Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water Read online

  Mason wasn't surprised to see that the woman was a LAW officer. She walked up the hill to him and put her hands on the waist of her flightsuit, thumbs to the rear. "Thanks for taking your phone off-line, Mason. I really needed to waste an hour tracking you down." She pushed a strand of shiny black hair from her face. "I'm Deitz. I've been assigned to represent you at the inquest."

  Mason nodded knowingly. "No wonder you're in such a rush. I'm sure that LAW's eager to get on with the court-martial."

  She frowned at him. "No one has said anything about a court-martial, Administrator. This is only an inquest." She glanced back at the helo. "But I do have several hundred questions for you, and I'm going to need the answers by tomorrow a.m. if I'm to be any help to your case."

  "I've no expectations, Ms. Deitz."

  She nodded. "Then the sooner we get started, the better." Her pointed chin indicated the helo. "It'll be a tight fit for three, but it's the fastest route back to Blades Station."

  Mason swept his hand in a gentlemanly gesture. "After you, Ms. Deitz."

  Chapter

  Twelve

  In A.D. 2103 the first colonial expedition to leave Sol had fled for Aquamarine, cynosure of the Eyewash system, bearing with it the agencies of its own destruction and the obliteration of its grandiose, even megalomaniacal dream.

  A breakaway conspiracy of self-styled techno-utopian Übermenschen, they had dubbed their new order the Opti-macy—with a nod to the Romans—and themselves Opti-mants. Their regressed Aquam descendants called them the Beforetimers, and some LAW sources referred to them as the First Colonists.

  The Optimants envisioned the seeding of nearby star systems, then the galaxy, and in due course all galaxies with its progeny and concept of a scientopian Eden. Contact with the Roke was still generations off, and there was no hint of the existence of the Oceanic.

  The Optimant's grand scheme dated back nearly two centuries at that point, and some of the technology remained to be devised. Even at greatly subluminal speeds, replicating seed-ships could carry forth humans in cachesleep, plasm, and/or dormant fetuses to propagate Homo sapiens throughout the Milky Way. The 45,000-odd Optimants meant to have a critical head start on any such competing effort from the Earthbound masses, whom they called the Mundanes. Most Optimants were of Caucasian stock, and for many there was an unapolo-getic element of racism in the destiny they were charting.

  The linchpin of their original plan was that all resided in or had access to the L5 colony Thomas Edison, a multicon-glomerate-built O'Neill that was a research facility, factory complex, resort, and experimental living arkology. The zero-point-energy and spacedrive application research being carried forward there was central to their enterprise.

  The Optimants would have preferred to covertly mount their departure from the solar system. That hope was dashed when the nearly nineteen billion have-not voters on Earth swept the Stewardship coalition into power. The Stewardship's agenda of deprivatization and enforced egalitarianism threatened to bring Edison and similar offworld resources under the direct command of central government overseers.

  The Optimants' fallback plan called for a complete break with the Mundanes. The tens of thousands who were onboard the O'Neill constituted over eighty percent of the Optimacy's core membership. Their many dupes were left behind almost without exception.

  Thomas Edison fired up a zero-point-energy drive that authorities had thought to be a crude prototype. Sympathizers who had rendered secret aid to the Optimants abetted their flight as well. The three-kilometer-long O'Neill accelerated ponderously out of orbit, easily destroying the first pursuit sent after it, and eventually outran the rest. Those who weren't loyal Optimants were dispensed with, their remains recycled in one fashion or another.

  Rechristened Atlas Shrugged, their starship tapped the limitless quantum foam for its power and accelerated into the trackless darkness.

  With them went all the resources and technological breakthroughs that were theirs by right of genius or at least possession. All remaining data concerning zero-point energy as well as bioengineering discoveries, radical AI/AL cybernetic advances, and other Edison innovations were spurious or had been wiped from Solarian records.

  The Optimants coldly calculated that Earth would require a minimum of two generations to mount a punitive expedition.

  Only a small watch was required to run the hijacked O'Neill, although R&D would be carried on in shifts throughout the centuries-long crawl to Aquamarine, over sixty-five light-years from Earth. To conserve consumables, abate crowding, and allow them to live to see their destination, the Optimants set up a cachesleep apparatus and a rota of long suspended animation between waking duty tours.

  The fugitives' data had indicated abundant water on Aquamarine. Their preliminary survey of the planet made them exultant. Granted, it was vexingly short on landmass, but Aquamarine offered everything needed to carry forward their high destiny.

  No communications or other artificial electromagnetic signatures were being detected from Earth. Whether that was due to some catastrophe or to the difficulty of reception across the light-years, the Optimants could not be sure. As time and Terra's silence wore on, the fugitives became convinced that some planetary breakdown had overwhelmed its wretched masses. There was even talk of an eventual return to assume dominion.

  In dealing with the Oceanic, they understood from the outset that they were confronting an unguessably powerful entity with absolutely no tolerance for contact. The limited observations convinced even the Optimants of the wisdom of live and let live. The inscrutable Oceanic showed no objection to their presence so long as they quarantined themselves to land and sky. While the marine resources of the planet were clearly vast, they were not indispensable to the high destiny; the humans adopted a policy of total avoidance and painstaking nonprovocation.

  The staggeringly beautiful water world and the rest of its system provided all the raw materials for the next step in their high crusade. Many felt they owed it to themselves, after their long confinement, to savor fresh air, elbowroom, and natural sunlight as a reward for their hardships and successes. They erected structures of grandeur and whimsy and road systems that were more aesthetic than practical. They indulged themselves in fanciful and even bizarre cultural trappings. The preeminent among them proved their status by building flying pavilions that migrated through the sky on endless circuits of revelry. Others carried out engineering projects on an imposing scale: riverine rechanneling, dams, bridges, monuments of overweening scale. Much of it was a sop to the Optimant ego, supposed proof that while the Oceanic controlled the sea utterly, the Optimants were masters of the high ground.

  The Optimants wanted a large workforce a lot sooner than conventional childbearing could give it to them. Highly automated GeStations and child-rearing complexes were established. Seedship research was readily applicable. Aquamarine's biosphere harbored countless mutagens, but genetic stabilization was basic science for the First Colonists.

  Even more than their signal progress in robotics and bio-engineering, their vast leaps in artificial intelligence and biocy-bernetic interfaces allowed them to create, manufacture, and construct at an unprecedented rate. Subdural cybernetic shunts, quantum chip technology, and omninetworking made each individual a protean task force—an enhanced intellect—at need.

  Accordingly, with the raw materials of Aquamarine's surface areas at their command, as well as those of the planet's moons, the immigrants spent much of the next seven baseline decades populating their new world, indoctrinating their new populations, forging a techno-industrial power base, and playing demiurge.

  But impediments came from unexpected quarters. R&D conducted in transit and after arrival was pointing to dramatic improvements in the zero-point-energy drive. What was the point of launching a slower starship when another few years of work would yield a vessel that could complete the voyage in a fraction of the time? Adding to the complication, research promised even greater leaps in speed. It made no
sense to begin a craft that would have to undergo reclamation before it was half-finished.

  A more divisive debate centered on just what kind of ship's complement the Optimants should send forth. The majority still favored the proliferation of natural and/or cloned Opti-mant offspring, but a vocal and influential minority pushed for bioengineered Meta sapiens or even the bodies inhabited by godlike AIs drawn from Optimant matrices. There was also bitter disagreement about which of Earth's traditions and values to immortalize. Contentious meetings ended more and more often with nothing resolved.

  Earth was a low priority, to be looked into at some future date. Confirmation arrived that other Terran expeditions with relativistic drives faster than that of Atlas Shrugged were still inferior to those in the Optimacy's CAD/CAM banks. The Optimants' giant head start made them contemptuous of any threat from planets such as Periapt, Concordance, and the rest. They were increasingly absorbed with a new facet of their high destiny: personal immortality. In the meantime there were the delights of their planetary empire to enjoy.

  Until the Cyberplagues came to Aquamarine.

  Early analyses suggested that the initial vector was the long-range surveillance arrays trained on Earth, but further investigation was not to be. Perhaps because they had evolved the most pervasive computational ecology humans had ever devised, the Optimants and their offspring suffered the worst devastation.

  The havoc wrought by a worldwide infrastructure gone berserk was horrific enough, but even ghastlier were the monsters suddenly sprung to life within the Optimants themselves. The kamikaze crash of an automated OTV and the berserker-gang of foundry lasers were less terrifying than the rebellion of physioimplants and cyber-shunted AIs.

  The fortunate ones were killed quickly by a simple cortex burn or an OD from a pharmaceutical bleb. Others battered their bones to jelly in imposed seizures or thrashed in agony while subminiaturized automatons savaged their bodies from within.

  There were indications that the Oceanic took measures against what it considered aggression, but those measures ceased early on, possibly because the Cyberplague apocalypse carried no danger to Amnion, Aquamarine's single sea. Some speculated that the Oceanic was intimidated by the orgasm of destruction playing out across ground, sky, and space.

  Only in the aftermath of the first cataclysmic day did the Optimacy's true vulnerability become clear. Their power had lain not in their artifacts and wealth but in information, and that was suddenly gone as a result of suiciding AIs and ALs. Because they had had the utmost confidence in their cybernetic edifice, hardcopy and other backup formats scarcely existed. The few bound books on the planet were mostly literary and historical works of no practical value.

  People were helpless without their smart apparatuses and/or AI collaborators. There were virtually no manual tools with which to fashion higher tools to repair their complex world and no data on how to proceed. Engineers who could do CAD/CAM miracles in a single work shift were suddenly at a loss about how to build a fire. Weeping doctors, impotent and lost, squatted before dying patients in the burning ruins. Even when crude surgical instruments were improvised, there were no AI dopplegangers at their ear to diagnose, guide, and oversee. Aristocrats of the High Destiny were digging through garbage for food scraps, cowering from wild predators, tying rags around their feet. The irreplaceable underpinnings of their intricate, interdependent civilization had simply vanished.

  When the initial fury of the Cyberplagues was past, the Optimants discovered that they had a vulnerability far beyond that of their computers: they weren't really a homogeneous society, after all. Rather than a cohesive and unified world-nation, they were nothing more than an alliance of egocentrics kept from fundamental conflict by their immense assets.

  Though the majority were from essentially the same racial stock and broad cultural background, they found abundant excuses for hatred and hostility. There was no shortage of proximate motives for violence. The GeStation-bred labor forces found rationales for establishing agendas as well, including the extermination of the Optimants.

  Ironically, it was the onset of survivor wars that reformed tight and circumscribed communities. Scraps of knowledge were slowly regained. But there was no way back to Optimacy or anything like it. The age of the Beforetimers was over.

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  "The court is particularly interested in the incidents that led to the death of Captain—" Deitz ran a manicured finger down the screen of her electronic assistant.

  "Marlon," Mason supplied.

  Deitz nodded and tapped the screen. "Yes, here he is." She gazed at Mason. "I've read your report, Administrator, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to run through it again." She shook her head. "There is so much I don't understand…"

  Mason snorted a laugh. "You're in good company, Ms. Deitz."

  She smiled. "I'm sure I am, Administrator."

  She brought her gaze back to the screen for a moment as the wind howled outside the tinted window wall of Blades Station. The view encompassed miles and miles of Periapt wasteland.

  "Suppose we get right to that day at—Gapshot, is it?"

  "Styx Strait," Mason corrected her. "Gapshot is the town overlooking the strait that separates Scorpia—Aquamarine's principal landmass—from the Trans-Bourne, an island to the south. It earns most of its profit from tariffs levied on Jut-hoppers."

  "Jut-hoppers?"

  "Traders crazy enough to dare crossing the Styx Strait when the tide is out." Mason laughed, mostly to himself. "When the Oceanic's out."

  Mason took a breath. "Gapshot was ruled by an Aquam named Majestica; she was the hereditary autarch of the place back then. As shrewd and relentless a woman as I've ever met. Marlon was synapshit over her. He was older, at least in somatic years, and should have had the upper hand, but she played him brilliantly, offering herself like a prize Marlon couldn't have unless he met her price."

  "And what price was that?"

  "A permanent land link between southern Scorpia and the Trans-Bourne that Gapshot—Majestica—would control."

  "A bridge, you mean."

  "Yes and no. Marlon understood the risk from LAW for enhancing the lot of a single ruler. Leaving behind a big-ticket construction project would let the indigs make their own progress in LAW's absence. It was such a fundamental violation of doctrine that Marlon refused to give in—no matter how much he wanted her.

  "But Captain Marlon was a man whose ego and visions of personal glory responded to stroking, and a lot of members of the Scepter's crew were eager to please." Mason motioned to Deitz's machine. "Check your data banks for the psych profiles on a kiss-ass named Nick Musto."

  "Planetological Sciences," the lawyer said after a moment.

  "Musto suggested a solution to Marlon's dilemma. Why not simply raise the juts to serve as a permanent causeway, well above any high-tide line? That way the whole thing could be explained to LAW as a planet-morphing experiment of sorts.

  "Marion loved the idea, of course. He persuaded himself that the land link could be rationalized as the co-opting of a solidly loyal indig sovereign. There was talk that he was thinking of taking Majestica back to Periapt or even remaining behind after the Scepter departed." Mason gave his head a rueful shake.

  "Go on, Administrator," Dietz told him.

  "Musto's plan called for the use of a prototype plasma drilling rig that would punch through the littoral on the Trans-Bourne side of the strait and penetrate all the way to a magma bleb several thousand meters down. The engineers were confident that the upwelling would plug the Styx Strait for good. Any excess magma could simply be diverted into Amnion by means of judicious lateral enlargements of the original drill hole. Naturally, the drilling would be done at low tide, so there'd be no contact between machinery and sea."

  "So this creature, the Oceanic, wouldn't mind."

  "Unfortunately, it did mind. The moment the plasma drill penetrated the superficial rock and hit pockets of salt water underlying
the juts, the whole damned planet started shaking."

  Dietz's eyebrows beetled. "You can attest to this personally?"

  "I was right there in Gapshot, though on the sidelines, you might say. Majestica, Marlon, and his staff were inside a command and control VTOL. There were also two linesman helos on the lookout for any devout Aquam addled enough to try to interfere, plus half a dozen hoverpods serving as spotters for the op."

  "Did anyone attempt to interfere?"

  "No. Marlon and Majestica had managed to convince everyone that here at last was a human empowerment that could defy the Oceanic."

  "The Oceanic caused a quake, I take it."

  "A quake?" Mason said. "A quake could have been dealt with. No, Ms. Dietz, the Oceanic produced a manifestation none of us had ever seen, something the Aquam call a Skyskein."

  Dietz glanced at the screen. "I read something about these manifestations…"

  "You won't find much in there," Mason said. "Manifestations are just one of the Oceanic's inexplicable activities. They can be observed all across the planet." He paused, then grinned. "Think of them as living geysers."

  "Living?"

  Mason nodded. "The Skyskein reached up, following the line of the drill rig, and took hold of the flying crane that was holding it. It grabbed the thing like a fist and yanked it back into the strait. Then about two million cubic meters of seawater just mounded up and moved over onto the beach at the Gap-shot side of the juts, covering the LAW tech support field station we'd set up. The seawater covered everything."