are attracting some founder capital — which of course does its bit to undermine the pro-embargo coalition, by vesting interests in colonization and getting out. On the cultural side there’s a small school of artists over in the corner data-mining Red Sun transmissions — four years behind, obviously, and four hundred years of cultural drift off, but that’s what makes what they make of it interesting, even beautiful.

I’ll tell you a secret: we’ve gained by losing the virtualities. Without that distraction we’re more focused on our work and on our plans. Some of us. The truth is, the workshop is crowded not because too many people are working on projects, but because not enough are to justify opening another one.

And therein lies a problem, one I was reminded of as I walked to the cafe just now for my morning break. The streets and parks were busy. What worries me is what they were busy with. Fun, games, music, talk talk talk. Half a dozen kids loafing, passing an inhaler around, giggling. Nothing wrong with that at a party, but this was ten in the morning! Saw one guy cross-legged on a bench, whittling a bit of bent branch into a vague semblance of an animal. Doubtless he thinks it’s art and that he’s accomplishing something. Not everyone is into starting projects. Some always take more initiative than others. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that too many people who should be initiating projects aren’t, and too many people who should be checking out which project they want to join aren’t bothering. They don’t have plans and they don’t bother even to study. They’re out there playing under the sunline.

Who can blame them? Well, we can, and we do. We busy folk call them slackers and birthrighters, because they’re living on their birthrights and not earning or learning. But they didn’t just happen to be born with idle bones. They’re idle because they don’t believe they’ll ever get out, at least not for decades. So we should blame the founders, and all those who voted for the embargo?

No! We should blame ourselves! We’re not doing enough to convince them that the embargo won’t last more than another six months. All we have to do is vote. The voting-age cohort of the ship generation is enough to tip the balance.

I’ve just had an awful thought. If we don’t shift that crowd of slackers, they might vote to keep the embargo.

Think about that. Actually, when I think about that, I get such a terrible sense of suffocation that I gasp. And I think about killing. I really feel as if I could go out and choke slackers with my bare hands.

I’m as shocked as you are.

Synchronic Narrative Storm was showing a group of five-year-olds the big machine that turned bales of mown grass into milkshakes and meat patties when a shadow darkened the sunlight from the doorway. She turned and saw Constantine.

“You grace us with your real presence,” she said, in an electric message with a sharp edge. He smiled and stepped out of sight. Synchronic passed the five-year-olds to the charge of two ten-year-olds, who took over the demonstration so quickly that Synchronic could smell the sizzle before she was out of the door. She found Constantine leaning on the side of the barn, in a pose that needed only a chewed straw between his teeth to complete.

“You have some nerve coming here,” she said.

“Yes, my lady,” he said. He straightened away from the wooden wall and gestured to the pathways. “Care for a stroll?”

“If you must.”

“Thank you.”

They walked between gnarled trees. Mowing machines like large trilobites with baskets on their backs trimmed the verges.

“Feed for the nanotech cow,” remarked Constantine. “A cumbrous process. In the cones we grow food straight from the gunk.”

“You didn’t come here to pass the time of day.”

“No, my lady, I did not.”

“I still haven’t forgiven you, and I’m not going to, so don’t ask.”

The subterfuge of the surveillance still rankled; its exposure, at least, still embarrassed him. She could see his blush in the infrared.

“I didn’t come to ask that,” he said. “Nor to offer mine.”

“You think I need any?”

“Not particularly.” He looked sidelong at her. “Business is business. Can we put all that aside for the moment? Accepting it as unfinished business?”

She shrugged. “If you insist. So what did you come for?”

“We’re in danger of losing the ship generation.”

“I’m aware of the problems,” she said. “ ‘You can’t tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.’ Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.”

“All true as it ever was,” he said, “but it’s more than that. They were ripe to go out, and now they’re overripe, to the point of becoming somewhat rotten. A significant number are demoralised. Another and better fraction are becoming angry and organised against the founders.”

“And whose fault is that? They were conveniently distracted and constructively occupied with the virtualities until you crashed them.”

He raised a hand in front of him, palm facing her. “I know, I know,” he said. “Let’s not recriminate. As we agreed, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So the question is what’s to be done about it. I think we have to give them hope, and we have to give them constructive work. Real work and real hope.”

“Planning and designing is real work.”

“Yes, and it’s killing their spirits. The better they are, the more they yearn to put their plans into practice.”

She stopped dead on the path. Constantine took a couple of oblivious steps forward, then noticed and turned around. She glared him in the face. “Don’t open again the question of colonisation. We’re not doing it until at least we get advice from the Red Sun system.”

Constantine spread his hands. “You know you haven’t won the young people over to that. When the emergency goes to referendum they can vote it out, and vote your people off the Council, and colonise anyway.”

“They can vote all they like,” she said. “They can’t force us to invest.”

She thought she detected a flicker of amusement at this, but no note of it reached his voice. “Don’t put them to that test,” he said.

“So do you have anything to propose?” she asked. “Some real work that isn’t virtual?”

“Yes,” he said. “I propose that we let them get to work on real asteroids, but not out in the system.”

“Oh?” she said. “And where would we find these real asteroids? In the slag mountains?”

“No,” said Constantine. “In the hollow spaces of the cones.”

She knew about these asteroids, of course. It was because she had classified them in the wrong mental category that she hadn’t thought of them.

“That sounds very tempting,” she said. “I think we could sell that to the Council. On one condition.”

“Yes?”

“That it counts as colonization, with the settlers emigrating as if they were going into free space. They are, after all, leaving the habitat.”

Constantine smiled. “And therefore can’t vote? Yes, I had thought that aspect would appeal to you.”

“I can see how we benefit,” said Synchronic. “What’s in it for the crew?”

“Same as for the kids,” said Constantine. “Work. Something useful to be getting on with. Trade. Resource extraction.”

“You know,” said Synchronic, “it might be best if the suggestion were to come from the ship generation themselves, and then be acceeded to by the Council. So that it seemed less like a palliative offered by us, and more like a concession won by them.”

“I’ll take steps,” said Constantine.

The town, or miniature city, of Far Crossing had changed since Horrocks had last visited it. This time he arrived in his own hired microlight. He dragged it across the field and parked it at the edge of town, then walked in along the same street he’d walked six months before. Sternward Avenue, that was it. Its familiarity underlined how much about it had changed. It was more crowded and less busy than he remembered. The paintings and writings on the walls were no longer harmonious and decorative. Angry slogans flared in jagged letters. Rock the founders. Rock the aliens. Room to live. Space for us. Elaborate illuminations of names and obscure words. Obsessive, detailed pictures of habitats, fantastically encrusted with weapons; of the aliens, with speech bubbles enclosing improbable dialogue. Trompe 1’oeil murals of climbing plants. The loss of much of the usual electronic buzz and background chatter had shifted illustration and emphasis and communication out to the actual.

Music thudded or moaned from every shopfront and open window, or so it seemed. The air floated pheromones of frustration and molecules of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens. The people in the street affected in their attire a studied casualness — space-rigger fatigues, mesh and nanofibre — or the louche, bedraggled formality of ill-matched, half-fastened outfits like those of people returning drunk from a party. Some of them, Horrocks realised with disdain, were returning drunk from parties. It was the middle of the afternoon.

He felt pinched and short of the ready. The stuff in the shops was out of his reach. Six months of seeing terrestrials stock tank and not much in the way of training fees had left him, not poor, but cost-conscious in a way he hadn’t been before. The thought of Constantine’s scheme put a bounce in his step.

The Yellow Wall held a surprise. It had changed in a different direction. Most of the tables were occupied by two or three people, but it was as quiet as a library. A lot of reading and writing was going on. Some heads were even bent over physical books: pages printed out and bound in codices. Horrocks had come across this before, as a work-around for certain access restrictions. He couldn’t see it as anything but bad for the eyesight.

Atomic sat alone near the window. She stared in front of her, fingers tapping, a neglected coffee cooling. Her hair was tied up by a complex braid of threads, her makeup colours clashed, and she wore a thin vest and long shorts. A bulky crew-surplus jacket hung on the seatback.

Her eyes blinked and refocused as he sat down. He had two fresh coffees; he pushed one across the table.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said before she could say anything, and before he had thought of what to say. Her smile surprised him, but it conveyed detached amusement more than welcome.

“I knew you’d be back,” she said. “What brings you here this time? Another message from Synchronic?”

“No, no, nothing to do with her. And no message. Just an idea.”

Eyes narrow, seen through a wisp of steam. “What kind of idea?”

“One that’s been kicked about in the crew quarters for a while,” he said. “You know I got a lot of stick for supporting the embargo, though what I did on the jury kind of offsets that.”

Atomic snorted. “Not as far as I’m concerned!”

“I know,” he said. “Anyway, we’re all hurting from the embargo. I am, for sure. By this stage we should be raking in asteroid organics, and construction consultancies and training fees. Some of us were grumbling about all this when somebody pointed out that we can get hold of massive chunks of asteroids and chondrites and cometary dirty ice and so forth, in vacuum and free fall, without going outside the ship.”

“Where?”

“In the reaction-mass tanks in the cones. They’re not exactly a reserve, but they’re a bit extra over and above what was in the cylinder. They were full at the start, and now they’re much depleted, but there’s a good bit of rock and ice still in there.”

She gave him a sceptical smile. “Oh, come on, what does that add up to — a few boulders?”

He pulled over the cold cup, dipped his finger in, and drew a triangle on the table, about ten centimetres to a side, and dropped a perpendicular from the apex. “That has the proportions about right,” he said. “The sides represent the space that’s used around the surface and rear of the cone, for living space and machinery and so on. The perpendicular contains the engine, and more living quarters and amenities. The empty spaces stand for the tank. So we’re looking at a conical volume sixty-odd kilometres across the base, less the spaces I mentioned.” He looked up. “You do the math.” He noticed her gaze go blank. “I didn’t mean literally.”

“How much rock is in there?”

He shrugged. “Millions of tons. The tanks aren’t full up. Maybe a tenth of the volume is solid, the rest vacuum — well, very thin gases. The rocks are kind of piled up against the surfaces the deceleration pressed them against — the top of the forward cone at the front, the base at the rear.”

“You’re thinking of us working on them?”

“Yes,” he said. “Colonize them, if you like. Stake claims. You could build whole habitats, mines, fabrication units, fusion plants…”

She breathed in sharply. “Wow — I can see that, but I can’t imagine working or settling on rocks all bumping about—”

“They wouldn’t be,” he assured her. “The first job would be to stabilise them. Move them out a little — you’d get that as a by-product of working them, or we could fire off a tiny acceleration burn on the drive, move the ship in relation to them — then tether them in place with massive buckyropes.” He shrugged. “Or use attitude jets. It’s an engineering detail.”

“But what would be the point? I mean, OK, we could mine them, but what’s the point of settling them? Inside the ship? It would be just playing at colonization.”

“Even if it was, it would be good practice,” Horrocks said, “but they needn’t be inside the ship forever. The cone surface is segmented. Whole sections of it can swing open. That’s how the rocks get loaded in the first place.”

“So we could settle and someday… move out?”

“You got it.”

She leaned back, gazing above his head. “That sounds wonderful,” she said. “So what do we have to do to get this going?”

“Well,” he said, “like I was saying, it’s just an idea that a few of the crew have come up with. I’d want to see it discussed a bit more widely, among the old hands especially. Thrash out the feasibility. And I suppose you’d have to get the Council’s blessing, though technically I’m not quite sure if it has standing in regard to the rocks. Raise funding from founder capital, maybe by swapping for other stakes that are… at a discount right now. Oh, and I guess you’d have to see if any of the ship generation were interested.”

“You must be joking! They’d jump at it!”

“I’ve seen a few today who wouldn’t.”

She waved an airy hand. “The slackers? They’ll join in too, you’ll see, but who cares if they don’t? You’ll get enough of us going for it, that’s for sure.”

“Great!” he said. “Ah—”

“What?”

“There is one drawback. The legal situation.”

“How’s that?”

“When we first came up with the idea we checked the Contract.”

“You’re telling me it has no provision?”

“Oh, it has a provision all right. Not for this situation, exactly, but it’s very specific about who can vote and who can’t. About who is in the Complement. Crew, of course. Founders and ship generation over sixteen, as long as they live in the habitat. The habitat, not the ship. It definitely has provision for people moving to nearby celestial bodies in the same orbit. Which applies to the rocks in the tanks.”

“You’re saying we’d lose our votes?”

“Possibly. Very likely.”

He expected her to balk or bridle at this, but she just stared off into space for a moment. “Hmm,” she said at last. “How many of us could move out in six months?”

“Oh, a few thousand, I should imagine.”

“Ah!” Her face cleared. “That’s all right. There’ll still be plenty behind who can vote.”

“You know how they’ll vote?”

“Once this gets going — oh yes.”

“Well, I’m sure you know how to spread the word.”

Her face fell a little. “Yeah. It’s just a lot more difficult these days.”

“There’s a rumour going around,” he said, “that the Council is thinking of lifting the comms restrictions.”

“I haven’t heard it”

“It’s bandied in the cones.” He drained his cup and rose to leave.

“Do you have to go?”

“Yes,” he said. “To be honest, this isn’t the only place I want to visit. Spread the word in person.”

Her nod was firm, her look a little disappointed. “Good idea. Come back sometime, OK?”

“Sure.”

When he looked back from the doorway she was already writing.

14 366:02:12 00:17

Haven’t written much recently. Nor received many comments. Is anybody still reading this? Is anybody else still biologging?

Oh yes. I see you are. Those of you who haven’t come out here yet, and are still just talking and planning, planning, planning.

Well, this is for you. I haven’t written much because I’ve been doing things. And because it’s exhausting out here. It’s exhausting but it’s fun. It’s pioneering. It’s what we were born for.

Out here… Let me just pause for a moment and clarify a point of terminology. Words are important. I see from a quick search through the biologs that most of you refer to us in the cones as “in there.” We’re not “in there.” You are: you’re in there in the habitat. We’re out here.

It’s not outer space. But it’s hard vacuum (well, hard-ish), it’s free fall (well, microgravity), and it’s black all around. An aperture on the sunline burns in the sky like a nearby sun. The rocks we’re working on are hundreds of metres across. Most of them are less than a kilometre apart from each other, so it all looks like a child’s cartoon illustration of an asteroid belt rather than the real thing, with millions of klicks between one and the other. It’s a bit like being in a Ring, but without the collisions and the ablation and the micrometeorites going like sandblasters and the dying full of holes in a cloud of blood and stuff.

But it’s still the real thing. If you want the full illusion of being outside, you can tune your eyes to the external view and see the stars — and those of the planets that are visible at the moment — just as they would be if they were outside your faceplate. That’s cool, but admittedly you can do that anywhere in the ship. And somehow, we don’t feel the need to. Being in this enormous space is enough.

Because we really are pioneering. These rocks have never even been prospected! If they’d ever had to be processed, they’d have been refined and sifted for useful minerals and organics before the slag was thrown in the drive. But I’m sure a lot would have been missed. Apart from anything else, we’re doing real science. These rocks are after all from the Red Sun system, and some of them date back to its formation, and we’re actually finding out stuff that I’ll bet their own scientists back there haven’t got round to yet. Well, maybe not, but it’s new to us, and it’s fun finding out secrets four billion years old. Delicate crystal formations; complex organic molecules; microscopic bubbles trapped in the rock or ice, of gases with curious isotope ratios; shock patterns that indicate or suggest that at least one rock out here was chipped off a larger body, which some have identified from the records as likely to be Red Sun VII 14.

All right, that’s exciting to me, but maybe not to you, and anyway we’re not out here to do science. Science is a sideshow. The main event — events, rather — are mining and extracting, synthesising and building. We’re building habitats! Real habitats we’re actually living in, and that one day — soon, I hope — may orbit freely around the Destiny Star on their own.

Nobody’s got the habitat of their dreams. (Mine needs a much bigger asteroid.) Everybody has had to divvy up or share. For this rock we’re on it’s a team: me, Grant, a few people from Far Crossing, and the New Lamarck crowd. Of course there are more machines than people, which makes it feel more crowded but also makes things happen fast. We’ve already got a beautiful cluster of diamond bubbles that look green from outside with all the plants within.

Nobody’s doing the exact project they’d planned. Again, most of these are tagged to specific features or moons or rocks, so they’re not relevant at the moment. That doesn’t matter. There’s a whole lot of projects we’re working on with the crew, both because it’s valuable experience and because it’s trade for the expertise and resources we get from them. (Any accountancy software experts still hesitating? There’s work for you out here.)

Oh, and speaking of work, anybody with power-engineering ambitions should just drop everything and emigrate here, because you’ll never get a better chance to hone your skills and serve a sound apprenticeship with old crew hands. Fusion power plants aren’t strictly necessary here, but they’ll be useful in the future. Same goes for missile and laser batteries. We’re building plenty of them, there’s a whole industry going on (amazing the explosives and fuels you can cook out of gunk from carbonaceous chondrites, and the reaction and refinery paths are way complex and cool). They’ll be sold around when we move out. Likewise the power plants. Like I said, the opportunities in that line are amazing. We are building a lot of fusion power plants.

It had been a long three months for the Red Sun Circle and its associates. For a time the entire scheme had hung in the balance, with the more energetic elements of the younger generation divided between those who most wanted to get on with constructive work, and those whose top priority was ending the emergency and voting out the Council. Synchronic wasn’t sure how much effect her caredaughter’s passionate appeals for the former option had had, but she couldn’t discount them.

Now the stream of young settlers to the hollow spaces of both cones was steady; the lifting of comms restrictions had allowed first an outpouring of discontent and then its gradual fading; and among the majority of the voting-age cohort who remained behind, a growing minority had begun to voice a grudging recognition of the wisdom of the founders in vetoing colonisation until future relations with the aliens could be sorted out.

Her one disappointment was that almost all the ship generation had lost all interest in the Destiny II virtualities now that they no longer had a live feed. The archives of the virtualities were vast, and in large part unexplored. An immense amount of information of undeniable future use lay untapped. She’d expected that this hoard of insight into the very first alien civilization — and indeed multicellular biosphere — to come within the ken of humanity would lure many bright young minds. But few indeed still entered it. It was as though it was old news, and that only the constant unfolding of the planet’s present moment could seize attention.

She’d have been tempted to write this off as the superficiality of the youth of today, but her own contemporaries in the founder generation were almost as remiss. They too were entranced by incoming live data, in their case from other planetary probes and system surveys. Speculation on resources remained brisk, though with long futures. There was even a market in shorter futures, betting on the possibility that the embargo would be reversed; Council discouragement and disapproval of this dubious activity had merely and predictably given rise to secondary and tertiary markets in moral hazard.

So she herself had taken to doing what she’d once hoped the ship generation would become absorbed in doing. In hours of relaxation and recreation she roamed the vault of uplinked and recorded and synthesised impressions, trying to make sense of the bat people’s world.

Today she haunted the simulacrum of an upland settlement, somewhere in the typical altiplano of the continental hinterlands. Scrub and brush on the hills, a richer and greener vegetation in the hollows that might have been the local analogue of grass, grazed by the big four-footed beasts. A narrow, rickety tower on a hilltop, surrounded by fenced and hedged orchards and a scatter of low sheds. You couldn’t call the place a farm: the bat people didn’t practice agriculture. They tended tiny plots of herbs and berries; they built fences and walls that kept the grazers out of patches of ground, wherein fruit trees sprang up, with parabolic inverted-umbrella layers of branches turned to the sky like some ancient SETI radio-telescope array; they herded and hunted, chivvied and chased the grazers, swooping and hallooing around them, driving them with slashing clawed kicks and occasional bites that looked like a vampiric refreshment. When a beast was selected for slaughter, and driven close to the settlement and set upon with tooth and claw and blade, the crowd of wings and the frenzy was such that it seemed a surprise how much meat remained to be cut up and carried off, to be hung and salted and smoked and sent on its way to the cities on the occasional passing cart hauled by machine or slave traction.

She rotated the POV and drifted it toward the shed that she guessed was the slave pen. As the door came closer — it was wooden, the lower half of solid planking, the top barred — the POV fell through a sudden and disconcerting rift.

Her viewpoint was now behind the bars, looking out. The time of day, perhaps the day itself or even the season, had changed. The shadows looked shorter, the hillside scrub thicker than they had a moment ago. The quality of the image had sharpened, had become more detailed, dense with verity. It was as if she looked directly upon a real scene, rather than a seamless but guessy, lossy construal stitched together from numerous flaky, tiny inputs. The sound quality had improved too: she heard a sound like breathing, louder and closer than the grassy arboral hiss of the upland wind that carried the lowing of far-off alien kine.

And, as if from around a corner, voices.

High-pitched and fast but with almost recognisable syllables, quite other than the bat people’s chirruping patter.

As she strained to hear, the view before her tipped forward and filled with a crossbar and a pair of four-digited hands. The hands, encumbered about the wrists with a sort of ragged fleshy sleeve, squeezed between the bars and twisted around with a disregard to their own damage that made her flinch. Blood slicked the boards. There was grunt, and then a rattle and squeal of metal, and a hard rap.

The hands were wrenched back through the slats. For a second or her gaze fixed upon raised wrists, scratched and scored, spiked with splinters, bleeding back to the elbow. Then the wrists reversed and the hands slammed forward, thrusting the door open with a thud. The POV rushed straight ahead, jolting as if from a camera on the forehead or shoulder of someone running. Trampled mud, grass, a ring of cyan fungi, a fence looming, a leap and a frantic scrabble—

A shout from behind.

“Hey — the trudge is out!”

“After him!”

Before Synchronic could assimilate her shock at understanding the words, her vision became a confused, blurred rolling as the viewpoint topped the fence and fell down the other side, then more running.

Then wings, a glint of teeth, a clawed foot jammed straight into the viewpoint. A flurry and a welter. Sky and a sunlight flash on a downward-stabbing blade. A long, deep, full-throated scream that ended on a rising, resonant pitch, as if a soul had streaked upward to the bright, blank blue that was the last image to fill its sight.

Darkness and silence.