Learning the World

9 — Red Sun Circle

14 365:05:12 11:17

It is now a year since I started this biolog. Happy birthday to Learning the World! Last night I stayed up all night reading it. Well, skimming it, to be honest. So much in it is self-absorbed and self-indulgent. Sometimes I gave you all too much information. Any fully adult reader must have found it painfully limited. I can see that now.

But, you know, it’s surprising. Seeing is seeing; reading is reading; and being able to see through everything and read anything is still seeing and reading. You can have the illusion that you’re thinking faster, but it’s not you who carries out the calculation, or the search, or the transformation — it’s the system doing it for you. So, now that I have more of my adult faculties, I will not be patronising toward those who have not. Which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the added richness, the texture, the depth that the virtuality genes (and, I suppose, in due course television and all the rest) give to the world. (Or do they? Is knowing (that you can know all that is known about) what you are looking at, is the labelling and tagging and indexing an impoverishment of experience? Does it carry the risk that we miss what might be new and unknown and fresh, even about familiar things? Whenever I test that seductive thought by turning off the virtual overlay, I seldom experience any enrichment: the world just loses a dimension, and looks flat.)

But I’ve told you all that already, in now embarrassing breathy excitement when the genes at last kicked in a couple of months ago. Enough.

To serious business. Life has become strange. It is not how I had expected it to be. I and everybody I know are working on their plans and proposals and trying to pull together a team or find one they’d like to join, just as we always expected to be doing. But overlaying all this — kind of like the virtual overlay, now that I come to think of it — is our preoccupation with Destiny II. In one sense it’s the most exciting thing that could have happened. In another it’s a big distraction from what we all thought was all we wanted in life.

The first probe images were distracting and fascinating enough. Since the probe returned to the orbiter with its atmosphere samples (high partial pressure of oxygen, which supposedly explains how the bat people fly and the megafauna are so, well, mega), and the analysers got busy sequencing the aerial bacteria (they have (yawn) a unique genetic code) and the orbiter started spraying out glass-beaded atmosphere-entry assembler packages to build microprobes with compatible chemistries and the little bugs started reporting back… well! You know what it’s like. You can get lost in exploring Destiny II.

I hesitate to say this, but the bat people are horrible.

The filthy roosts they live in are bad enough. What really disgusts me is that they keep slaves. It’s a word I’d only encountered before in the context of ants. I have since found out that originally this usage was a metaphor, and the term “slave” applied in the first instance to human beings — the prehistoric races used to do it to people. And the bat people do it to these poor mutilated drudges. But still, I suppose we should not be too sweeping in our condemnation: human beings used to keep human slaves almost up until the time of the Moon Caves. So our ancestors were just as disgusting when they only lived on the surface of the primary. It may become important to bear this in mind.

This morning at breakfast in the cafe with Grant and as usual talking about the big argument — is there really anything more to say? if so, I’ll find it — when I wondered what the Contract has to say about resolving disputes that divide the whole ship. (Notice how we all now think of it as the ship? And not the world?) So I looked it up. Part of my mind, I guess, must have been on the subject of contact, because I must have subvocalised the word, and that was what came up:

11378(b): Alien contact shall be treated as an emergency. “Alien contact” means the acquisition of information in any form direct or indirect which indicates or suggests the presence in any region within operational or communications range of the ship of any form of intelligence not of human or posthuman origin. “Emergency” means a situation as defined in Clause 59 paragraph (f) above; wherein it is declared, that the duly constituted Council at the time of the declaration or discovery of emergency may take any action internal or external which it deems fit with a view to resolving the emergency; such action to be answerable to the entire Complement and to the Civil Worlds in due course. In a situation of urgency (q.v.) within a state of emergency executive action may be taken by appropriate members of the Crew. Such urgent action shall be referred at once to the Council. A state of emergency may not be maintained for more than one calendar year as heretofore defined unless renewed by express permission of a poll of the entire Complement, normal canvassing procedures being available on a regular and non-emergency basis for the duration of the pre-poll discussion, which shall not be less than seven calendar days.

“Look at this!”

Grant was in a trance of his own, doubtless refining the design of his waterworld scheme (it now has a name, the Last Resort) or (hah!) his novel, but I overrode it with a zap. He came out blinking and shaking his head as if he’d really been swimming in his ludicrous ten-gravity water.

“What?”

“Look at this.” I patched him the link.

Breath indrawn through teeth. Trouble is, he was chewing at the time. (Yes, Grant, this is to embarrass you.)

He swallowed and came back into focus.

“Does this mean what I think it means?” I asked.

“If what you’re thinking is: ‘Has the ship been in a state of undeclared emergency for the past four months?’ and if ‘shall’ and ‘or discovery of emergency’ mean what they normally mean, yes,” he said.

“Oh good,” I said. “So the Council is a lawless dictatorship with only eight months to go before it has to put all its actions up for scrutiny.”

“I don’t see what’s good about that,” said Grant.

“The ‘only eight months to go’ part.”

“Do you think the Council is aware of this?”

“Of course it is,” I said. “It has to be. What amazes me is that the Contract has a clause about alien contact at all.”

“It has clauses for all sorts of unlikely events,” said Grant. “Fast burns inside or out, capture of ship, memetic plague, meteor strikes, you name it. Even war.”

I had to look the word up, but the internal dictionary is so fast it just looks like a blink, not a trance.

“You mean, something other than clade conflict with fast-burn spinoffs?”

“Yes,” said Grant. “Organised hostilities between relatively stable societal entities.”

“But there hasn’t been one of these for thousands of years!”

“Not in the Civil Worlds, sure. But some societies may have fallen out of them. Fast-burn survivors and so forth. And some ships go bad, we know that. So yeah, mad as it seems, the Contract has the appropriate provisions.” Grant gri

I can’t really imagine war. I can imagine having to fight some swarm of zombie machines or snarling horde of posthuman fast-burn wreckage or whatever, but not two or more actual human societies actually fighting each other. I’m aware that people did that, before history, before the Moon, but it seems irrational. One side would have to believe they had something to gain from destroying or damaging the other, which just doesn’t make sense: it runs up against the law of association. And more to the point, each individual on any side would have to believe that they benefited from participating even if they died, which doesn’t make sense either. I suppose kin selection could make genes prevalent that made people vulnerable to that kind of illusion, but that only makes sense with animals that don’t have foresight. Even crows aren’t that stupid, at least not the ones that can talk. You have to get down to ants and such like before you see that kind of genetic mechanical mindlessness.