Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“Okay Mr Tricky, how did you know about Charles and me in the first place?”

“Long, long ago, someone wrote a pattern recognition application that scans the faces of delegates in holovistas taken at conferences,” I replied, feeling very relieved. “It picks up on little cues given by couples who have, er… come to a romantic arrangement.”

“Seduced each other?”

“Yes, and it’s accurate with about four couples out of five. Fortunately, the inventor was having a secret affair, so the app was never released.”

“Was it you?”

“No, I just have access to it. Personal favor from the inventor.”

“Very decent of whoever wrote it. An app like that could really take the fun out of life.”

“How did Ashcroft do the kill switch key?”

“He changed the key, but he did it with a random key generator. He didn’t look at the new key.”

“But he showed it to you.”

She buried her face in her hands for a moment, then rubbed her temples.

“Like Charles said, you’re good. There was a risk that the virtual would not survive but the Firewall would, so I had to have the kill switch key available, just in case. Manual control through that pathetic emergency link was clunky, but it was better than nothing.”

“You put on a good act, demanding that his mind be searched,” I said, hoping she would take my words as a compliment. “You gambled that nobody would think of searching your mind.”

“And the gamble paid off, very nearly.”

“So even now you can take over the Firewall and force the entanglement transmission of pictures from Wells’s surface?”

“Yes.”

“Yet you don’t.”

“Ashcroft-virtual is my child. My very clever child. It realized that a camera on Wells sending out pictures to Earth like some sort of holovista reality show would satisfy humanity. Why spend hundreds of trillions of dollars on another starship when we already have a view from Wells’s surface?”

“Ashcroft-virtual turned out to be a good judge of human nature,” I said, nodding.

At last I had the truth, and it was a powerful truth indeed. It was like winning a particularly difficult game of chess. There was no prize, however.

“So, now what?” asked Jackson, forcing the words out with obvious reluctance.

“What do you mean?”

“About me and Charles?”

“None of anyone else’s business.”

“What?” she exclaimed.

“I’ll say nothing about any of this.”

“But why? This is top-value sensation news. The kill switch key could be ripped from my mind within seconds of the electrode cap going on. You could give a view of Wells back to humanity, you could get over a billion Spacebook likes. That would boost your career to interworld judge level.”

“I’m a just a bureaucrat who dreams, Control-Captain. Fame and power do not interest me, I’m not an explorer, and I’m not a scientist. All I can do is hold the door open while those who are better at exploring and discovering get on with the job. That’s enough for me.”

“But—but I still don’t understand.”

I handed another printout to her. I had been expecting that sort of reaction, and had come prepared. The picture showed three men, two of them wearing very archaic spacesuits.

“Do you know who these are?” I asked.

“Apollo astronauts, the spacesuits are pretty distinctive,” said Jackson. “The resolution is bad, I can’t recognize the faces.”

“The man in the foreground is Neil Armstrong, behind him is Mike Collins, and the date is 16th July, 1969. Can you tell me about the third man?”

“It’s not Aldrin, he would have been wearing a spacesuit. This guy has a military looking cap and overalls, and he’s carrying gear of some sort. I give up, who is he?”

“No idea.”

Jackson stared at me, uncertain of whether or not to be annoyed again.

“I assume there’s a point to all this?” she said.

“That third man knew who he was, and I’ll bet his family had that picture framed and displayed in the living room for decades. His descendants probably still have the picture on the wall. He held the door open, Control-Captain. He was not an astronaut hero or a brilliant engineer, but in a tiny, tiny way he contributed to putting the first men on the moon. Now here I am, holding the door open for the whole of humanity to explore Wells with Argo 2. Should I take the pressure off and give us one pathetic camera on the Firewall? I don’t think so. Give people wonders, and they’ll sit back, open a beer and watch. If you want folk to get up and do something, you must give them mysteries.”

I stood up to go. Jackson stood too, waving her hands in circles and looking like a mess of gratitude, relief and confusion.

“Best to just shake hands, Control-Captain, don’t do anything emotional like hugging me,” I said. “There are always cameras, everywhere.”

“We—Charles and I plan to come out with the truth when the first followup probes land on Wells,” she said as we shook hands. “When we do the declaration, would you like me to mention that you, well, held the door open for us?”

This was unexpected, and I had to think about it for a moment. Fame was beckoning… yet what had I done to deserve it? Jackson, Ashcroft and Ashcroft-virtual were the real heroes.

“Thank you, but no,” I decided.

This seemed to cause her genuine distress.

“Please! You must let me do something for you. Would you like one of Wells’s seas named Harper? I can arrange it.”

The Harper Sea. It was a tempting thought, but I shook my head.

“Why not make your big declaration with Ashcroft in front of a magistrate?” I suggested instead. “I’ll make sure that I’m available.”

“And that’s all you want?”

“Yes. I’ll just be in the background but visible, that’s enough for me.”

I walked away through the old university, feeling very light on my feet. The day was warm, the sunlight dappled by the trees, the scene could not have been more pleasant or mundane… yet I was also on Wells, struggling for breath in the thin air, my teeth chattering with the cold. I was holding a door open, and beyond it was the grassy littoral and a calm, silvery sea. I was the happiest man alive.

Jay Lake was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an award-winning editor, a popular raconteur and toastmaster, and an excellent teacher at the many writers’ workshops he attended. His novels included Mainspring, Escapement , and Pinion , and the trilogy of novels in his Green cycle– Green, Endurance , and Kalimpura . Lake was nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2004, the year after his first professional stories were published. In 2008 Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer, and in the years after he became known outside the sf genre as a powerful and brutally honest blogger about the progression of his disease. Jay Lake died on June 1, 2014.

Maduabuchi St. Macaria had never before traveled with an all-Howard crew. Mostly his kind kept to themselves, even under the empty skies of a planet. Those who did take ship almost always did so in a mixed or all-baseline human crew.

Not here, not aboard the threadneedle starship Inclined Plane . Seven crew including him, captained by a very strange woman who called herself Peridot Smith. All Howard Institute immortals. This was a new concept in long-range exploration, multi-decade interstellar missions with ageless crew, testbedded in orbit around the brown dwarf Tiede 1. That’s what the newsfeeds said, anyway.