Sunward, page 1
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For Ursula
1 A Body in Motion
AGATHA PANZA VON SPARKLES settled into Needle’s pilot seat for the very first time. It was much too big for her. We had to adjust all the straps.
I hovered while her mechanical fingers settled over the controls. “Steady.”
“I know,” she said.
“Stay focused,” I said.
“I know,” she said, and then got distracted anyway. “There’s a debris field up ahead. We should investigate, right? I think that we should definitely do that. Maybe we’ll find some survivors to rescue.”
I pulled up my own display of the debris. “I don’t think so, kiddo. Whatever happened over there doesn’t look survivable.”
“Can I go see?” Agatha asked.
I knew what she was asking, but I pretended not to know. “You’re the one flying. Bring us closer.”
She shook her head with precision—forty-five degrees to the right, forty-five to the left, and then back to center. “No, I mean really see.”
“You want to dive into the data stream?”
“Yes,” she said.
“No.”
“Just a peek?” she pleaded.
“No.”
“I promise to come right back!”
“Absolutely not, Agatha Panza von Sparkles.” Full names have power.
She tilted her head forty-five degrees downward, which meant sulking. “Fine, Captain Mom.”
That was new. She had never called me Captain Mom before. None of my charges ever had. I didn’t know whether or not I liked the sound of it. They usually started with “Captain,” or even “Captain Tova Lir” if they liked to savor the fullness of names and titles, and then settled into calling me “Tova” once we got to know each other.
Juvenile AI need to be embodied. They require the anchored limitation of a single robotic chassis until after they mature. Otherwise a baby bot will split their attention by splitting themselves into smaller and smaller fragments—one separate piece for every shiny thing that they notice and decide to chase. Those pieces will drown in the data stream, unable to reassemble themselves.
My side gig for the past seven years has been babysitting baby bots. These toddler-sized kids leave the nest after a full year, when they’ve grown enough self-cohesion and reached the bot age of majority. Sometimes gendered identities emerge. Sometimes not. Sometimes they name themselves. Sometimes I make suggestions. Agatha announced her full name during our first run to Saturn’s Phoebe Station. Now we were on our way back to Luna.
She slowed us down to examine the puzzle pieces of debris that littered our route.
“It used to be a ship,” Agatha said. She had stopped sulking about the data stream, which was nice. This kid didn’t hold a grudge. Now she seemed content to focus on the visual display, even though plugging directly into shipboard systems would have been faster. That was the problem. Data streams have rushing currents and deadly undertow. Agatha wasn’t a strong enough swimmer yet. “A little ship. Smaller than ours. Just big enough for a crew of one.”
That little ship had been smashed into itty-bitty bits, which only ever happened on purpose. Catastrophic accidents might leave gaping holes, but the rest of the structure remains more or less intact. No part of this wreck was still intact.
“We need to go,” I said. “Immediately. We need to be on our way and already forgetting that we ever saw any of this.”
Agatha ignored me. Maybe she was still sulking after all. Maybe she had just tuned me out while the display claimed her full and absolute attention. “There’s a body.”
Now we couldn’t leave.
I managed not to curse in front of the kid. “Okay. Show me.”
An image of a vac suit filled the main display. It had drifted a fair distance, which meant that the single crew member had successfully abandoned ship before all the pulverizing happened.
“Do you think they’re still alive?” Agatha asked.
“No,” I said. “Check the temperature inside that suit.”
“Three kelvins,” Agatha said. She sounded sad. “That’s very cold.”
“Freezing isn’t a bad way to die,” I told her. “Now scoot over and let me drive.”
Agatha didn’t protest. I settled into my chair and shifted course, matching the body’s path away from the event that had gotten them killed.
“Are we going to pick up the dead person?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Even though it’s too late to help them?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why? Because they were probably a courier, just like us?”
That was a strong argument for not picking them up. “I’m impressed you put that together.”
“You shouldn’t be.” She sounded annoyed, like I’d just set off her condescension alarm. That was new. “Most single-crewed craft are piloted by couriers. It’s not impressive that I noticed. Are we going to deliver their message—whatever it is—now that they’re too dead to do it themselves?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “We are going to send that body home just as soon as we figure out where home is.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s terrible to lose someone at sea. You never find out if the lost sailor decided to leave you behind, or if they died while trying to come back to you.”
Agatha’s eyes made little whirring noises as she focused on my face. I expected her to nitpick the differences between seafaring and space travel, but the kid got all insightful instead. “Did you lose someone that way?”
A month ago she wouldn’t have been able to put that together. I was proud of her, but didn’t say so. “Yes. I did. One of my moms flew away and never came back. Mama CJ. The one who carried me.”
“Because you’re mammals.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We’re mammals.”
The only nonmammalian form of biological life that Agatha had met so far was a smuggled pet iguana. She’d named him Ferdinand. We kept him fed, delivered him to Phoebe, and filed no complaints about improper transport.
“Why did your mother fly away?”
“She was a courier.”
“Like us?”
“Like us. One of the best.”
“I want to be one of the best,” Agatha said.
“I don’t,” I told her. “Excellence is dangerous. The best couriers get chased down, intercepted, bribed, and/or blown up whenever powerful people want their messages redirected, delayed, or destroyed unread—which is pretty much all the time. Better to stick with third-class deliveries.”
Agatha pointed at the main display. “Do you think that this courier got chased down and blown up?”
“Yes. Probably.” I concentrated on nudging our guest into the main airlock by gently maneuvering the ship to surround them. “Which is why we’re going to remain actively disinterested in whatever message they carry.” The kid didn’t understand disinterest—curiosity is a near-universal juvenile trait—so I let her take charge of one mystery in order to distract her from any of the others. “Go examine the body. Try to figure out who it used to be, and which place they called home.”
She bounced off every wall on her way to the airlock.
* * *
My ship was long and pointy, the pointy bit a cone of diamond weave that deflected small pebbles struck at high speed. I tried to keep the diamond polished and fully transparent, because I liked to see where I was going—even when that distant destination remained a tiny pinprick for most of the trip. One can’t always trust nav projections.
The rest of the ship was a lot less elegant. Modules stacked together in a row behind the diamond: piloting station to the fore, engine room all the way aft, galley and two airlocks in between. No separate living quarters. No separate storage, either. I kept lockers bolted to almost every surface. Some had proper doors, but otherwise they were just cubbies capped with mesh to keep their contents from floating all over the place. Deliveries got stashed haphazardly, but I always knew exactly where they were.
The locker doors were all covered with art. Agatha had painted some of it, including an impressionistic portrait of Ferdinand the iguana. Most of the locker art had been etched directly into the metal by Isosceles—another fostered baby bot. They loved to draw my mag boots in particular. Because that’s where you keep your gravity, they said. Now I had boot etchings signed with little triangles all over my ship.
I followed bouncing Agatha and hovered on the other side of the inner hatch. It’s hard not to hover whenever kids play in airlocks—even when those kids don’t need to breathe. “Check the tags once you get the helmet off.”
“I know,” she said. “Let me concentrate.” The helmet clasps took a while. Agatha was still building up her fine motor control. She hummed a tune that she liked because she found the math funny, and finally removed the helmet. “No decompression. The eyes and tongue didn’t pop inside the helmet. That would have been messy.”
“Don’t forget the tags.”
“I know,” she said. I heard the cold metal necklace clink as she tugged it free. “Name: Michael Kuneo. Gendered male. Twenty-nine standard years old. Courier, First Class.”
Of course he was. “What about home? Next of kin? Guild number?”
“None listed,” Agatha said. “The only thing stamped on the second tag is a circle surrounded by radiating lines.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. That changes things.”
“What does it mean?”
“His last wish. That circle is a picture of the sun.”
* * *
I spent the next two hours answering insatiably curious questions about sun cults and funeral customs.
“People want to be thrown into the sun?”
“Yes. Lots of them do.”
“Why?”
“They think of it as going home.”
Agatha shook her head several times, but only slightly, with just a five-degree shift to either side. That meant she was laughing. “Nobody is from the sun. Nothing was born, hatched, or coded on the sun. It’s too hot.”
“True,” I said. “It’s still where we began, though. The sun was our only source of heat and light when people were growing up earthbound—before we could make heat, light, or life work elsewhere—and we still haven’t left to live near any other sun. This is our only solar system. We only exist because Sol was here first. We can only survive here for as long as Sol lasts.”
“Which is how long?”
“Seven billion years. Maybe eight.”
“I hope it’s eight.”
“Me too.”
“What happens after that?”
“The sun will swell up, swallow all the planets, and then burn out.”
Agatha took seven seconds to process the entropic death of the solar system. “So all our elements are going to end up inside the sun anyway.”
“Yes,” I said. “Eventually. Meanwhile, everybody who opts for solar cremation gets to be part of what gives light and life to other things.”
“Is that what you want?” she asked. “After you die?”
“No,” I said. “Waste of fuel to get there. Turn me into fertilizer for bubble gardens instead. I’d rather be tiny pieces of plants drinking redirected sunlight than plasma burning up to make the stuff.”
I didn’t ask what Agatha would want done with her current chassis if she should ever cease to inhabit it—mostly because it wasn’t her decision to make. The manufacturers would reassert ownership over her component parts in the event of a return to factory default settings.
Agatha thoughtfully focused and unfocused her big glass eyes. “Michael Kuneo wanted to burn.”
“That’s what his tags tell us,” I said. “No rush, though. Put his helmet back on. We’ll keep him safely tucked away until after we make our scheduled deliveries. Then we’ll throw him into the sun.”
* * *
Phoebe sent a message to our ansible and gave us a reason to rush. (I mean both the moon and the person. Phoebe is my boss. She lives on Phoebe Station.)
Transmission for Needle, said Postmaster General Phoebe of Phoebe. I’m sure you’ve heard the Lunar news. Note that docking will be a nightmare. Send me a status report now, and then get yourself home as fast as you can. Shelve your current deliveries. You can’t deliver any of them. Every recipient is listed among the dead.
I paused the message to stare at Phoebe’s frozen face.
“What happened to Luna?” Agatha asked quietly.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. I waved my hand at the message to continue.
Stay on Luna as long as you need. Just let me know whenever you’re ready to come back to work. I’ll have a backlog of top-tier deliveries waiting. Please take good care of you and yours in the meantime. Phoebe out.
“We should check the news,” Agatha said. “I know that you don’t like fretting about things that you can’t fix, but we should check anyway.”
I really didn’t want to see the news. Luna was home. Something bad had just happened there. Finding out about the Bad Thing would draw a clear line between Before and After, and I wasn’t ready to step over that line.
“Not yet,” I said, and played Phoebe’s message again.
“Weird,” Agatha said after the second time.
“How so?” I asked her. “Walk me through it.”
Agatha turned to focus her huge glass eyes on my face. “We never shelve deliveries. If the recipient is deceased, then we’re supposed to find their next of kin, or else return the package to the sender.”
I nodded. “What else?”
“Boss Phoebe also knows that you only accept third-class work. Because you don’t want to be the best. Even though you could be the best, if you wanted. So it makes no sense to keep a bunch of first-class packages waiting around for you. People who pay those rates hate waiting.”
“Indeed they do.”
“So why would she say that?” Agatha asked.
“To warn us that suspicious things might be happening on our usual route.”
“Like the murder of couriers?”
“Yes. Like the murder of couriers.”
Agatha titled her head sixty degrees downward. “So what should we do now?”
“What do you think?” If Agatha Panza von Sparkles planned to grow up to be a first-class courier, then she would need to learn how to navigate this kind of mess. “Should we send Phoebe a status report right now, like she told us to?”
Agatha looked up at the precise angle to make eye contact. “No. Boss Phoebe told us not to do that. In a sneaky way. Any message that we send would make us easier to track.”
“That’s right.” I could see my own reflection in her eyes, distorted and wobbly. “What should we do instead?”
“Check the news.”
* * *
The news was bad. The docks and shipyards of Luna had utterly collapsed. Cause unknown. Investigations ongoing. Seven thousand dead. The largest fleet of funeral barges ever launched was already on its way from the moon to the sun.
“Is there a list of casualties?” Agatha asked quietly. “Is anyone we know on the list? Any of your family?”
“Probably not,” I said while searching for a list. “My family is a little bit famous. It would be in the news if we lost anyone. Plus, I’m pretty sure that I would have been notified by now. They would have sent word.”
Agatha twitched with impatience. “Maybe they did,” she said. “Maybe that was the message Michael Kuneo died carrying.”
We found two familiar names listed among the dead: Vesper Prin and Q Fortier. Both worked shifts at the dockside courier depot. Both were on duty when it all collapsed. I remembered that Prin moved like a dancer, even while fetching awkwardly shaped packages down from high shelves, and that Fortier had green tattoos.
I waved my hand to banish their names and faces from the display. “Okay, kiddo. We’ve got a decision to make, and we need to make it quickly. Do we keep a steady course? Continue homeward?”
Agatha shook her head. “Not if someone is trying to track us. Boss Phoebe mentioned our destination in her message, so it was another backward sort of warning. She knew that anyone might overhear.”
“Agreed,” I said. “There’s no such thing as an encrypted transmission. The whole data stream is loud, overwhelming, and absolutely public.”
“Why?”
“Because the Info Guild keeps all the ansibles braided together. Every broadcast passes through central processing and gets archived. Anyone can access the archives at any time. So the only way to pass a secret note across the solar system is to hire a decent courier.”
“Like us,” Agatha said.
“Like us,” I agreed.
“Aren’t we part of that guild, too?” she asked.
“Sort of. There was a bit of a schism. Info split into three separate guildhalls that don’t like each other very much.” I counted the three on my fingers: “Archivists manage the stream. Couriers deliver the mail. Containment specialists keep secrets more aggressively.”
“By pulverizing couriers?” she asked.
I nodded. “So where should we go to avoid getting pulverized, if not home to Luna?”
“We need to hide,” Agatha said. “Take the time to figure out if anyone else is following us. Maybe we could go here?” She pointed at news footage of the huge funeral procession. “We do have a sun-worshipping passenger to deliver.”
