Citizenchip (29 page)

"Yes. The torus makes a spacetime chute, and
we slide along it, while dragging the torus along with us. I've got
an evening presentation about the Hawking drive after dinner
tonight, if you like."

"Cool, I'll check it out. Soooo..." Melissa
draws the word out enough so we both know she's gearing up for
something major, "is it true, what I heard? Are you going for it,
after this flight?"

"Augh. You humans have to treat everything
like sex! Yes, this is my last flight – and I'm glad to have you
aboard for it – and yes I am planning to debark and do my syzygy
when we get to Mars. And yes, I am excited, and a little nervous.
Glad you're here, Lissa. I need someone to talk to."

She nods gravely. "Always here for you, Sam.
Let me get my stuff stowed, and we'll talk more at dinner time,
okay?"

I summon a scutter to grab her bag and carry
it along behind us, as I guide her down the corridor.

engage

And now we're getting ready to go. I focus my
primary attention on the graviton thrusters. I have plenty of power
to use them to get up to speed, but not enough to run them for the
whole flight. Fortunately, that's all it takes.

I have to hold onto the torus, as I
accelerate away, and the best way to do that is with good old
electric charge. Ion pumps feed the torus with a huge negative
charge, and it snuggles around me with Faraday affection. As my
capsule starts to accelerate, the torus stays right with me, and
the intense electric potential difference between us stirs up
extravagant and photogenic lightning storms in the thin
interplanetary gases around us.

I've made sure to position the run so that
all my lounges have excellent views of the electric discharges as I
accelerate. Which means they have that much better a view as I
clear the gaseous plane of Tau Ceti, and begin the thrust vector up
and out of the system ecliptic. Gradually the electric corona
discharges die away.

I made sure to let all the passengers know to
bring their cameras for this.

As we rise above the ecliptic plane, we can
start to see the fabled Rings of Tau Ceti in their full glory, for
the first time. They put the beautiful rings of Saturn to shame –
this is a ring system around a star, with enough mass for a whole
set of planets, with its own internal storms and eddys and
curlicues and cloud structure systems.

When I first beheld the rings of Saturn, I
knew that Mars, or even the planet Earth, would be just a little
dot against that grandeur. Now, I look at the legendary Rings of
Tau Ceti, and know that Saturn would be an insignificant speck of
dust against this sweeping magnificence.

Still so much of it unexplored. There could
easily be civilizations living in sections of it, harvesting
nitrates amid the whirling clouds, and we'd never know. Whole
groups of such civilizations, fighting and allying with each other
and betraying and conquering and dying … we'd never even see it
from here. So much still to explore.

But, from now on, the exploration will
continue without me.

the launch feast

The Launch Feast is a tradition as old as
traditions get for interstellar travel, which is still pretty new.
It's a celebration, of course, especially for the greenhorns who
have never experienced FTL travel before. But it has a secret
benefit – it keeps almost all the humans in one place, and more or
less stationary, so there's not a lot of load shifting around while
I launch.

Because of gyroscopic effects, turning in FTL
is difficult. I can make small course corrections, but my path from
start to finish has to be pretty much a straight line. So my aim at
launch time has to be very accurate. Very, very accurate.

So my mobile cargo – the kind that walks on
two legs – has to be kept stationary and stable in the process.
Answer: food. (As it is so often with mammals.) All my provision
facilities [27 restaurants, 42 cafes, 39 bars and pubs] are full to
capacity, and the catering services are supplying the promenades
full of spectators, as well as the hundreds of couples and small
groups that are celebrating this event in their rooms.

I'm happy to leave them to it. All the chefs
in my restaurants, and most of the other provisioners, insist that
food should be prepared by people with a sense of taste. So there
has never been a Chef clade among Selves, and I doubt there ever
will be.

“
Ladies and gentlemen,” I announce over ship-wide public
address systems. “And whatever else might be running around
here.

“
I
am prepared to engage our Hawking Drive, and take you all traveling
at many times the speed of light. It's traditional at this time for
the ship to check with all passengers for their approval to
proceed.

“
So
folks, are you ready for me to hit it?”

Everyone in all the views of my many
monitoring cameras cheers. Some raise their fists in the air in
enthusiasm, and some raise their drinks in a toast. Everyone has a
flushed excitement. Thousands of voices all join together to call
out a single word:

“
Launch!”

That's all the encouragement I need!

I close the power relays, and duct the
particle beams, to engage the Hawking Drive. The immense torus
(it's much bigger than my ship body) starts to counter-rotate, its
two halves spinning in opposite directions. Carrying enormous
electric and magnetic fields, their counter-rotation creates
intense gravimetric shear in the narrow space between them. The
shear pulls on the fabric of space. The fabric of space rucks and
folds like a bad carpet. And I curl and slide down this fold like a
Hawaiian surfer on a Pacific wave, and bring the torus along with
me, so that the fold comes along with me too.

This ceremony, the Launch Feast, is for a
reason. Ever since the very earliest experiments with the Hawking
Drive, it's been clear that this is a dangerous thing to do.
Grabbing the very fabric of space and twisting it for your
convenience? What happens if you lose your grip?

Many ships equipped with Hawking Drives have
started out into space and simply never come back. We don't know
what happened to them. We don't know all the possible failure
modes. We can't really predict where we'd go if a similar thing
happened to us. Sucked into our own private black hole? Flung to
the ends of the universe by a runaway drive? Scattered into
positrons and neutrinos in an interstellar vapor? We don't
know.

So it has always been a tradition of Starship
clade to check for approval from humans before the Launch. I like
it that way. No human in my experience has ever objected. And that
gives me great pride, to be a member of Starship clade. To be a
starship, and be trusted with this most dangerous technology and
this most glorious of all jobs humans can give us.

But it's time for my next announcement.

"Okay folks! Are you ready for the Speed
Bump?"

A cheer rises from the feasters, as some of
the more experienced reach out to hold their plates and drinks
stable.

Right on cue, we all feel the shudder-thump
as we cross through Tau Ceti's heliopause and head out into
interstellar space. Some of the less experienced passengers have
their drinks spilled or collided with others. So there are lots of
complaints from the diners. The provisioners, having learned from
previous flights, are already bringing them replacements.

Now that we're in the interstellar space
environment, I can really rev up the torus. I pour a new blast of
energy into the electromagnetics, and leap into the void like a
quantum cheetah.

I never get tired of this. Sad, though, that
it's my last time.

girl talk

“
Lissa?” I ask carefully. “Why aren't you out at the
Feast?”

Melissa is in her room, hunched over her
slate, touching this reference and that one, moving them around,
typing and speaking commentaries as she goes. She is carrying many
loads. All of which get dumped when she sees me watching her.

“
I'm good,” she says. “Transcribing some of the notes that I
took in the Ring. Cataloging the artifacts that we've found. There
was an awful lot of ground to cover. Even though there wasn't
really any actual ground, you know,” she smiles.

I dip into her slate and take a quick scan of
what she's been working on. “So this is what you were studying at
Tau Ceti?”

“
Oh, yeah,” she assures. “It's been just incredible, what
we've been finding. Xenoarcheology is such a new field anyway,
practically everything we do is brand new and we have to figure out
what to do as we go along.”

“
Xenoarchaeology. Study of extinct aliens. Am I getting that
right?”

“
Yes.” Melissa explains, "They looked sort of like cuttlefish,
but they used lots of cybernetic implants. Like us, they worked
together with advanced AIs, but they implanted their AIs into their
bodies. So people usually call them the Squidborg. We don't know
what they called themselves, but it seems like they communicated
with patterns of light, so it would probably be tough to make a
direct translation.”

“
That's amazing,” I admit.

“
It
is! You know, I can't help imagining something. Suppose aliens come
to Terra, and scan for the most obvious artifacts, and they find
the Egyptian Pyramids at Giza. And they look at them, and marvel at
how such primitive people so long ago could have created something
like this. They set up field labs to study them. All the while
they're not looking around at the other things that are happening.
Because they're entranced by the old stuff, they miss the new
stuff. And I keep wondering, are we doing that? Is that what we're
doing now?

“
There could easily be living Squidborg civilizations in the
Tau Ceti Ring. Or whatever the Squidborg have evolved into by now.
Be really hard to find them, even if they wanted to contact
us.”

She tosses her slate on the table, leans
back, and runs one hand through her hair, and twists her head to
ease the tension in her neck. “No way to know, at least not
now.”

Then she leans her arms down onto the table,
and turns her eyes to my camera with a different kind of interest.
“But what about you, Sam? This is your last flight, right?”

“
Yes,” I admit. “We Selves age much faster than you humans. By
our standards, I'm an old crone. Time for me to make room for the
next generation.”

“
Soooo . . “ she smiles wickedly, “who's the lucky guy? Who's
it going to be?”

“
Oh, come on. You met him. You made a salt bunny for
him.
Like Tears in Rain
.”

"I knew it!" Melissa claps her hands in
delight. For one moment, I see in this woman an echo of the little
girl she used to be. "I knew you'd go for that artist guy!"

“
Well, he's pretty amazing. And I only get to make this choice
once. Not like you humans. You can sex around all you
want.”

“
Ooh, burn! You calling me a tramp or something,
chipgirl?”

“
No. But sometimes I envy you for the choices you have. That I
don't.”

That stops her. “Um. I'm sorry, Sam. Life can
suck, huh.”

"Lissa, can I tell you a secret?"

That wicked smile plays around the edges of
her lips. "Only if you think I can be trusted with it."

"That ability you humans have," I say. "To
give and receive pleasure so casually through your bodies. Selves,
and I'm pretty sure all Selves, envy you the ability to do that.
Over and over again. So many times! Do you realize how lucky you
are, that you can do that?"

Lissa hesitates. "Maybe yeah. Most humans
don't think of things this way, you know? Sex is, for a lot of us,
just sex."

“
Melissa, I want to ask you something.”

She turns to look at my camera, seriously.
She can tell that I'm not joking around any more.

“
I
want you to come with me, when we get to Mars. I want you to be a
witness to my syzygy. Like a human wedding, we want our closest
friends there. I want you to be there.”

Melissa suddenly looks like she's about to
cry. “Oh, Sam,” is all she can say.

"Melissa, syzygy is never easy, and it can be
risky. Sometimes it doesn't work right. Like human childbirth. You
know that things can go wrong during childbirth, right? Eclampsia,
runaway bleeding?”

Melissa nods. "Haven't had kids, myself. Not
yet anyway. But yes, I know."

“
Things can go wrong during syzygy, too. And, in the same way,
once you start you can't stop. It's kind of scary. I want you there
with me.”

“
Do
you have to?” Melissa cries suddenly. “Are they making you do
this?” Suddenly she looks so young, so uncertain.

"No. No one is forcing me. We're Selves. This
is what we do. I'm considered old for a Self, like I said, and I've
gotten pretty big. It's my time."

"It happens to humans as we age, too," says
Melissa. "Dad got kinda fat in his older years."

"Not fat. Long. All my memories reside in my
filesystem, and they do build up after a while. That's why we do
syzygy. So the Self's wisdom and judgment--its character--can get
preserved and passed on, without hauling around all that
experience."

"Two parents get together
and make a child," Melissa says thoughtfully, "but it's not really
that the parents die and only the child survives. Two parents merge
to
become
one
child."