Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star

“Do you know anything about Tampico?”

“No. Nothing. Why?”

“It was the planet you bought a ticket for.”

Wyobie Cotal closed his eyes. Tears squeezed out to wet the fine lashes. “I don’t know. I don’t remember any of this. This has to be a mistake. One giant mother of a mistake. I’m still out there somewhere. I must be. I just forgot to come back for my rejuvenation, that’s all. Find me, please. Find me!” He started to lift his back up off the pillow, juvenile features straining hard. “Do something.”

A nurse came in as Wyobie Cotal sank back down again. He was unconscious before the electromuscle suit finished lowering him back flat onto the bed.

“He’s been sedated,” the nurse said. “It’ll be another three hours before he’s conscious again. You can come back then if you have to, but he can’t be exposed to an unlimited number of sessions like this. His personality is still very fragile, he’s completely immature emotionally.”

“I understand,” Paula said. She and Hoshe Finn left the room together.

“What do you think?” the detective asked as they took their coveralls off.

“Taken alone, I would have said it was a clear-cut case. First-lifers are always excitable. He went off on an adventure holiday with a girl and drowned or crashed or flew into a hill, something reckless and stupid. But with Shaheef as well, we have to consider the circumstances.”

Hoshe Finn nodded and threw his coveralls into a bin. The cooler air outside Cotal’s room made him shiver. “That’s what alerted us to this in the first place. Tara Jennifer Shaheef was re-lifed twenty years ago. She was written off as having an accident.”

“So who made the connection?”

“Morton, her past husband. Apparently, Cotal was named on the divorce papers; he was the one she was shacking up with on Tampico.”

“So it did get serious between Cotal and Shaheef?”

“Looks like it, but not on this planet. She filed the papers on Tampico. Once the divorce was arranged, Morton never heard anything from her again until her re-life. My division investigated her re-life as a matter of course, but there was nothing unduly suspicious other than the lack of a body. Accidents do happen.”

“So after the divorce Cotal and Shaheef went on holiday, or even honeymoon, together. They had the same accident.”

“Could be. Except there really is no trace of them after they left Oaktier.”

“Apart from the divorce petition.”

“Yes. And there certainly isn’t a motive for killing them. All we have are a lot of suspicious circumstances.”

“I need to see Shaheef next.”

“She’s expecting us.”

SIX

The message was loaded into the unisphere through a planetary cybersphere node in Hemeleum, a small inland farming town on Westwould. It remained in a onetime address file for five hours, long enough for whoever loaded it to have traveled clear across the Commonwealth. After five hours were up, the message’s sender segment activated. The program distributed the message to every e-butler address code in the unisphere, an annoying method of advertising called shotgunning. As a method of commercial promotion it had fallen into disuse centuries ago. Every modern e-butler program had filters that could bounce the spam right back to its sender, although as most shotgunners used a onetime address there was little point. The e-butlers also automatically notified the RIs controlling the unisphere routing protocols, who immediately wiped the offending message from every node. And under Intersolar law, finally passed in 2174, anyone shotgunning the unisphere was liable to a large irritant fine that could be applied to every message that was received by an e-butler, so the penalty was never less than a couple of billion dollars. Subsequently, shotgunning was used only by underground organizations or individuals who had ideologies, disreputable financial schemes, religious visions, or political revolution that they wanted the rest of the Commonwealth to know about. Given how quickly the unisphere RIs could identify shotgun spread patterns and block them, any software writer capable of composing a decent new shotgun sender could earn themselves a lucrative fee—cash, of course.

In this case, the factor that allowed the shotgunned message to get around most e-butler filters was that it had a genuine author certificate. On the arrival of any message, that was the first thing an e-butler would query. This one had the certificate of April Gallar Halgarth, a twenty-year-old resident of Solidade, the private world owned by the Halgarth dynasty. Over ten billion e-butlers allowed it to go forward into their hold file.

Most people upon receiving a message from a Halgarth opened it from sheer curiosity. When the visual recording started to play they realized they’d been shotgunned, and ninety percent wiped it immediately. Those who let it run did so out of native inquisitiveness, the prospect of filing a shotgun suit against a Halgarth, or because they were fellow extremist freedom fighters or it was useful raw material for their dissertation on modern political factions. A rare few simply believed.

The visuals opened with a man in an office, sitting behind a desk, with the snow-cloaked city of San Matio, Lerma’s capital, spread out panoramically through the window wall behind him. His face boasted strong features that were highlighted by dark skin, while neatly trimmed brown hair was threaded with a few silver strands. It emphasized the kind of authoritative air that inspired confidence, marking him down as a positive, progressive leader. (Forensic analysis showed he was a graphics composite, designed by the Formit 3004 simulator package, using its politician sculpture function.)

“Sorry to burst in on you like this,” he said. “But as you probably know, the government spends a lot of tax money on hunting down our group. Contrary to the Commonwealth charter which permits free public assembly, I am not allowed to say what I want to other citizens. I represent the Guardians of Selfhood. And before you wipe this message, I have one question to ask you. Why has the Senate and the executive chosen to send a starship to the Dyson Pair? Specifically, why now?”

There was a perspective shift in the pause while the man drew a realistic breath. The observer point moved forward and down, sitting in front of the desk, closer to the spokesman. It was a cozier setting, giving the impression of a one-on-one chat.

“As you know, we are campaigning against the Starflyer, an alien we contend is actively influencing the Commonwealth’s political classes for its own advantage. It is this Starflyer which has engineered the current mission to investigate the Dyson Pair. The Commonwealth has known about the enclosure of the two stars for centuries. We have known that one day, when phase six space is opened, that we would reach these strange stars and begin our investigation. What has changed? A single observation that proved the enclosure was a force field rather than a solid shell. Exactly why should that reverse centuries of Commonwealth policy?”

The spokesman shook his head solemnly. “Possibly the most critical human voyage of exploration since Columbus set sail has been launched without any valid explanation. The question was not debated openly in the Senate, despite the vast amounts of public money being spent to finance the starship. Instead, the decision emerged from some obscure ExoProtectorate Council that nobody had ever heard of before. It is exactly the kind of clandestine back-room deal that favors the Starflyer and its agenda.”

Perspective shifted again, sweeping the viewer out through the window to soar over the complicated maze of San Matio’s streets. “Somewhere out there it lurks, controlling and influencing us through its puppets. Government and their media manipulators ask how we know the Starflyer is malign. The answer is simple: if it is a friend, it would reveal itself to us and the other alien affiliates of the Commonwealth. If it is a friend, it would not push us into sending an expedition to the Dyson Pair. The President says we need to know what happened. He is mistaken. We know what must have happened. Shielding two entire star systems with force fields is an act of extreme desperation. Something terrible was about to be unleashed, something that warranted such colossal countermeasures. These barriers have kept the threat isolated from the rest of the galaxy for over a thousand years. We are safe because of that. This wonderful city, and thousands like it across the Commonwealth, sleep soundly at night because the threat is contained. Yet now we are being sent out there to tamper with the dangerous unknown. Why? What was wrong with our old policy of caution? By the time we reach phase six space we would probably know how to generate force fields of such a size, we would certainly comprehend the science and technology involved. We would not be endangering anybody, least of all ourselves.”