Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

“Boring,” Constantine had told her. “Even with time dilation, it takes months to get anywhere in the long tubes. I worked my passage, stevedoring and whoring.”

“ ‘Passage,’ ” she’d sniggered.

“Tell me about it. Eventually, and I’m talking about years — decades, centuries — subjective, I arrived in a system where there were no electromagnetic acceleration tubes out front. No stars ahead were green. I’d reached the surface of civilization, from the inside. Everything was raw in the territories, even reality. It sufficed for a while.” He’d gone off in a dwam, at that point.

“And then what?” she’d prompted.

“And then? I was talking to a woman a thousand years older than I, much as we are now but the other way round, so to speak, when I listened to her for the thousandth time and I heard myself saying, ‘But the sky, my lady! The sky!’ ”

“What a romantic.”

Synchronic Narrative Storm was not a romantic. She was very maternal. This proclivity was in her genes. She could have fixed that: many of her cohorts had. She did not choose to do so, and she felt the decision was free. Brides and babies and strong dark men and intellectual and sensual women and the prospect of wide-open spaces to populate with humanity had always made her weak at the knees. She regarded that as a strength, knowing that this evaluation too was in her genes. Freedom, she had decided in a vehement childhood, long before the relevant genes had kicked in, was to be what you were. That changing what she was would change what she wanted to be she regarded as an irrelevant curiosity, a philosophical abstraction. (A predisposition to this conclusion, too, was in her genes. She knew it and didn’t mind.) She had fallen in love many times, married many times, borne many children and raised and generated more; sometimes — most times, to be honest — without having met the other geneparents in the flesh, but never without having fallen in love with all of them. She had no continuously cohabiting lover. Falling in love indicated that your genes were complementary to those of the loved one. It told you nothing about whether your personalities and sexualities were compatible. Constantine thought it did, about her and others. It was one evidence that he was a hopeless romantic. The world was another.

“I have to leave,” said Constantine the Oldest Man. “Something has come up.”

“Always the romantic,” said Synchronic Narrative Storm.

The Man sneered and left.

Awlin Halegap, the speculator, seldom let broader considerations override his pursuit of profit. When he saw the pattern in the supposed lightning spikes, right there in the raw data stream, and interpreted them before even the scientists had noticed, he was torn between alerting the relevant authorities and the tempting prospect of swift insider trading. He could have shifted the terrestrials in milliseconds. He sighed and did his duty. To his surprise the prospecting jury didn’t send one of its own members.

“Show me it,” said the Oldest Man, manifesting without warning in Halegap’s cramped brokerage. His apparent position was behind the speculator’s shoulder. Halegap felt the virtual presence more than he saw it. The back of his neck prickled.

Halegap ran the numbers. “Signal, not noise,” he said.

“I can see that,” said Constantine. His presence flipped, to perch on the edge of Halegap’s data table, and made a show of peering into its depths. He fingered his ebon chin. “Hmm,” he said. “Troubling.”

Halegap had nothing to fear from Constantine, but he felt the unease of the bearer of bad news to the great nonetheless.

“You think we’ve been jumped?” he hazarded. Being overtaken by fast probes was a minor but real hazard for travelling worlds. Rare because it was bad form, impolite and not the done thing, but sometimes a scientific enterprise in an origin system would become impatient and, as the expression went, gun the jump.

“Most likely,” said Constantine. “I’d have expected a priority-jumper to broadcast their claim, though. It’s only happened to me twice before, and a long time ago. Customs may have changed, manners coarsened. The youth of today.”

“Oh no!” said Halegap, stung. He had grown up in the system they’d left four centuries earlier. The obscure urge to defend it surprised him. “The latest information doesn’t bear that out. We’ve drifted apart, of course, but Red Sun is developing into a most polite society.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Constantine. “They all do, for a while. You know, my best heuristics can’t make head nor tail of these signals. They must be encrypted. Rather pointless, out here, one would think?” ”

Rival establishments?” suggested Halegap. “There are at least two sources in there, perhaps more.”

Constantine shot him a data-freighted glance. “Good thinking,” he said. “But for more than one scientific society to override its manners, well…”

“There is always the possibility of data colonies,” said Halegap, with an uneasy laugh. Very uneasy; the prospect disquieted him at a level he didn’t care to access.

“And if matters had reached such a pass, one might indeed see rivalry,” said Constantine, taking the notion in his stride. He smacked his fist on his palm again and again, a gesture made more disturbing by its lack of sound effects. “Damn! Damn! To be jumped by some degenerate offshoots just as we’re entering orbit, it’s most aggravating!”

“There is that,” said Halegap. He was already thinking of worse possibilities, his mind racing ahead of the facts, ahead of the curve, into the worst-case scenario. “But if Red Sun society were to go into fast burn… well, I wouldn’t want to be four light-years away from it. Not if I were a flatfooter, especially.”

“Rock the flatfooters,” said Constantine. “They can dig deep and ride it out, like they would a supernova. That’s what they’re bred for. It’s the rest of us who’d take the full blast of the thing.”

Halegap shivered, feeling as vulnerable as some drifting, soft-skinned sea creature before a landslide. Fast burn was rare, far rarer even than data colonies, but data colonies were among its first stigmata. A society undergoing exponential evolution was unstable; no persistent examples were on record. All that was left were dark spots in the green haze of the Civil Worlds: ashes of the fast burn. In the fifteenth millennium of the Space Age, the bulk of humanity with all its hacks and tweaks remained close to its terrestrial ancestral form, and the bulk of thinking machinery around or below the human level; there seemed to be an upper bound on the complexity a society or an individual could sustain.

Constantine’s presence refocused itself, brightening. “Let’s not run away with ourselves,” he said. “The most we have real evidence for is a couple of probes. If they’re data colonies, we’ll know soon enough. Either way, I suggest you release the news.” He chuckled. “Expect a momentary panic, then a boom in terrestrials.”

14 364:06:20 06:30

I’m scared. I’ve never seen a world slump before. The one last night lasted for hours . Down below I could see lights going out all over the place; it was as if people had lost the will to live. Today, things are picking up. Confidence returns, every newsline says, a bit too urgently. I don’t feel confident at all. I’m watching the Long Steading crowd waking up, stirring, red-eyed. I think some of them were crying last night; I’m sure I heard them.

I’m not going to do that myself. I’m not. I’m sure the signals, if that’s what they are — and as you can see here there are doubts about that — are just from fast probes from Red Sun, and not any of the nasty things some people say they could be. But to think that the system that we thought was all fresh and empty and untouched, waiting for us, our future, already has somebody else’s grubby fingerprints on it just makes me sad and sick.