Peter Hamilton - Manhattan in Reverse

Maybe one day they would tire of their borrowed times and wake from their unreality to look around anew at what we have achieved. For out there on the other worlds, the ones defying any restriction, there was much to be proud of. Fiume, where the gas giants were being dismantled to build a vast shell around the star, with an inner surface capable of supporting life. Milligan, whose colonists were experimenting with truly giant wormholes which they hoped could reach other galaxies. Oranses, home to the original sinners, condemned by the Vatican for their project of introducing communal sentience to every living thing on their planet, every worm, insect, and stalk of grass, thus creating Gaia in all her majesty. All this glorious playground was our heritage, a gift from the youth of today to their sulking, inward-looking parents.

My flyer soared out of the traffic stream just before we passed over the rim of Tangsham portal. I directed it round the toroid of exotic matter to the station on the other side. The molecular curtain over the hangar complex entrance parted to let us through, and we alighted on one of the reception platforms. Charles Winter Hutchenson, the station chief, came out to meet me. The Hutchensons are one of our partners in Tangsham, a settlement which is endeavouring to transform people into star-voyagers, a species of immense biomechanical constructs that will spend eternity exploring space. Placing a human mind into the core of such a vessel is simple enough, but its psychology must undergo considerable adaptation to be comfortable with such a body. Yet as I saw on my approach to the portal, there was no shortage of people wishing to join the quest. The solid planets in the Tangsham star system were ringed with construction stations, fed by rivers of matter extracted from asteroids and gas giants. Energy converter nodules had been emplaced deep within the star itself to power such colossal industrial endeavour. It was a place of hard science; there was little of nature’s beauty to be found there.

‘Pleasure to welcome you on board,’ Charles Winter Hutchenson said warmly. ‘I didn’t know elder representatives concerned themselves with incidents like this.’

‘I have several motives,’ I confessed. ‘I met Carter Osborne Kenyon a long time ago. Attending to him now is the least I can do. And he is one of the senior nuclear engineers on the project, he’s entitled to the best service we can provide. Is he back yet?’

‘Yes. He arrived about an hour ago. I halted the transshipment as you asked.’

‘Fine. My cybershadow will take care of the official casework for us. But I’d like to assess the requirements in person first.’

‘Okay. This way.’ He led me over to a cathedral-sized cargo hall where the stasis chamber was being kept. It was a translucent grey cylinder suspended between two black glass slabs. The outline of a prone human figure was just visible inside.

My cybershadow meshed me with the chamber’s control AI, and I instructed it to give me a status review. Carter Osborne Kenyon wasn’t in a good condition. There had been an accident on one of Tangsham’s construction stations; even with our technological prowess, machinery isn’t flawless. Some power relays had surged, plasma temperature had doubled, there had been a blow-out. Metal was vaporized as the errant plasma jet cut its way through several sheets of decking. Loose panels had swung about, one of them catching Carter a severe blow. The left side of his body had been badly damaged. Worse than that, the edge of the metal had cracked his skull open, pulping the brain tissue inside. It would have been fatal in an earlier age. He was certainly clinically dead before he hit the ground. But the emergency systems had responded efficiently. His body had immediately been sealed in stasis, and microdrones had swept the area, gathering up every cell that had splashed across the floor and nearby walls. The cells were subsequently put in stasis with him.

We had all the component parts, they just had to be reassembled properly. His genome would be read, and each damaged cell repaired, identified, then replaced in its correct location. It could be done on Tangsham, but they would have to commit considerable resources to it. While Earth, with its vast elderly population, retained the greatest level of medical expertise among all of the settled worlds, and subsequently devoted the highest percentage of resources to the field. That concentration of knowledge also meant our software and techniques remained far ahead of everyone else. Carter’s best chance for a full reanimation and recovery was with us.

‘The damage is within our accepted revival limits,’ I told Charles Winter Hutchenson. ‘I’ll authorize the procedure and take him back with me to the institute clinic.’

The station chief seemed glad that the disruption to his routine was being dealt with so propitiously. He instructed the cargo hall’s gravity field to refocus, and the stasis chamber bobbed up into the air, then slid away to my flyer’s hold.

I left the portal, and guided the flyer directly to the Raleigh institute. It wasn’t just the physical cell structure of Carter’s brain which the medical technicians would repair, his memories too would have to be re-established. That was the part of him I was most interested in salvaging. It was as close to time travel as I would ever get.

With the sensorium integration routines developed for the daysleepers I would be able to drop right into his world. I would be there, observing, listening, and tasting, right from the very first time he met Justin Ascham Raleigh during that initial freshers week, until the night of the murder. And unlike him, I wouldn’t view those moments through sentiment — I’d be scouring every second for anomalies, hints of out-of-character behaviour, the misplaced nuance of a single word.

There were three and a half solid years to reconnoitre. I wasn’t just examining the time they were in each other’s presence. Anything that was said and done during that time could prove crucially relevant. Even his dreams might provide a clue.

It would take a while. There were so many resources I had to supervise and negotiate over, I couldn’t schedule much current time to the case; maybe an hour a week. But I’d waited this long now. Time was no longer a relevant factor.

The deepflight ship eased out of the wormhole portal and twisted smoothly to align itself on the habitat disc. Two light-years away, Eta Carinae had inflated across half of the universe. Its blue-white ejecta lobes were webbed with sharp scarlet lines as the outer plasma envelope slowly radiated away their incredible original temperature. The entire edifice was engulfed in a glowing crimson corona that bristled with spiky gas jets slowly dissipating out towards the stars. Fronds of dark cold dust eddied around it at a greater distance, the remnants of earlier explosive activity.

Eta Carinae is one of the most massive, and therefore unstable, stars in the galaxy. It is also the most dauntingly elegant. I could appreciate why the transcendients had chosen to base themselves here, ten thousand light-years away from Earth. Despite its glory, an ever-present reminder of matter’s terrible fragility. Such a monster could never last for more than a few million years. Its triumphant end will come as a detonation that will probably be seen from galactic superclusters halfway towards the edge of infinity.

How Justin Ascham Raleigh would have loved this.

The habitat appeared in our forward sensors. A simple white circle against the swirling red fogs of the hulking sky. Two hundred miles across, it was alone in interstellar space apart from its companion portal. One side flung out towers and spires, alive with sparkling lights. The other was apparently open to space, its surface undulating gently with grassy vales and meandering streams. Forests created random patches of darker green that swarmed over the low hills.