Same As It Ever Was

They sat, the man and the woman, in the middle of the narrow crescent of a white beach, looking out across calm blue water that stretched, punctuated here and there by low green islands. The sheer wall of the tent curving up, and beyond its lattice of huge diamond panes a low range of bare and dusty hills stretched across the near horizon, sharp against the black sky.

‘You remember this place,’ she said.

‘Of course I remember it,’ he said.

‘The last time we talked. When you tried to explain why you were leaving. And now . . .’

‘It hasn’t changed. The view. It hasn’t changed.’

‘Why should it change?’

‘There you are.’
‘We don’t need to talk about that again. We talked ourselves out the last time, years ago.’

‘And nothing has changed. But that’s all right. It’s what you are. What your family are.’

‘Did you come here to pick a fight with me?’

‘I came here to say goodbye.’

‘Because it’s part of the program. The thing of yours.’

‘Not just me. There are thirty-two others. Three ships, eleven souls in each ship.’

‘Souls.’

‘Some believe so. Souls, minds, personality clusters.’

‘Copies.’

‘We won’t think of ourselves as copies.’

‘Even though that’s what you are. What you’ll be. They’ll open your skull, pare down your brain micron by micron, and rip its structure and activity into a viron inside that little can of a ship. The process destroys the original, so all that’s left will be the copy. The ghost of a dead man.’

‘You can’t talk me out of it.’

‘I know. I never could talk you out of anything, and I’m not about to try now.’

‘So what are you trying to do?’

‘I don’t know. Introduce a note of realism into your fantasy, perhaps.’

‘I know what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘And even though you won’t admit it, I know it’s important.’

She didn’t reply. They sat quietly for a little while. The woman looking off at the view of the lake and the islands, the hills stark against the naked black sky. The man running white sand through his fingers, looking sideways at the woman. She had aged well. Slim as ever, hair white now, pure white hair in a bowl cut, lines of course, a certain stringiness at the throat, but the same squarish tip to her slender nose, the same small bow of a mouth, the mouth he’d once loved to kiss and rekiss.

He said, ‘Okay, I admit that this is part of it. Saying goodbye to your family and your friends. To the people who were important in your life. Who are important. Doing it, being able to do it, I admit: it’s a tick mark. But I would have come here anyway.’

She said, ‘You always did find it easy to say goodbye.’

‘Now who’s trying to pick a fight?’

‘You were never satisfied. Never content with what you had. You always wanted something else. My mother warned me, but I never listened.’

‘Your mother? I always thought she liked me.’

‘She liked you, but she knew you. My father didn’t like you, and didn’t care to think about why.’

‘Well. Maybe they were right.’

‘Don’t. Don’t . . . indulge me.’

Another silence. Small waves ran up to the beach, over and over. A bird slipped sideways on the warm breeze, dipping low over the water, gliding on.

‘I never asked for forgiveness. I always admitted that I was wrong to go. But I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t give you what you wanted kids, stability . . . I wanted more than that. Lovely though this place is, I was dying here,’ he said, smiling at his own hyperbole.

‘There are all kinds of cities and settlements right here on Callisto,’ she said. ‘And cities and settlements on Ganymede and Europa, too. Ten thousand gardens and habitats in the Belt. There’s Earth and the Moon. There’s Mars. Mercury. All the places further out, Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. Pluto and Charon, kobolds, the centaurs, the scattered disc . . . And that’s not enough?’

‘I guess not.’

‘I’m trying to understand.’

‘I’m trying to explain. I thought I had explained.’

‘It was a nice little speech. Leaving the cradle. The brave pioneers, the brave new worlds.’

‘Maybe it’s people. I think sometimes it’s that,’ the man says. ‘Everywhere you go, people are much the same. They make a big deal about little local differences in customs and protocols that really aren’t a big deal. And everywhere the same conversations about art and politics and the economy, the same gossip, the same ways of earning kudos . . . It’s all the same, everywhere. But out there, it’s blank. It’s new.’

‘Except other people are already out there, aren’t they? One of the first ships to light out, isn’t it headed where you’re headed?’

‘It’s old tech, that ship. A big, old, slow multigeneration ship that can’t make more than a fraction of a percent of light speed. It left more than a century ago, and we’ll overtake it inside a year after we launch. And we’ll get there centuries before it does. And that won’t be a problem because we don’t want what its crew and passengers want. They want the planet. The exoearth. We want the asteroid belts. The two belts, the comets . . .’

‘As if you couldn’t find a rock of your own here.’

‘And in ten or twenty years, the neighbours come calling. There’s nothing new, here. I don’t mean that’s a bad thing for you. You like things the way they are. But for me . . .’

‘You always had a low boredom threshold. I liked that, once upon a time. Your love of life, your fearlessness. The kid from Earth, coming all the way out here just because you wanted to see what it was like. You made everything into an adventure.’

‘We had some good times together, didn’t we?’

‘We had the wanderjahr.’

‘Driving along the equatorial mountains of Iapetus.’

‘Camelot, Mimas. Paris, Dione—’

‘We’ll always have Paris,’ he said, and smiled, but she didn’t understand the reference. ‘We had some high old times. But afterwards, I couldn’t hack it. Life here. I said I was sorry then. And I’m sorry now.’

‘No, you aren’t,’ she said neutrally. ‘You know your problem? You can’t change.’

‘I can’t change?’

‘You’re still that kid, looking for thrills. You haven’t grown up. You can’t grow up.’

‘If you ask me, it’s over-rated.’

‘Kids go on wanderjahrs because it helps them find out who they are,’ she said. ‘The experiences, the new places, the different people. It all gives a certain perspective. But you just liked to travel.’

‘Maybe I already knew who I was.’

‘You see? Same as you ever were.’

‘Not for long, according to you.’

She looked sideways at him. ‘Perhaps that’s why they chose you. People like you. People who can’t change. Perpetual adolescents.’

‘People who want adventure. Who are willing to risk everything to create something new.’

‘Say you get there. You survive the journey. Then what?’

‘We find CHON and metals, build the machines that build the really big construction machines. And we quicken kids, and teach them what to do. We’ll be like the guardians, the guides. And they’ll build new habitats and settlements, new cities. New ways of living around a new star.’

‘And then? When that gets old?’

‘There are always more stars. One thing about uploading into a viron, you don’t ever have to die. I’ll be have a front-row view of ten thousand years of history. A million years.’

‘Like anyone who hasn’t ever grown up, you really do fear death, don’t you?’

‘Uploading is dying, according to you.’

‘It’s a kind of death, but not the real death. And not real life either.’

‘Compared to this?’  The man gestured, meaning the lake and the islands, the trim little villages scattered around the rim of the tent.

‘People find who they are,’ the woman said. ‘They move on from childish things. Small things, ordinary things, everyday things, they become important. Hard things like raising kids become important. Work becomes important. My work on quantifying morality, you don’t think anything of it, but it’s not only important to me, it has mass, it has significance. It has made a significant contribution to setting a universal standard of kudos. Part of it is incorporated in every bourse in the system.’

‘I don’t mean to dismiss what you do.’

‘But you do. You did. You walked away from it. And now you’re walking away from everything else, into this awfully big adventure of yours. And you’ll keep running away.’

‘I’ll keep moving on. I’ll always want to find out what’s over the next horizon. And I will find out, too.’

‘You’ll keep on running. And never look back, never come home. Never stop to think why you’re running.’

‘I should have known that you wouldn’t understand.’

The woman studied him with a look of unquantifiable sadness. She said, ‘You are what you are. I am what I am. And sometimes I tend to slip into the formal mode of academic discourse when it isn’t appropriate. I’m sorry.’

When she stood, the man reached for her, saying, ‘I’m not angry or anything. Listen, I have a couple or three hours before the flitter leaves for Rainbow Bridge. We could hang out here a while, call up a picnic, maybe, you know, say goodbye properly . . .’

The woman laughed. ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ she said, and turned and walked off across the breast of the little island, its rabbit-cropped turf and scattered trees vivid and green against the black sky and Jupiter’s slanted pastel crescent.

‘The front-row view of a million years of history,’ the man called out, but the warm wind took his words and the woman walked on to the little skiff beached on the far side of the island, to her home, to the life she’d made.

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Evening's Empires - Some Key Words

Gajananvihari Pilot. Pabuji's Gift. Kabadiwallahs. The iconography of the Bright Moment. Microscopic jitter. Tick-tock philosophers. Head doctors. Dacoits. Discorporate tankies. Ascetic minstrels. Skull feeders. Spire builders. The Free People. 207061 Themba. The forests of Vesta. Chandelier cities. Ophir, the world-city, a.k.a. The Caves of Steel. Free People. Fei Shen, the Flying Mountain, a.k.a Wufen Shan, the Fifth Sacred Mountain, a.k.a. First New Shanghai. Monoliths. Tannhauser Gate. The Republic of Arden. The ten thousand collectives of Europa. The Commonwealth of Sugar Mountain. The Memory Whole. Seraphs. Waypoints. The Great Expansion. The True Empire. Vacuum organisms. Cratered rubble-piles blanketed in deep layers of dust and debris, mountains of nickel-iron, stony mountains of pyroxene, olivines and feldspar, rocks rich in tarry carbonaceous tars, clays and water ice. Pirates of the asteroids.

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Links 25/01/13

Earth may be crashing through domain walls of dark matter.  And if it isn't, the leading theory for the composition of dark matter is almost certainly wrong.

On the other hand, the supergiant star Betelgeuse is definitely going to crash through 'a strange wall of interstellar dust' in 5000 years.

On Mars, the Curiosity rover has just taken its first images with its 'hand lens' camera at night.  And here's a nice little gallery of images from the first fifty years of robotic solar-system exploration.

Talking of robots, Project Phoenix proposes to use robot mechanics to recycle parts from orbiting satellites.  And Deep Space Industries plans to deploy flocks of tiny Firefly satellites to prospect for lodes of valuable metals on near-Earth asteroids, and to mine them with Dragonfly robots, which will each return 20-45 kilograms of material to Earth for study.  'DSI is also developing a space-based 3D printer called the MicroGravity Foundry, which would grind up asteroids, separate out the useful bits and fuse them into manufactured goods.'


The British Museum is about to open an exhibition of ice-age art.  According to Curator Dr Jill Cook, some of the works on display may have been created by a professional class or artists: 'Some of the things we have from digs are a bit rubbish; some of them almost look like apprentice pieces. But the best things are masterpieces and would have taken hundreds of hours to produce.'  (While I was researching Mind's Eye, by the way, Dr Cook gave me an invaluable tour of the British Museum's neolithic and palaeolithic stores; I was lucky enough to be able to take a very close look at some of these pieces.)

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Dragon Lady

I knew who it was as soon as I saw her. She was a lot older, of course, and her hair, still glossy black, was no longer bowl-cut but brushed back and caught up in a long pigtail braided with gold wire, and she wore a sober grey spider-silk trouser suit rather than freefall coveralls. She had long nails, too, and her lips were dyed deep red to match. But it was Xiuli Tian, all right. I’d know her anywhere. Our dragon lady, our saviour, our nemesis.

I hadn’t seen her for more than thirty years. Closer to forty, really. She’d stolen a gig and hightailed it out of Charn, and here she was in the passenger terminal of the port of Al Yahar, the capital of the Koronis Emirates, talking with an equally expensively but much younger dressed woman as she skimmed past me. I half-raised a hand in greeting, a foolish reflex she fortunately did not notice, and she said something that made her companion laugh, and then she was gone.

It was Ruger Ridgley who gave her the nickname, after she’d spurned his attempt to get her into his sleeping niche. The stereotyping, and trying to hit on anything young and female: both were typical of Ruger. He was our systems engineer and somewhat older than the rest of us, and believed that gave him all kinds of unearned privileges.

‘If she doesn’t loosen up, that attitude of hers is going to cause friction,’ he told my partner, Krish, and Krish, who liked to play the diplomat, advised him to give her time to get used to her new home.

Xiuli Tian had been the last to join our kibbutz, signing up less than twenty days before we lit out for Charn. She claimed to know something about hydroponic work, but more importantly she had a chunk of credit that greatly enhanced our sinking fund and earned her the right to become a partner with a three hundred and fifty eighth share, the smallest of all of us, calculated from the time she’d spent working on planning and preparation (zero), her expertise (small), and her credit (substantial).

She was – or so we thought at the time – one of the wave of new immigrants to the Belt who were swarming up the new elevators and heading out to the Moon or Mercury or the Belt to find their fortunes, a rising demographic that would characterise what we’d come to call the Great Expansion. Our kibbutz was doing its bit in that rush into new territory. We were mostly first-generation Belters, born into families, crews and communes of Outers who’d migrated inwards after the Quiet War. Now, like our parents, we wanted to set up a place of our own. We’d been granted title on a lumpy rubble-pile asteroid, 2038615 Charn, hired a construction crew whose big machines had tented an equatorial crevasse and installed a basic lifesystem, and purchased a chunk of comet CHON, now a tiny, tarry moon of our rock, that would supply organic material and water. And then we moved in, forty-three of us including our new friend from Earth, Xiuli Tian, and got to work.

Xiuli was part of my crew, horticulture and landscaping. It immediately became clear that her hydroponic expertise was vestigial. She’d helped out on her parents’ farm back in Tasmania, she confessed, and hadn’t realised that what she’d learned back then wasn’t especially transferable. But she was a quick learner and a hard worker, putting in more hours than anyone else, signing up for all the tough, dirty, unpopular chores. She kept out of the sex and romance games of the unpartnered, hardly ever volunteered anything about herself or her life on Earth, and hardly took part in the struggle sessions where we thrashed out democratic solutions to every kind of problem, but pretty soon we accepted her as one of us. Quiet and unassertive, but tough and single-minded. Point her at a problem and she’d bang her head against it until she’d cracked it by sheer force.

I wonder what would have happened if it hadn’t been for the crash. Would she have settled down, partnered up, and started making babies like most of the rest of us? Or would her past have caught up with her anyway? One thing was certain, it was the crash that raised her up, and brought her down.

We’d used less than a tenth of the mass of our little CHON moon to establish a viable, fairly stable biosphere in our tent town. Five years after we’d moved in, we began to delicate work of break up and de-orbit the rest, planning to smear its primordial tars across a large percentage of Charn’s surface and grow photosynthetic vacuum organisms that would transform it into electrical power and novel polymers, room-temperature superconductors and quantum dots, and so on and so forth. But an explosive charge misfired and shattered a chunk into too many fragments, some of those fragments smacked into the surface outside the target area, and three struck our tent. Everyone got into a p-suit or a shelter in time. No one was killed. But the biosphere was wrecked. Our gardens, our farms, our tanks: all dead. And even worse, one of the fragments had smacked into our maker plant.

We’d been having problems with the farms in the past year, so our stores were too low to tide us over until we got things up and running again. And with all but one maker wrecked beyond repair, we couldn’t print enough food from CHON, which in any case was mostly smeared across Charn’s craters and lumpy plains. For a couple of days, it looked like we would have to sell Charn at a knock-down price, and return to our homes and hope we could scrape together enough credit and kudos to start over in five or ten years. A hard thing for young, ambitious, proud, independent people like us, a big hit on our pride and self-worth. And then, when everything seemed hopeless, when we met to talk about what we should do, Xiuli presented her inventory and her plan.

It was impressively detailed. And after a couple of days of analysis and failure testing, it looked like it might work. She was modest about her achievement, saying she had learned something about resource allocation in an old job, but showed some steel when she warned us that democracy would have to go during what she called the emergency. There was no time for debate, she said. Someone must take charge.

And we let her. Our dragon lady. We let her take over. And she saved us. Saved our pride, saved our commune, saved Charn. It was a hard year. Every calorie, every watt, had to be hoarded and doled out. We mostly lived on plastic food and vitamin supplements. We all lost mass, and spent most of our time working or sleeping, no time or energy for anything else. Three people died, and Xiuli and her cadres treated the bodies the way we'd treated every scrap of CHON we could scrape together. It came out, about the bodies, and things eased up a little after fifteen people decided to drop out, and ten more were exiled for what Xiuli called insurrection, but for two years it was touch and go. Xiuli kept us together. Whenever a problem cropped up, there she was, with a ready solution that we had to apply without argument or discussion. Whenever anyone complained, or failed to work hard enough, she decided on their punishment. That insurrection happened six months in, when she discovered that a family was hoarding food for their kids, and punished the parents and the kids. The insurrection was put down quickly and violently, and the rebels were given a choice: hard labour on short rations, or exile, and loss of their credit. They all left, but the resentment lingered, and never quite went away.

Xiuli seemed not to notice it. She thrived on hardship and she loved leadership. She didn’t even mind that we called her the Dragon Lady. I think she actually liked it.

When the vacuum organism farms yielded their first crops and things began to ease, it seemed natural and inevitable that Xiuli would lead the trade mission to Green Mansions, at that time the nearest garden to our rock. She drove a hard bargain, bringing back three reconditioned makers and luxuries like tea and chocolate we hadn’t been able to afford to make ourselves. Everyone got a share, but Xiuli’s cadre, her close friends and sycophants, got the lion’s share. It emphasised that we were no longer equal, might never be equal ever again.

There was more grumbling, and perhaps there might have been another insurrection, but then collision watch spotted a ship approaching. Xiuli made contact with it, and the next day she was gone, on the stolen gig. The ship changed course when it spotted the fleeing gig, but she managed to reach Tannhauser Gate ahead of it, and disappeared into the Autonomous Trading Zone.

The ship had been carrying two people from Earth: security from the corporado Xiuli had robbed. She had been working as a low-level administrator on a construction project in low Earth orbit, and one day had bugged out to the Belt with the chunk of credit she had used to buy her way in to our thing – credit, we soon discovered, which had been transferred out of our account an hour before she left Charn.

And that was the last we knew of our dragon lady. She had saved us, no doubt, but she had changed us, stamped her authority on our hearts and souls, and we never quite got over it. Partners split up; friendships ended. Tough things had been done during the hard years, and some of them could not be forgiven. Everyone who had been in Xiuli’s little cadre left. Ruger Ridgley left too, and two years later was found dead in a hostel in Tasmania: it seemed that he had been looking for Xiuli, and several people speculated that she’d found him before he’d found her. Three years after that, half of what was left of the kibbutz left to start another settlement, out in the Trojans. They called it Fresh Start.

Well, the rest of us are still here, and have prospered after our fashion. We are not what we wanted to be, perhaps, but we have tried to make the best of what we have become.

And here I am, making my way back home after visiting my old family, my old home, and there she is. The Dragon Lady. Xiuli Tian. I have checked the registry: she is travelling under the name Miao Liang, is about to board a highliner for Ceres. She owns a small vacuum-organism farm on Ceres, with a sideline in wine production. She is unpartnered but has a daughter, seems to lead a quietly respectable low-profile life.

If I were a different kind of person – if I were like poor Ruger, for instance – I might be tempted to turn her in: the warrant for her arrest is still outstanding. If this was another story, it would begin here: intrigue, blackmail, and after various thrilling twists, revenge and catharsis. But I am not interested in revenge, and besides, she saved me, and even though we split up (he became part of her cadre, and confessed to me that he’d briefly become her lover, too), she saved Krish, too. She was our leader, but we allowed her to lead us. She used us, yes; but we used her. We all made our choices, and we have to live with the consequences. We chose to save Charn rather than walk away, and we did save it. And some of us walked away anyway, because we were all changed by what we had to do.

No, she has her life, and I have mine. It is not cowardice to let her go: it’s good sense. The past is a dangerous place, and I have many millions of kilometres to traverse before I return to the place I helped to make, the place my friends and I are still trying to make good, the place we saved from her, after we let her do what she had to do to save us.

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Links 18/01/13

Cabin Porn is liable to induce envy in those who want a little place to get away from it all.  I lust after the studio cabin in Wayne, Maine (page 3).

'100 Wild Huts is an experimental challenge I’ve set myself to build 100 small survival shelters on any piece of ground that harbours enough natural resources for the build. I intend to sleep rough in each shelter for one night and blog about the experiences.'

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Bit Rot

Like most writers, I'm healthily paranoid about backing up my work.  It's done automatically every ten minutes, and at the end of the day I back up files to a thumb drive, an external terabyte hard drive, and send an email to myself via gmail, with the work-in-progress attached.  I also add new files to an offsite thumb drive periodically.  (So far, I've resisted the allure of dumping copies in the Cloud using DropBox or an equivalent, mainly because I have the feeling that while it's free now, it probably soon won't be, an opinion backed up by a couple of friends who work in IT.)

When I started out, things were much easier.  The only computers were mainframes, and the only word processors were Wangs.  So almost every author either wrote by longhand, or typed, and all backups were in the form of atoms.  I typed my first stories and my first published novel, backing up first with carbon paper copies, and later on by submitting photocopies.  I graduated to bit storage with my first computer, which used 5.25" disks.  Later media included Zip disks, and 3.5" disks, which as well as accumulating new files were also imprinted with copies of old files that travelled from computer to computer.  And because files produced by old word-processing programmes aren't always compatible with new WP programmes, all final versions are saved in WP and the universal .rtf format.

But even bits can rot.  As I prepared to copy-edit old WordPerfect 5.0 versions of the first two Confluence books, I discovered that chunks were missing from the files thanks to some copying error that must have originated in the WP program - all back up files were identical.  Luckily, copies on atoms saved the day.  I spend several evenings over Christmas razoring out the relevant pages from the relevant US hardbacks, turning them into text files using my scanner, correcting the (surpriusingly few) errors in the resultant files, and patching them into the existing WP files.  If there's a lesson in all this it's this: keep backup copies of everything.  Including your own books.

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Monoliths

There were three of them in on it at the start. Juny Parrish and her partner, Moss, were engineers working on the Mare Imbrium section of the trans-lunar railway; their friend, Ringo Takashi, was designing a mural for the big interchange station at Archimedes City. They were all from Paris, Dione, had helped to rebuild the city after the Quiet War, and had worked on the railway that girdled Mimas. The railway stretched across the nearside southern hemisphere of Earth’s Moon was a much bigger project, but in many ways easier. With the exception of Montes Taurus, the terrain was mostly rolling lava plains, with few large craters or rilles. The big machines that fabricated the pylons and track rolled on at a steady three kilometres per day, with few snags, so Juny and Moss were able to commute between the railhead and Archimedes City fairly regularly. One night, over dinner, Ringo told them about a fabulous three-hundred-year-old movie he was mining for his mural, a vast panorama blending dozens of paleo-spaceflight representations of the exploration of the Solar System. He showed them a clips of ape-men clustered around a vertical slab, and people in weird silvery spacesuits examining an identical slab in a pit dug into the lunar surface, said he was working on something that would merge the two.

‘A where-we-came-from, where-are-we-going kind of thing. I might make it the centerpiece.’

Moss was interested in the slabs. ‘Where is the one on the Moon supposed to be?’

‘Tycho,’ Ringo said. ‘The movie is very strange: an attempt at realistic futurism mixed with weird transcendentalism. Aliens uplifting the ancestors of humanity, astronauts triggering an alarm on the Moon, proving that humanity has left the cradle, and nonsense involving wormholes and a kind of posthuman transformation.’

‘I know these people working on wormhole theory,’ Moss said. ‘A posthuman clade in the Belt. You should show them this.’

Juny said, ‘Are they really trying to make wormholes?’

‘Of course not. You know posthumans. All theory and no application.’

Moss was fiddling with the second clip, freezing the moment when one of the astronauts reached out to the black surface of the slab.

‘It would be interesting to actually make one of these things,’ he said. ‘You could plant it in Tycho.’

That was how it began.

At first, they talked about casting a slab of black lucite and incorporating it into Ringo’s mural, playing the two clips superimposed on each other in its depths. Ringo soon dismissed this as a cheap and obvious trick, but the idea didn’t quite go away. Why not make a slab, a monolith as it was called in the movie, and plant it somewhere? Bury it, Juny suggested, with clues pointing towards it, and make a piece of action art or secret theatre involving unwitting treasure hunters that would imitate the lunar scene in the movie, complete with a radio pulse aimed at Jupiter. Or better yet, Moss and Ringo said, aim the pulse at some star where the aliens might come from . . .

It became a game they played over several dinners. Evolving and refining it, until they were all agreed that they had something worth doing. Juny and Moss organised the design and construction of the monolith in a print factory run by a friend of theirs. A black slab with dimensions in the ratio of 1:4:9, the square of the first three integers, 3.35 metres tall. Its faces smooth and black and non-reflective, incorporating a system that converted sunlight to electrical power, stored in capacitors that at a touch anywhere on the surface discharged in a radio squeal shaped by internal waveguides.

The fabrication of the monolith was straightforward: the three of them spent far more time discussing how to erect it, and where. They quickly eliminated Tycho Crater and anywhere on the nearside, because there were too many installations and satellites and spacecraft that could be disrupted by a powerful radio signal. They talked about sites elsewhere in the Solar System, but eventually settled on the farside of the Moon, atop the rimwall of a small crater inside the larger Mendeleev Crater, a spot near a popular hiking trail.

After much argument, they settled on an enigmatic unmodulated radio signal rather than some kind of encrypted message, and decided that it should be aimed at the core of the galaxy. Moss, with the stubborn literalism that was sometimes endearing, sometimes frustrating, said that no alien civilization would ever be found there because the central black hole violently affected the whole region; Juny and Ringo pointed out that they weren’t aiming it at actual aliens, and besides, there were a good number of nearer stars in the same direction. It was a trivial hack to make the wave guide directional, and to delay transmission of the signal when the galactic core was below the horizon. Moss incorporated a safety routine, too, so that the signal would also be delayed if the monolith detected any spacecraft or satellites in the path of the radio beam.

‘We don’t want this to come back and bite us,’ he said.

All that was left was to organise the emplacement. They hired a lunar hopper and borrowed a small construction robot, swore Ringo’s assistant to secrecy, and planted the thing in six hours. Ringo’s assistant took photographs of the three of them posed in front of the monolith, as in the movie clip, helmet visors fully polarised to hide their identity, and after Moss activated it they all had to resist the temptation to touch it: part of the fun was waiting for some random stranger to discover and trigger it.

They did not have to wait long. The first squeal was triggered just eleven days after the monolith had been emplaced, and soon there was a steady trickle of signal pulses. It became a brief sensation. People hiking the trail made a point of diverting to the monolith and triggering it and posing for pictures. Several couples performed partnering ceremonies in front of it. Visitors left tokens, or added rocks to a cairn. Someone strung Tibetan prayer flags nearby, which slowly bleached in the relentless sunlight. The nearest hiker shelter was renamed Monolith Station.

Juno and Moss and Ringo talked about claiming credit but never did. It was more fun to leave it as an enigma. They moved on to other work, and over the years mostly forgot about their little project. Juno and Moss drifted apart; she continued to work in railway construction, while Moss set up home in an ecocommune on Mars, gardening a tented crater. One day, some thirty-six years after they’d planted the monolith, Ringo sent an eidolon to Juno, who was working then on girdling a rock some twenty kilometres in diameter with a monorail.

‘There are other monoliths,’ the eidolon said, without preamble, and showed her in quick succession images of slabs on Ceres, Vesta, several smaller asteroids, and one of Mars’s moons, Phobos. They were identical to the original and like the original aimed their radio blurts at the galactic core, and had appeared within the last hundred days. Clearly a large crew, or perhaps several smaller ones, had been involved in their placement.‘I have no idea who who did it,’ Ringo’s eidolon said. ‘Has anyone contacted you?’

‘No. I suppose Moss might know something.’

She hadn’t seen her ex-partner for more than ten years, but thought with a little stab of old
exasperation that it would be just like him to ruin their lovely little site-specific idea.

‘I’ve already talked to him,’ Ringo’s eidolon said. ‘He claims to be as baffled as me, and
has been buried in that ecocommune for years. He’s taken some kind of vow of poverty. My
assistant, and that friend of yours who helped with the fabrication, they don’t know anything
either. It’s a mystery.’

Juno told the eidolon a little about her work and her new partner, asked to be kept in the loop.
In the next decade, more than a hundred monoliths appeared, scattered through the Belt, on
Mars, on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. No one claimed credit, although someone belw up
a giant monolith more than a hundred metres tall that appeared on Earth, in the Australian
outback, and released a terse statement claiming that monoliths diverging from the norm were
heretical. Rumours of a secret cult of philosopher-monks circulated but were never
confirmed, and no one ever saw a monolith being erected.

Ringo and Juno met one last time on Phobos. Ringo was outward-bound; Juno was heading
towards Bradbury, to advise on construction of a tram system inside the tented city. They
confirmed to each other that no one had ever contacted them about the original monolith.
Ringo believed that it was a gigantic practical joke, and the rumours about vagabond monks
and worship of alien overlords were part of it.

‘Anyone with an industrial maker swarm could replicate what we did,’ he said. ‘We should
only be surprised that it is still ongoing after all these years.’

Juno told him that she had analysed the spread of the monoliths. There appeared to be at least
nine separate nodes, nine groups making them and setting them out.

‘If it is a joke,’ she said, ‘it’s highly organised. Many people must be involved, and none have
ever broken cover.’

‘Neither did we,’ Ringo said.

‘Imagine if we did.’

‘No one would believe us.’

‘There’s no sign that they’ll stop,’ Juno said. ‘Whoever they are.’

‘Maybe they truly believe in what they are doing,’ Ringo said. ‘Maybe it isn’t a joke, to them.

Maybe they really do believe that random radio signals will be detected by aliens.’

‘Our silly little joke,’ Juno said.

‘Our work of art,’ Ringo said. ‘I’m glad we never signed it. Because if aliens did answer the
signals, if they were hostile or if they destroyed us without meaning to, we’d be made into the
worst and the most foolish villains in all of history.’

He looked deadly serious for a moment, then burst into laughter.

Juno laughed too. ‘For a moment you almost had me.’

They never met or talked about it again. But on rocks in the belt, on moons in the Outer
System, on kobolds and comets, the monoliths continued to appear, each a lonely and
enigmatic iteration of a secret purpose, each a single voice of a random and unfinished
symphony, singing out to the stars at the touch of a wanderer’s hand.

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Links 11/01/13

I seem to be looking at a lot of space-based stuff lately. Maybe I'm unconsciously searching for new subject matter, or maybe it's just that there's been a huge number of amazing new discoveries.  There's evidence that Titan's hydrocarbon seas may have hydrocarbon icebergs floating on them, for instance, and three-dimensional imaging of weather patterns in a brown dwarf with the catchy name 2MASSJ22282889-431026: wind-driven layered clouds 'composed of hot grains of sand, liquid drops of iron, and other exotic compounds.' And astronomers have discovered an incredibly old star just 190 light years away: with an age of at least 13.2 billion years old, HD 140283 is only slightly younger than the universe, but because it possesses small amounts of heavy elements it is probably a second-generation star (only hydrogen and helium formed immediately after the Big Bang; all other elements heavier than iron were created by supernovae). Meanwhile, Cassini scientists list their top ten discoveries in and around Saturn and its rings and moons, in 2012.

As Kevin Kelly observed in a recent thought-piece, thanks to the panopticon of phone cameras and the internet, the improbable is becoming the new normal.  Kelly, ever the optimistic, thinks this will change us in interesting ways; web pioneer Jaron Lanier thinks the whole Web 2.0 thing may have been a terrible mistake. Even though it links you, instantly, to stuff like this - 2001: A Space Odyssey comics, with space squids.

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The Trinity Effect

I'm a sucker for little museums, and this has to be one of the smallest, a tribute to Michael Faraday housed in a garden shed. It can be found at Trinity Buoy Wharf, the site of London's only working lighthouse, formerly the site of workshops where shipping buoys were repaired. Sited in Tower Hamlets, where Bow Creek debouches into the Thames, it's one of those odd, overlooked corners of London that isn't on the way to anywhere else. The wharf has been made over into an art quarter, and despite the corporate-bohemian feel (that web site, plaques overexplaining the 'heritage', a visitors' centre), the area is a nice mix of industrial activity and Victorian decay. There are workshops, studios housed in repurposed shipping containers, an American diner (closed, darn it, when I visited on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year's Day), and the Longplayer installation.

Composed by Jem Finer for Tibetan singing bowls, the Longplayer is designed to play for a thousand years (it started on January 1st, 2000). There's a listening post up in the old lighthouse, which gives lovely views across the river; I was inspired then and there to write a short story about a similar installation orbiting inside Saturn's rings.

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Confluence

The Constable of Aeolis was a shrewd, pragmatic man who did not believe in miracles. In his opinion, everything must have an explanation, and simple explanations were best of all. ‘The sharpest knife cuts cleanest,’ he often told his sons. And: ‘The more a man talks, the more likely it is he’s lying.’
 
But to the end of his days, he could not explain the affair of the white boat.

 Very pleased to report that I have just received a contract from Gollancz for a reprint omnibus of my far -future science fiction trilogy, Confluence. The three novels (Child of the River, Ancients of Days, Shrine of Stars) were published way way back at the end of the last century, and went out of print fairly quickly. Now they're coming back as a big omnibus edition (1100 manuscript pages, 360,000 words), with two related stories as bonus material. Right now, I'm re-formatting and copy-editing ancient text files in a long-dead version of WordPerfect. The book should be out in December this year.

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The New Neighbours

Here they come! Here come our new neighbours! They’re so close now that if you went outside and stood on the shell of our garden, you would be able to see them without enhancement: six sparks of fusion flame, six ships killing their velocity as they make their final approach to our home. Our new neighbours, come to visit in quaint old ships, lumpy cylinders equipped with so-called anti-proton ‘fast-fusion’ drives. And as their ships approach our home, our ships approach theirs, which is also naked-eye visible. You see? That faint fleck about twenty-eight degrees antispinward of Jupiter’s cold brilliant star.

It’s an old place, their home, an old way station constructed by Earth’s European Union four centuries ago. It looks like a sea creature from Earth – a sea urchin. You see? At the heart of that cluster of spikes, pointing in all directions, is a small stony rock. The spikes are cylindrical habitats, what they call skyscrapers, on Earth. They are linked by a web of cableways and tubes, and those lights in their casings, they’re windows. Inside the spikes, the skyscrapers, are divided into hundreds of rooms.

I know. It is a strange way to live. We’d find those skyscrapers cramped and claustrophobic: the rooms are small, and not every room has a window. And yes, I know, our new neighbours look strange, too: small, compact, golden-furred. But we must look strange to them – long and skinny, mostly bald, mostly pale-skinned – and they’ll find our garden strange and unsettling, too. Imagine being used to living in a crowded maze of little spaces, little rooms, and finding yourself inside a spherical room twenty kilometres across, with a layered shell of foamed diamond-fullerene composite and water, and all green inside, raft forests and airkelp clouds and secondary spheres two or three hundred metres across arrayed around a little central sea and lit by chandelier clusters. They’ll think our lovely bubble fragile and overwhelmingly empty, and they won’t be able to swoop and glide through its airy volumes; they’ll cling to the towns strung along the struts.

We’ll have to be kind and patient, even though we have so much to show them, so much to celebrate, so much to talk about, and so little time.

There are more than ten thousand gardens and habitats like ours, constructed from materials mined from rocks and comets. There are more than a million and a half rocks with a diameter of more than a kilometre, and about one per cent of them are permanently inhabited. That’s a lot of cities and settlements, yes, but the Belt is a big place, a toroidal volume of 6 x 10 to the power of 24 cubic kilometres. On average, rocks and gardens are about a million kilometres from their nearest neighbour, and most of their nearest neighbours are either barren or are not much more than pebbles or boulders, too small to ever be colonised.

But everything in the Belt is moving in different orbits around the sun, at different speeds. Everything is constantly changing its position relative to everything. And whenever a garden or an inhabited rock crosses our sky close enough to reach with minimal expenditure of reaction mass, we like to visit our new neighbours. It doesn’t happen very often – after all, this is the first conjunction since you were born – and that’s why it’s important, and exciting.

Yes, of course we’ve already talked to them. We already know a lot about them. They’re very eager to talk about their work, even though we don’t understand much of it. The geometries of manifolds; theoretical work on wormholes, those fabulously impossible dreams of rapid-transit systems between worlds and stars. They are posthuman and scrupulously rational, with minds as hard and spiky as their home; we’re dreamers, gardeners, experts in the malleable possibilities of the so-called soft sciences. But there’s much we have in common. We’re all from the same stock, human and posthuman. And it’s good to be reminded of how much we have in common with people who seem utterly unlike us.

Everyone agrees this is a Golden Age, four hundred years of peace and prosperity, four hundred years since the last big war, when certain powers from Earth attempted to impose their authority on the cities and settlements of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Oh, I know there’s conflict. This is a golden age, but it isn’t a utopia. It’s vital, ever-evolving, struggling in a thousand different directions towards a thousand different ideals. There are plenty of arguments and disagreements in our great and variegated human family, and sometimes disagreement flares into brief conflict, and there are civil wars, too, one family toppling another, scions fighting parents, the rising generation struggling to escape to influence of its elders.

But there aren’t any big conflicts, and in the past four centuries no single ideology has attempted to use violence to stamp its imprint on history. Trade is one of the big reasons for peace. And so are visits like this. Visits from new, temporary neighbours. They send visitors to us; we send visitors to them. Yes, I’ve heard that a few cynics call it an exchange of hostages, but it’s really a cultural meiosis.

Here they come, swinging down the sun’s gravity well in their funny old ships! There will be scientific and philosophical talkfests, poetry olympics, concerts, and games of all kinds. There will be commerce and romance and intrigue – even espionage, a game with rules and penalties thousands of years old. Information will be exchanged; new ideas may be born from fusion of our different traditions; techniques considered trivial by one party may kickstart an artistic or industrial revolution in the other. Who knows what will happen? We will dance with our new neighbours, and when we separate we will begin to discover how we have been changed. Here they come!

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Links 04/01/13

'Researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California have confirmed that NASA is mulling over their plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit. The mission would cost about $2.6 billion – slightly more than NASA's Curiosity Mars rover – and could be completed by the 2020s.'

Report in the New Scientist; the Keck Institute's proposal here (.pdf)


Dark, carbon-rich material on the surface of Vesta may have transferred during early impacts with small asteroids.  Similar collisions may have delivered the building-blocks of life to Earth.


Stem cell scammers lay the ground work for a thousand technothrillers.


Scientists have manipulated a quantum gas to cool it to a fraction below absolute zero, paving the way to create new forms of material:

'If built, such systems would behave in strange ways, says Achim Rosch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cologne in Germany, who proposed the technique used by Schneider and his team. For instance, Rosch and his colleagues have calculated that whereas clouds of atoms would normally be pulled downwards by gravity, if part of the cloud is at a negative absolute temperature, some atoms will move upwards, apparently defying gravity.

'Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. “It’s interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab,” he says. “This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely.”'

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