Learning the World

I think the crew are at a bit of a loss as to what to do with us. They must have expected the settlements to survive the separation, with any repair work to be quite enough to keep us occupied until the rocks could be decanted into independent orbit. Right now we’re poor, idle and fending off investors offering rock-bottom (hah!) prices for our compensation claims. Exploring crew quarters is fun but after a while that’s bound to pall. Salvage… I don’t have the heart for it, though Grant does. He enjoys the challenge.

But there’s one thing we can do that is more than just killing time. We can go into the new virtualities, the ones uploading data from the slaves — the trudges, as I gather we’re now supposed to call them.

I’m surprised the crew haven’t suggested it. Maybe they think it’s too reminiscent of how the founders tried to keep us occupied. Maybe they want to make any decisions about intervention without any pressure or clamour from us. I take their point. But we are, after all, the ones who are going to have to live with the consequences, long after the crew have gone. So I think we should at least know on what basis the decisions are made.

Another thought: I miss those of us who were left behind. I miss, in particular, my three-quarter-sister Magnetic. We used to talk and write to each other a lot. It’s not something I ever mentioned here. It was private. But I miss her, and I’m saying so now because it’s about time someone did. There’s been a lot of tough talk about how the kids who didn’t make it to the cone settlements are ones who were slackers or birth-righters anyway. This is nonsense. Most of them were just too young, or had you forgotten that? And cut out the talk about how we don’t need them anyway. There are enough of us here to make viable settlements, for sure. But we need the rest of the ship generation to fulfil our plans and hopes — and theirs. There are tens of thousands of our younger brothers and sisters stranded back there in the habitat. We are not going to abandon them.

So don’t give up. Don’t turn into a new kind of slackers. Get stuck into those virtualities, try to observe what is going on down there, and keep up the pressure on the crew to come up with an explanation of how we are going to get the rest of our generation back.

“It’s time to reopen contact,” Synchronic had said, two days ago at a meeting of the Red Sun Circle at the villa in White City. The others around the pool had, to all appearances, engaged in glum counsel with the mullets, or divination with the wrack. Then one by one they had looked up and nodded. The Council had, after a likewise unfathomable deliberation, come around to the same decision.

But as she sat in the estate garden, real thumb poised over a virtual switch, Synchronic found herself hesitating. When you’d lived long enough, she’d sometimes reflected, when certain habits had become ingrained no matter what refreshment of the neural pathways the immortality genes could bestow, ethics and etiquette became ever less distinct. Hitherto the involuntary equation had read one way, in disproportionate pangs of conscience over a small breach of ma

Oh well. A week had passed since the separation, a day since the decision. She had deliberately not followed the exchanges between crew and Council. She presumed any initial awkwardness had been got over, and negotiations opened. The full brunt would have passed. Constantine, at least, would have calmed down.

She sighed and opened the cha

“You’ve got a rocking nerve,” said Constantine. “Showing up here.”

He lounged in some real-world environment beside a centrifugal wheel of water. In the background she could see people swimming, up and over, around and around. The Man was naked. Discarded drink-bulbs drifted around him. It had been a long while since she’d seen him like that.

“Excuse me?” she said. “I sent you the warning.”

“Well, whoop-de-do,” said Constantine. “That was good, but it’s not good enough. It was you who tried to have me arrested. It was you and your clique who set out to ruin our finances. That you drew back from the brink is very much to your credit, Synch, but it was a brink you’d brought us to.”

There was this to be said for comms delay: it gave you cover for speechlessness.

“I could recriminate too,” she said at last. “But I won’t.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Constantine. He took a squirt of his drink. “Do you have anything constructive to say?”

“We can discuss a timetable for contact and colonization, to minimize—”

Constantine had had his hand up, she reckoned, by the time she had said “discuss.”

“Not up for discussion. What I and the crew are waiting to hear about is the steps you’ve taken to have the Council deposed, arrested, and slung in the brig.”

She blinked up a couple of words in her dictionary. “Out of the question,” she said.

Constantine reached forward to cut the co

“Wait!” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“We can’t possibly unseat the Council. My position was in a minority.”

“So? Last I heard, the Council had a couple hundred members. You have tens of thousands of ship-generation kids. No contest.”

His words conjured up an absurd image of a crowd surrounding the Council building, marching in and carrying off its members. At that point her imagination failed, and she knew she had him on the run.

“That’s absurd,” she said. “The Council has nothing with which to enforce its will but its moral authority and the agreement of the Complement. If that goes, on what does whatever replaces the Council rely? Armed force?”

“I’m not asking you to use armed force, or unarmed either. Heaven forfend that civilized people like us should resort to violence. That could escalate all the way up to nuclear. No, you can do it constitutionally. Raise a petition to have them impeached. Trigger a recall referendum. Whatever. It’s all in the Contract. I don’t care if you succeed or not, as it happens. In a few years the ship generation will all be old enough to vote. But what I want to see now, and I think I speak for most of us, is some evidence of good faith on the part of the Council minority. Some real protest at what happened. Not some apology and let’s put it all behind us and move on. Until we see that, we’ll continue to put you behind us and move on.” He chuckled. “At some considerable velocity.”

“We could demand the same of you, about the intervention.”

“You could, but it would be a waste of breath. The situations aren’t symmetrical. We are in the right, your majority is in the wrong even if we made a mistake, which I don’t think we did. So we’re going to sort out the consequences of what we’ve done, with or without the rest of you.”

Synchronic sat silent for a moment. This was a private cha

The cylindrical habitat was self-sufficient. Not indefinitely — it would need system resources in at most ten years — but it could hold out for the time that mattered. It had the finances, the resources, and the experience to make colonization a fast and smooth process. The trouble was, the cones had all the most enterprising and energetic colonists. Without economic links to the future settlements and industries, the habitat was doomed to be a backwater. And a backwater occupied, not just with frustrated founders, but with an ever-growing crowd of frustrated would-be colonists.