Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

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.

In the third outer-month after the turning of the year, in the early spring, a ship flying the golden lizard pennant of the Southern Rule sailed up the Broad Channel from the west. It made port first at Low Lassir, the great harbour of Gevork, linked by river to its inland capital; then after three days of lading and unlading tacked across the channel and — somewhat to the surprise of informed observers — made for the jetty at the mouth of Long Finger River at Five Ravines.

Among the low barges, grubby coalers, and gay sailboats that shared that backwater, the ship stood out like a lordly roost above stables. Its steam engine gave off little smoke, and its propulsion churned the sea at greater depth than any known propeller. Its sails rose bright and white in odd-angled but harmonious shapes, like pieces of a geometric puzzle. Though its hull and superstructure were wooden, and its paint gaudy, its lines displayed something of the elegance of a leaping fish and the camber of a well-poised wing. As soon as its topmast rose above the horizon it attracted attention; by the time its hull was in full view it was an indispensable sight for anyone with the least pretension to being abreast of events; and when it sailed in to the harbour it had almost as many adult sightseers circling its masts at a respectful and admiring distance as it had screaming kits chasing the sea flitters that followed in its wake.

Before it had hove to, an eager crowd lined the jetty. Every merchant of drugs and spices in town had sent at least a boy with a list and a line of scrip; ladies and gentlemen of fashion hastened to the quay in hope of fine ribbons, bright buckles, keen blades, and grotesque belts; reporters from the local press came in search of distant news and outlandish opinion; draughtsmen from the cheaper journals did not scruple to snatch the sheets of newsprint in which the wares were wrapped, and steal from their coloured woodcuts inspiration; students and scholars sought exotica and erotica. Few in that crowd were disappointed, and fewer still noticed a member of the ship’s company balance on the rail, peer this way and that, check a bearing with tilted eye and levelled compass and an investigative sniff at the air, then take deliberate wing to the university quarter.

Darvin watched the students who had attended his lecture swirl skyward, shuffled his notes together, and sighed. Most of the students might have understood his presentation of the method of estimating stellar distances by parallax, but he was certain that some would not. A few essays would come his way explaining that it was done by looking at stars through binoculars and closing one eye at a time. He switched off the projector, stuffed his notes in his belt pouch, and began clambering up the expanding concentric rings of the lecture tower. He didn’t have the energy to take a running jump into the air.