Rich Man's Sky 03 Beggar's Sky, page 16
part #3 of Rich Man's Sky Series
That was a lot of fear.
The videos were supported by a fascinating array of advertisements, for products Frédéric had no way to buy, and services he did not even understand. What was an “insurance virtualizer”? Or a “rock-solid transport guarantee”? He didn’t know and he didn’t care; he wanted them, and the lifestyle they implied.
He also read news sites, and had lately become interested in the doings of all the other groups that did business in space. Lawrence Killian’s company, Harvest Moon, sold metals and water and fuel for fusion reactors. Orlov Petrochemical sold nitrogen and volatiles. Enterprise City had sent a hundred people to Mars, and was getting ready to send a hundred more. And no matter what Frédéric’s father had to say about it, those people had it better than the people of Thalia, if only because there were regularly scheduled cargo missions to deliver them critical supplies.
And of course there was Renz Ventures, whose business was the nexus of so much intrigue. WHO NUKED ESL1? the headlines read. ARE STEALTH SHIPS STILL OUT THERE? And also, IGBAL AND THE ALIENS—A STORY TOO WEIRD TO BE FALSE.
And as he read these stories, one thing he realized was that Venus—with its murderous atmosphere and furnace-hot depths—was not the most dangerous place in the Solar System. No one was going to attack them down here. No one was going to spy on them, or undercut their interests. People barely knew Thalia was here at all; if its people died, it would be of neglect.
Another thing that dawned on him, more slowly, was that Thalia had nothing to sell. Any material available on Venus, any product Thalia was capable of manufacturing, could be obtained somewhere else, for a fraction of the cost.
Mars was in a similar position; the planet itself was the only product. People simply wanted to move there, and had given over their life savings to make it happen. Mars promised a fresh start not only for themselves, but for the whole human race. Of course, the colony at Antilympus Crater had the wealth of the trillionaire Dan Beseman behind it, but the amazing thing was that most of the funding came not from Beseman himself, or even from the colonists, but from millions of donors around the world.
Frédéric began digging, through whatever sources he was (however painfully) able to access, into the mechanisms of that funding, and realized it was literally a game show. The money came from people who would never go to Mars themselves, but were willing to “sponsor” the candidates who might. People who were captivated by the idea of Mars—by the dream of anyone living there at all. That second chance for humanity, that fresh start, made a compelling story, and if there were ten million people willing to kick in ten thousand dollars apiece, why, that was a hundred billion dollars right there. Throw in a hundred million ten-dollar donations, a couple of really high-value grants, and some support from friendly governments, and voilà, the whole planet of Mars was yours for the taking.
And Thalia didn’t even need that kind of money. Piggybacked on other people’s infrastructure, the whole island had been built and populated for something like thirty billion dollars. And Thalia didn’t need a whole second island, anyway; they were so poor that just a few hundred kilograms of metal would utterly transform the quality of life here, and the sense of a hopeful future. Maybe some new plant seeds. Maybe just one more 3D printer. Surely that was something the people of Earth could afford?
“Thalia has a public relations problem,” Frédéric told his mother, Wilma, over breakfast one morning.
“Public relations,” she said, with a wistful look. She was passing out breakfast plates to Frédéric and his sister, Consuela, and she paused for a moment, as if remembering a past life where terms like that were a meaningful part of the daily vernacular.
“You have a stupid face problem,” Consuela said, wrinkling her nose and covering her eyes. “It hurts to look.” She was only six years younger than Frédéric—almost eleven, now—but seemed to have no reference point for what that was supposed to mean. Consuela had known no culture other than Thalia’s, and had no female role models anywhere close to her own age. She sometimes looked to Basilio’s daughter, Juanetta del Campo, for inspiration, but on the rare occasions when Juanetta had time for Consuela at all, she treated her like even more of a baby. Possibly out of some sort of manipulative spite.
“I’m not hungry,” Frédéric said to his mother. “Can I please just go to school?”
“Now there’s a first!” Wilma said, looking pleased, suspicious, amused, and conspiratorial. “To what do we owe this shocking development? Would it have something to do with Juanetta?”
“No,” Frédéric said, shuddering inwardly. “I just want to work on my English. I’ve been reading network content from Earth.”
She snorted at that, and looked like she was about to say something snide. Wilma Ortega had never been a big fan of network content, and sometimes said that she’d come to Venus “for the quiet.” And with only fifty people on the island, there was certainly plenty of quiet to be had. But then, instead of trying to change his mind or change him, she softened and said, “They don’t have network content in Spanish?”
“They do. It’s just harder to find. There are translators, too, but the latency is murder. It’s hard to find anything, Mamita. English will save me a lot of time, and save bandwidth on the communications array. It’s practical.”
She laughed. “Oh, so now I’m ‘Mamita,’ am I? Not Mami? Okay, it’s good to see you interested in something.” Even if it’s stupid, she clearly wanted to add. But she didn’t. Instead, she tousled his hair and said “Fine, little Frito. You may skip your breakfast and go practice a language that no Venusian speaks.”
A lot of people here speak English, he wanted to say. Yourself included.
“Thank you,” he said instead, getting up from his seat. “I hope you have a wonderful day with your plants.”
“I hope you don’t pass any mirrors,” Consuela said. It wasn’t clear exactly what she meant, or even whom she was addressing, so no one responded. Best not to reinforce.
Outside the front door, Juanetta del Campo stood, with a raised, loose fist about to knock. Both of them jumped a little, and Juanetta laughed. “Hello, Freddo.”
“Hi,” he said, stepping out into the corridor. The diamond-walled apartments were all painted white inside, both for privacy and for daylight control, but the corridor ceiling was of course transparent. Outside, the Sun was at a ten-o’clock position, so it streamed through the plant canopy only indirectly, lighting Juanetta’s hair and one side of her face. She looked good, he had to admit.
She kissed him on the cheek, as was her custom, and then took him by the arm.
“Ready for school?” she asked.
“Actually, yes.”
“Well, then, let’s stuff some knowledge down our eyeballs.”
He didn’t like the possessive way she held his arm, but he knew there was no point resisting it. Everyone seemed to think Frédéric and Juanetta were destined for one another—practically a couple already. Juanetta herself seemed to think this. The problem was, Frédéric didn’t like Juanetta in that way. At times, he wasn’t sure he liked her at all. But they were the same age, and the four other unrelated, uncoupled girls were years older or years younger. The older ones of course wanted nothing to do with Frédéric, and as for the younger ones . . . Well, that could be a long wait. Tika Valdez would not come of age for another six years; did Frédéric really want to wait that long to start having sex? With Tika, another girl he didn’t really have a choice about? Who even knew who either of them would be in six years’ time? Or he could wait even longer, for someone else he knew even less about.
There were worse things, he knew. Juanetta was pretty, and smart, and a hard worker. She had a sense of humor. She liked plants, and chemistry, and she knew how to print custom clothing. At this very moment, Frédéric was wearing a shirt she had made for him.
But there was always an edge of sarcasm in her voice, like a little whiff of Venusian air, and in the close confines of Thalia Village, Frédéric had seen enough bickering couples to know, without a doubt, that that caustic humor would eventually be turned his way. And then that would be his life.
There were worse things. Death would be worse. Celibacy and loneliness would perhaps be worse. Losing his connections to Earth culture would definitely be worse. For all he knew, she might be really good at sex, and other things he didn’t yet know about. But oh, if Juanetta was going to be his life, he wanted at least to choose her for himself.
That was not going to happen, though, so he touched her on the hand, gently but not intimately, and strode with her down the corridor toward another miserable day of robotic instruction.
Despite his plan to practice his English, he ended up mostly daydreaming the hours away, thinking about how he, a fifteen-year-old boy, could attract the attention of people on Earth. Technically, Thalia already had a charitable foundation—the nonprofit Aphrodite Group, which had organized the missions that had brought the equipment and people. When asked, Tohias had eagerly told him all about it, as it seemed to be one of his proudest accomplishments. And yet, the foundation was presently in a coma, just a holding vessel for the investments of five people who couldn’t actually come here unless another forty-five could be recruited. Assuming those five would even go through with it.
Could Frédéric, from 150 million kilometers away, start his own foundation? Children of Venus, something like that? If it were possible at all, it would be difficult. What he really needed was a lawyer willing to handle the details for him. TV had taught him that much! And a publicist, and an accountant, and some cash donors to get things rolling. Which sounded extremely difficult, but perhaps not completely impossible. Not for a marooned kid with way too much time on his hands.
That night, he stayed up late searching for social media sites he could access, and finally—after more than four hours—found his way to something called Weightless. It was aimed specifically at people who wanted to travel to space someday, and allowed them to communicate with people presently living on Mars, Transit Point Station, and ESL1. The landing page boasted that their servers used not only the SpaceNet protocol, but also the Deep Space Network through which governments and Horsemen communicated with hardware scattered throughout the Solar System! Well, der.
With painful slowness, Frédéric made an account for himself, snapped a quick profile picture with the camera on his tablet, and looked at the names and locations of people he could “join.” Right away, he could see that the outer space angle was a mostly fraudulent gimmick, because the list included exactly two Martians, exactly one ESL1 colonist, exactly zero people on Transit Point Station, and approximately half a million people from scattered locations on Earth.
He had listed his own location as “Thalia Buoyant Island, Venus,” and honestly, he was still figuring out the user interface when he saw that one of the Earth-based members had already joined him.
With a sort of exhausted excitement he typed a quick biography for himself: “My name is Frédéric Ortega. I am fifteen years old, and I have spent the last five years living on an island in the upper atmosphere of Venus. I am interested in Earth culture, and look forward to many interesting conversations here.”
He’d written it in Spanish, but the interface included automatic translation from the source language into whatever language the reader was using. And he was too tired to worry about it; he would take another look tomorrow, and see if he needed to edit anything.
He thought he might be too excited to sleep, but sleep found him anyway, almost as soon as he turned out his light.
And because he had neglected to log out of Weightless before setting his tablet down, he was still logged in the next morning when he picked it back up again and found a message waiting for him from “Jia Cheng,” a twenty-year-old woman in Shanghai, China: “Wow!! Tell me more!”
And behind that, seven hundred and fifty-nine other messages.
1.11
Post-Encounter Deposition
Harv Leonel, PhD
Department of Electrical Engineering,
University of Colorado at Boulder
I’m never sure if my reputation precedes me; to some people I’m famous, to some, infamous. A scammer, lunatic, idiot, or daring visionary? Some days I’m not so sure myself. But despite all the ink and bits expended on the subject, most people don’t actually remember my name, so I’ll say, I’m that guy who maybe invented an irreproducible time machine, and pulled ancestral experiences back (once, maybe) from the Antediluvian past into my present-day brain. My twelve-years-ago brain, actually. Remember that tabloid controversy that gripped the world for a week and a half? That was me.
The weight of evidence is on my side; things I saw back there in the Pleistocene have been archaeologically, linguistically, and genetically verified, that no one could possibly have known without firsthand knowledge. But the weight of public opinion is fickle, and mostly against me. The incident ruined my career, and the relationship I was in at the time, and my sleep cycles and short-term memory. I also dragged two promising postdocs down with me, which I deeply regret, so I actually do wish the whole thing had never happened. But it did, and apparently enough people believe in it that Igbal Renz invited me on his mission to meet the Beings.
(To be fair, we already knew each other, because my early quantum computing papers were crucial to his early successes in artificial intelligence. We’d been in the same room together maybe ten times, and he knew me by name and by sight. But yep, life can take strange turns. “You’re not afraid to risk it all on quantum mechanics,” he said, “and something tells me you’d risk it all again, for a chance to be right.” Say what you like about the man, he’s an excellent judge of character, and he was right on the money with that.)
A lot has been said about the Beings already, but my encounter was so different from anyone else’s that I can’t swear it wasn’t a dream. Which is the story of my life, right? I’m going to talk about this experience like it had a beginning, middle, and end. Just know, it actually didn’t—it was more like a Heironymous Bosch painting than a movie or even a comic book. You know, like that painting of Hell where the closer you look, the more crazy things you see. But when you pull back and look at the whole thing, that’s crazy, too. So much detail, everywhere you look. That’s what the experience was actually like, but it’s hard to talk about it that way. We like stories, so I’m going to tell one.
Beginning: I observed a galaxy cluster, with great curiosity. I don’t know what sort of body I had, or if I had one; I wasn’t paying attention to that. I only had eyes for this glob of something that was neither the vacuum nor myself. Neither the vacuum nor myself! If I think about it now, the galaxy cluster was actually inside me. I don’t think I had a way of looking outward, or even a concept of it. But I had perceived a vast volume, and this thing inside of it, and I took notice.
It wasn’t light or heat or gas that caught my attention. It wasn’t even gravity, per se, although I could feel the tug of it, moving atoms past me in a gentle breeze. What drew me in was motion. Each galaxy whirled about its axis, and the whole swarm of them revolved around each other, or around a common center of mass, in a complicated n-body dance. It was like I’d never seen such a thing before, and maybe I hadn’t. I watched it, utterly transfixed.
I say I don’t know about my body, but I was definitely not three-dimensional, and I was definitely not looking at a moving three-dimensional structure. The cluster was a lot more than that. Not just multidimensional, but also, it seemed to me, responsive in some way, like the surface of a pond that ripples when you brush it with your fingers.
That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? But in a big-square-peg/small-round-hole kind of way, a human brain can’t really remember or process that kind of experience. Trying leads to headaches. Actually, more than headaches: a kind of creeping, bone-deep nausea that’s almost a phobia. There’s something vaguely gross about it, at least for me, the me that I am now, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. But at the time, as one of them, I felt nothing but innocent amazement.
Again, I’ll say it was like a really complicated painting, with lots of stuff going on, and I could attend to one little scene, or another, or pull back for another look at the whole design. But it wasn’t really static, either; the whole thing fizzed with uncertainty that let portions of the painting change as I watched them, because I watched them. That’s the best I can describe it, and it’s not very accurate.
I think I used to be much larger. I had shrunk to look at this wondrous thing. To investigate it in further detail, I shrank and grew, attending to as much of it as I could, and when that didn’t satisfy, I broke apart into a million little self-aware fragments and swarmed the place, crawling through its intricate whirlpools like mice through a deserted kitchen. Mice that were all me, and also inside of me. I called and sang and squeaked to myself across the void, sharing information and excitement.
I’m going to say, I did that (or we did that) for a long time. That’s not how it worked, but that’s what I’m going to say. It was a research project, and a big one, with detailed reporting. Hypotheses were proposed and tested, discarded and modified at whim. It was all great fun.
Middle: I was smaller than a single galaxy, and overlapping with one, when something even more amazing happened: as I sang to myself (or we sang to ourselves), I (or we) became aware of tiny voices mumbling back! It was inexplicable, impossible, unthinkable.
It was irresistible.
There were others, who were not me. There were others.
We shrank, we spiraled, we surrounded and permeated this amazing phenomenon. I sang to these little voices. I whispered and I beckoned. They were in a noisy little place; I could barely pick them out against the background, and it seemed they could hear even less of me. Or they didn’t listen, or didn’t know what I was. I didn’t know what I was. I’d never had a reason to think about it! I didn’t know what they were, either, and it was hard, so hard to see them or hear them or understand them. I called them out into quieter space, but for a long time, nothing happened. That was okay. I was patient. I was transfixed.
