Learning the World

Apocalyptic and unexpected as the sight was, Synchronic recognised it. She would have seen such a spectacle at some point in the next few years. The gigantic electromagnetic baffles of the frictionless flange between the axial plate and the rest of the endplate within which it spun were being readied to lock down and friction-weld into place, searing the ship and turning off the field at the moment when the cones disengaged.

Synchronic made a supreme effort to retain her composure in front of the fast-growing crowd of her younger carechildren. Knowing that most of her older carechildren were now on the other side of that fiery barrier did nothing to help.

She put the little girl down on the ground and stroked her head and smiled around. “Isn’t it exciting!” she said. “What an amazing sight! And listen to that thunder!”

“What is it, Synch?” somebody shouted. The cry was taken up.

Synchronic waved her arms. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just some engineering work. The crew have to do it every so often. You’re all too young to have seen it before. Say, why don’t you all fetch your cameras and make some pictures of it?”

All but the smallest children, and one or two of the older, were satisfied with that. She told Magnetic Resonance and the other older ones a less than complete truth about what was going on, and set them to work distracting their younger caresibs. Then she went inside and sat down and tried to take stock before returning the insistent calls of her friends and allies.

This was mutiny, total and irrevocable. Worse, in a way, than the secret scheme of Constantine and his cabal of crew scientists. That at most had seemed — only hours earlier, in her furious confrontation with Constantine — a probably illegal and certainly unethical and underhanded circumvention of the established, albeit contested, will of the ship’s community. This was the literal breakup of the community itself.

The personal betrayal left her with a dark sense of abandonment. Constantine had not been her lover in a long, long time; but in their centuries of friendship she had felt she had come to know him to the bone. Cities had risen and fallen around them, fashions and philosophies had come and gone, fortunes had been made and lost, styles of art and customs of courtship and subtle techniques of intrigue had been refined and trashed like the buildings in which they’d flourished and faded. At the end of the great enclosed adventure of the one-generation ship, that had turned the emptying of the tank into the founding of a world, she stood here on what they’d made of the last dregs of the regolith and the mulch and realised she didn’t know him at all.

Above and beyond that, less personal but more disquieting and disorienting, was what the mutiny told her about people in general. Separating the cones could not be done without a sustained cooperative effort of the crew, and no doubt of the ship generation on the same side. In all her long life politicking had been polite: the fights fierce, the stakes small. You went along with decisions you’d been defeated on and expected others to go along with those you’d won, because there would always be another round of the game, another roll of the dice. Was this all an illusion? Did it all come down to personal influence in the end? If so many people were eager to troop along when a coal-black alpha, a respected senior, the Oldest Man, kicked over the table and walked away — then it seemed so.

If that much of her experience had fallen, far more still stood. She began taking and making calls. The Red Sun Circle and its allies would give Constantine the fight of his life.

Awlin Halegap had been surprised to find himself directed to his normal workspace by the Order of the Day. He’d always considered his work as vital as anyone’s, but he’d never have expected “speculator” to be a reserved occupation in an all-hands call. He regretted missing the fun: a day spent shoving and stopping large and dangerous masses sounded like sport.

He slid into his cubbyhole, invoked Java on his hot-drinks feed, and with a flexure of hands and fingers conjured the markets to the real screens around his head and to the virtual screens within. “A choppy day,” he said.

The great ship’s exchanges already looked segmented. With most crew and all the settlers in the cones mobilized to what amounted to manual labour, their trading had been left in the hands of agents, demons, and bots. It lacked panache. In these early minutes no one could be sure how the day would end, how much would be honoured and how much written off.

In the habitat cylinder, by contrast, immense disturbances stirred in the depths, visible on early trades like the upward bulge of a stretch of ocean that foretold a tsunami on a distant shore. Sharp fluctuations in raw materials prices agitated the surface. Established disreputable futures markets in bets on an early end to the colonization embargo supplied the windblown froth.

Moments ahead of most of his fellow traders, Awlin saw the arbitrage potential of the flatter markets of the cones. Even discounting for uncertainty, it was a sure thing that the gross misallocations imposed by the mobilization would open up gaps that it would be profitable to correct when the dust had settled. He spent a happy hour chasing them, and then was almost caught short by a wave of selling. Wrenching his perspective, he traced that wave to a sharp activity spike in the habitat, to whose markets the selling wave rebounded in seconds. The three parts of the ship were co

In the screen segment devoted to physical activity in the cone reserve tanks, snarl-ups and stoppages reddened the nodes of the decision tree.

“They’re cutting the kids off without a pe

Awlin flashed a comment around the traders’ loop: “This is downright economic warfare.”

Enough agreement came back for him to float a company and coordinate a counterattack. The markets rallied, but not enough. Awlin contemplated an array of downward slopes and a continued flare of red lights on the project board and decided matters were out of his hands. He liquidated the company and kicked the problem up to a finance jury.

The deliberations didn’t take long, and the response crackled with an impatience he suspected was Constantine’s: What are you waiting for? This is separation! So separate already!

Awlin sucked in a deep breath. This was the nuclear option. He hesitated for a moment, then sent out the proposal that would sever financial ties between the cylinder and the cones: currency reform.

The forward cone went through three distinct commodity bases for an autonomous currency in as many seconds, and settled on a basket of carbon, nickel-iron, and helium-3. At once all values of goods and services in the cone were reckoned on the assumption of access to the system’s resources and independence from — and the irrelevance of — habitat capital. The stimulus was in part illusory; it was almost certainly inflationary; but Awlin and his collaborators had bet that it would be enough to carry along the human and virtual agents. He waited for the markets to turn.