Learning the World

They did. The habitat economy went into a sharp downturn while that of the cones shot upward, at least as far as expectations were concerned. For the moment rich and hopeful again, the ship kids began to make good. The red, blocked nodes on the physical chart flipped to green. The cone was as yet a long way from separation, but already its markets had rocketed away from the ship.

Synchronic watched the cones’ break to financial autarky with her knuckles pressed to her mouth. She and the Red Sun cartels had tried to steal the ship generation away from Constantine. Now the crew cartels had stolen them back. She wasn’t worried about the integrity of the habitat. The crew’s work to ensure it was obvious. It was its future as a trading and cultural centre for the new system that had just taken a severe blow. Relations with the settlers, and with whatever market was eventually established with the aliens, could be chaotic for years — perhaps decades. By the time the data colonies and fast probes arrived, the habitat could have lost all the advantages of its prime location and become a backwater, vulnerable to hostile bids and outright attack. She was not complacent about the aliens’ prospects. They seemed a fierce, fast-learning species, and the knowledge that space travel and molecular technologies were possible might have them swarming out of their gravity well long before the ill-equipped, ill-prepared colonisation that the crew evidently contemplated was complete. The premature separation had left whole cohorts of the ship generation stranded in the habitat, and having seen how badly their elder brothers and sisters had behaved in a less fraught situation, Synchronic didn’t look forward to their likely reaction.

She summed her proposal for the Circle: Capitulate and negotiate. Offer reforged links, limited colonization, and accelerated contact.

Her voice was one of many from various cartels that called for a similar policy. The Council, still shaken by the news of the crews’ clandestine intervention and further rocked by the impending separation, considered it seriously. The main alternative proposal shocked her: To allow crew mutiny and unauthorised colonisation a free run sets a very bad precedent. Cripple and recapture.

Synchronic’s outraged demand of How? was met with a likewise laconic retort: EMP.

Electromagnetic pulse.

Nukes. It would work, she was assured. It wouldn’t even harm anyone, if they got the distance right, and the meteor-defence system was good at that.

The proposal passed. Synchronic was having none of it. She zapped through a warning to the cones seconds before communications were cut off.

Hours later, she stood in the garden with the children and waited. The circles of lightning flared and died. A sound too loud and brief to be called a scream split the air. For a moment a red ring glowed in the end plate as the friction welding seized. A vast shudder passed from the ground to the top of every head. In the same second the sunline died, giving a moment of total blackness longer than a blink. The sunline flickered like an old fluorescent tube, steadied, and shone on as if nothing had happened.

Synchronic spoke vague comforting words to the children. She switched her vision to the forward outside view, which was filled with the slowly shrinking circle of the base of the separated cone, and waited for the flash.

14 366:02:23 22:00

These are moments I will always remember in the present tense.

We have the fusion plants in place and on line. All the equipment that can be saved from the interior settlements is piled on the forward side of the rocks. We head for the huge exit airlocks as fast as we can, clinging to scooters and rocket packs and gas-bottle rafts in a great and now empty-seeming darkness. Our little round window on the sunline, our false star, has gone out. Hope your virtual and infrared vision is in synch. The airlocks loom. Brake if we can, jump if we must.

We tumble in heaps of hundreds into the locks. The cycle doesn’t bother to conserve air.

Into the corridors and rooms. Lights again. Find a corner, a cable, a cubbyhole, a creeper, anything. Cling and brace.

There’s a moment like when we entered this sun’s orbit, a moment when something that has always been there goes away. The engine that has powered the sun-line all our lives goes off. There’s nothing, not a flicker of the lights, not a vibration of the bulkheads, not a sensible clue. But we all feel that eerie absence. I have the passing fancy that the shutting down of a machine that makes universes should feel like this: like the sudden silence of a god.

The mystical moment passes in a blare: All hands! Stand by for separation!

There’s a shriek and a vibration that set your teeth on edge and rattle them at the same time. Then a faint backward pressure, a small sense of weight, increasing. We’re on our way now, ru

All hands! Brace for manoeuvres!

The floor lurches, the vertical tilts. Unsecured objects and people skid sideways. The whole cone is tipping over. I’m busy imagining this until I realise I can watch it if I want. I patch in the feed from the cameras on the base of the cone. The habitat cylinder is shockingly close, spi

My surge of angry adrenaline comes at a lucky moment—

All hands! Stand by for acceleration!

The god’s presence comes back, and with it weight, weight like a sack of soil on your chest, weight like people piling on to you. I’m looking ahead, eyes closed, seeing in the direction that is now down. I see the white rapier of the jet stab to infinity. Far away, another jet crosses it, as if in parry. The habitat dwindles beneath our backs. I see the cylinder entire now, rolling on its axis like an abandoned fuel tank. There are other lights, red and white, but they’re hard to tell apart from the bright dots in front of my eyes. Except they’re moving faster.

The habitat shrinks to a white streak like a star on a long-exposure plate.

The weight becomes so much that I feel my ribs are about to break. I think I’m blacking out.

My sight fills with soundless vast spherical explosions of white light far below.

Something, somewhere, fizzes and cracks.

Then there’s a sense of absence and blessed relief as the weight goes away. The call still rings through my head:

All hands! Stand by! Free falling!

And the lights below us fade.