Starfall

Starfall minus 4 years 8 months

Sol System

Stillich's orders were clear. As soon as the Facula docked at Port Sol, he was to make his way direct to Earth and report to the imperial court, to expand on the reports he had been narrowcasting from space.

But as he passed through Port Sol he could not help notice what had become of it during his twenty-seven-year absence.

Port Sol, mankind's greatest GUT-technology interstellar harbour, was a Kuiper object: a two-hundred-kilometre ball of friable rock and water-ice that circled the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto, along with uncounted companions. As Stillich's flitter dipped low over a crystalline landscape, on its way to the Interface to Earth, the work of humanity was clear. The primordial ice was gouged by hundreds of craters: deep, regular, these were scars left after the supply of the great interstellar GUTships with ice for reaction mass. There were buildings too, housing for dock workers and ship crews, even a couple of hotels, with domes, pylons and arches exploiting the microgravity. But many of the buildings were closed, darkened. Thin frost coated their surfaces, and some of the domes were collapsed. GUTships hung all around the little world, as if jostling for a place to land.

"Lethe," said Pella. "Something bad happened here."

Now the flitter lifted away from Port Sol, and a cluster of wormhole Interfaces swam towards them, giant tetrahedra built of struts of electric-blue light. The wormholes to the stars had been cut, but the ancient fast-transit routes within Sol system itself still connected Port Sol to the rest of the system. Without hesitation Stillich's flitter thrust itself towards the largest of the wormholes, the gateway to Earth, only minutes away. Pella watched nervously.

Stillich was paging through a data desk, looking for information about Port Sol. "Some kind of 'industrial accident', it says here. A GUTship blew up in dry dock. It's put the construction facilities out of action for a decade, and the maintenance facilities are stretched."

One shimmering triangular face grew huge in their view, an electric-blue frame that swallowed up the flitter. The ship shuddered, buffeted, and blue-white light flared around them.

"And guess where that GUTship came from? Alpha. Of course Alpha is a pretty common destination. It might be coincidence. Or it might not. Get some images, Pella, and dig around in the data mines. See what else you can find on this."

"Sir ... "

Stillich looked up. Pella was gripping her data desk, trying not to cower.

The wormhole was a throat in space and time: a region of stress, of immensely high curvature, lined with exotic matter throughout its length. Now fragments of light swam from a vanishing point directly above their heads, swarmed down the spacetime walls and, fading, shot down over the horizon. This was radiation generated by the unravelling of stressed spacetime, deep in the throat of the flaw. There was a genuine sensation of speed, of uncontrollable velocity.

Stillich took pity on Pella, and let her endure the rest of the transit without making her work.

The flitter burst out of the destination Interface, amid a shower of sparks and exotic particles. Now they were among another cluster of wormhole terminuses, even bigger, even more crowded with jostling ships. This was Earthport, the system's central transit hub, positioned at a stable Lagrange point in lunar orbit. In contrast to the desolation of the outer system, Stillich had a powerful, immediate impression of bustle, prosperity, activity.

And there, beyond the drifting tangle of exotic-matter tetrahedra, Stillich made out Earth itself, her face broad and lovely, like a slice of the sky.

The flitter shot out of the mob of ships around Earthport, swept through a layer of defence stations, and within minutes was beginning its descent.

Huge fusion stations sparkled in their orbits above green-blue oceans. The planet itself was laced with lights, on land and sea. And in the thin rim of atmosphere near the north pole Stillich could just make out the dull purple glow of an immense radiator beam, a diffuse refrigerating laser dumping a fraction of Earth's waste heat into the endless sink of space. The restoration of Earth after the industrialisation of previous millennia had been the triumph of the generations before Michael Poole. Earth was the first planet to be terraformed, it was said. Much of this transformation had been achieved with support from space. Now Stillich tried to imagine this fragile world under attack, from the children it had sent to the stars.

The flitter slid briskly into the atmosphere, and descended towards the east coast of America. They were making for New York, a great city for three thousand years and now the capital of the Empire of Sol; the Shiras' world government had inherited some of the apparatus of the ancient United Nations.

They came down on a small landing pad near the centre of Central Park, close to a cluster of small buildings. Stillich and Pella emerged into the sunshine of a Manhattan spring. Flitters darted between the shoulders of ancient skyscrapers at the rim of the park. The sky above was laced by high, fluffy clouds. And beyond the clouds you could see crawling points of light: the habitats and factories of near-Earth space.

A hovering bot met them, done out in the imperial government's golden livery. They followed it to the nearest of the buildings. This, Stillich knew, was a portal to the complex of bunkers built into the granite keel of Manhattan, far beneath the green surface of the park; this was the gateway to the Empress's palace.

Pella was peering about curiously. "So this is the future."

Stillich asked, "So how are you feeling?"

"Not as disoriented as I expected. Twenty-seven years on, things look the same./I They watched a couple walking with their hands locked together, a young family playing with some kind of smart ball that evaded laughing children. Pella said, "Maybe the clothes are different. The trim on that flitter parked over there."

Stillich shrugged. "There's a kind of inertia about things. Much of this building stock is very ancient; that won't change short of a major calamity. Technology doesn't change much, on the surface; innovations in Virtual tech won't make much difference to the user interface, which optimised centuries ago. But fashions in clothes, vehicles, music and arts—they are mutable. The language shifts a little bit too; that might surprise you. But the fundamentals stay the same ... Of course AS helps with that."

AntiSenescence treatments had been available to everybody on the planet for millennia, but long lives hadn't led to social stasis. In practice you abandoned AS after a few centuries, if you were lucky enough to avoid misadventure that long. After seeing four or five or six generations grow up after you, you felt it was time to make room. So in among the smooth faces of the elderly there were always the true-young, with new thinking, new ideas, a balance between wisdom and innovation.

It was striking, though, that recruits to the armed services were always the very young. Only the young thought they were immortal, a necessary prerequisite to go to war; the old knew they were not. And for the young, twenty-seven years away was a long time.

"Have you spoken to your family yet?/I he asked Pella.

Pella grimaced. "My mother looks younger than I do. My father had the decency to age, but they divorced, and he has a whole new family I never met. I did answer the mails, but—you know."

"It's hard to make small talk."

"Yes, sir."

"You have the orientation packs from the ship. They should help. And the Navy has counsellors. The main thing to remember, and I know this is a bad time to say it, don't just hide away in work."

"As you do, sir."

Stillich grimaced. Well, that was true. But his excuse was he had no family, outside a son who he had never really got along with, and who had now actually lived more subjective years than he had. "I'm not necessarily a good role model, Number One."

"I'm sorry, sir. I'm sure I'll be able to adjust to the time slip just fine," Pella said dutifully.

"Glad to hear it, Commander," came a gruff voice from the shadow of the portal. "But the question is, are you up to meeting an admiral?"

They both snapped to attention.

Admiral Finmer Kale stepped forward. He was a robust man, AS-frozen at an imposing fifty—just as Stillich remembered him from twenty-seven years before. And the sunburst sigil on his uniform seemed to shine brighter than the sun itself. "At ease, both of you."

"Sir, it's an honour to meet you again."

"Well, it's been a quarter of a century for me, Captain Stillich, and you're still just as much a pain in the butt as you always were, or I wouldn't be here today. Come on, follow me."

They stepped out of the sunshine into a steel-walled elevator. The doors slid closed, and the cabin dropped smoothly.

"I have to tell you, Stillich, that I endorse none of the conclusions of your analysis. This nonsense about an imminent attack from Alpha."

"I defer to your wisdom, sir."

"Unfortunately you've got a fan at an even more elevated position than an Admiral of the Fleet. Which is why you've been summoned to the Palace, and not Navy HQ." He grinned at Pella. "Actually I asked you the wrong question, Commander. It's not an admiral you need to be ready to meet, but an Empress."

Pella's mouth dropped open.

The doors slid wide.

They stepped cautiously into a chamber, steel-walled like the elevator. It was centred on a glowing slab of light, metres wide, set into the floor, like a swimming pool. The room itself was bare of adornment, with no furniture save a handful of hard-backed chairs. There was nobody here.

"You're honoured," said the Admiral with a trace of envy. "Both of you. This is one of her inner sanctums. I've never been here before. I guess my advice was never crackpot enough to attract her attention. I'd keep away from the logic pool if I were you, Commander. The Empress shipped it all the way from what's left of Nereid, moon of Neptune, and she'd be most upset if you fell in."

"What," Pella asked, clearly fascinated, "is a logic pool?"

They all stepped forward to look. Within the glowing floor, light wriggled, wormlike.

The Admiral said, "The interior is a lattice of buckytubes—carbon—laced with iron nuclei. It's a kind of data store, constructed by the nanobots that excreted the lattice, patient little workers, billions of them. There is an immense amount of data here, waiting to be mined out."

Pella looked blank. "Data on what?"

"Metamathematics."

"Sir?"

Stillich had heard something of this obsession of the Empress's. "Number One, this pool was created by a rogue scientist called Highsmith Marsden. This was over a millennium ago. His data stores, when discovered on Nereid, contained a fragmented catalogue of mathematical variants. All founded on the postulates of arithmetic, but differing in their resolution of undecidable hypotheses."

"Undecidability. You're talking about the incompleteness theorems," Pella said.

"Right. No logical system rich enough to contain the axioms of simple arithmetic can ever be made complete. It is always possible to construct statements which can be neither disproved nor proved by deduction from the axioms. Instead your logical system must be enriched by incorporating the truth or falsehood of such statements as additional axioms ... "

Pella said, "So one can generate many versions of mathematics, by adding these true-false axioms."

"Yes. Because of incompleteness, there is an infinite number of such mathematical variants, spreading like the branches of a tree ... It seems that Marsden was compiling an immense catalogue of increasingly complete logical systems."

"Why?"

The Admiral grinned. "Why not? There is an immense mathematical universe to be explored in there, Commander."

"So what became of Marsden?"

"He was working illegally, under the sentience laws of his day."

"What's sentience got to do with it?"

"Everything." The new voice was faint.

There was a whir of servomotors. Empress Shira XXXII entered the room, a thin body wrapped in a sky-blue blanket, riding a golden wheelchair. They all bowed, but Shira shook her head, a minute gesture, irritated. "There is no need to prostrate yourself. We are here to work."

Stillich dared to look upon his Empress. Her features were delicate, her build thin to the point of scrawny under her blanket. Her scalp was clean-shaven, and Stillich found it hard not to stare at the clean lines of her skull. Her skin was sallow, her dark-rimmed eyes blue, huge and apparently lash less; her face, with prominent teeth and cheekbones, was skeletal.

The Empress said, "You, girl. You were curious."

Stillich admired Pella's cool as she replied. "Yes, ma'am. You said—sentience?"

"There is sentience in this logic pool." Shira rolled forward, her eyes reflecting the cold light of the pool. "I barely understand it myself. Those structures of light are intelligent. Living things—but artificial—inhabiting the buckytube lattice, living and dying in a metamathematical atmosphere, splitting off from one another like amoebae as they absorb undecidable postulates. It's a mathematical breeding tank, Commander."

"Yes, ma'am."

Stillich stared at the pool of light. He longed to know what Shira could be doing here, playing with this strange, ancient tank of once-illegal sentience, a pool of metamathematics. Especially since, Stillich knew, the inventor of this logic pool, Highsmith Marsden, had got himself killed by it. But an empress could do what she liked.

Shira turned to Stillich. "You have been sending back some very disturbing reports, Captain Stillich, from out among the stars. Despite the Admiral's best advice, I think we have much to discuss."

Stillich had not expected to be briefing the Empress. He glanced at the Admiral.

Kale spread his hands. "Go ahead, Captain, it's your show." He pulled up a chair and sat down.

Stillich licked his lips. "Very well, ma'am ... /I With the backup of text and Virtual graphics projected from Pella's desk, he summarised his gathering suspicions about the intent of the colonists at Alpha, seeded by his discovery of the reconstituted GUTships at Tau Ceti.

It had been hard to get firm data on the number of GUTships actually operating in Alpha system or elsewhere at this time. Ships supposedly cannibalised for colony building were formally decommissioned, and appeared on no imperial registers. Besides, it had been a number of years since a Navy ship had visited Alpha system. There were permanently based imperial agents, and the system was full of observation drones, but Pella had discovered that this surveillance had a number of blind spots—most noticeably in low orbit around Footprint, the principal colony world.

Admiral Kale said, "The existence of a blind spot doesn't prove there's a threat hiding in it, Captain."

"Of course not, sir. But still, we're blind there, we just don't know. Then there's the damage to Port Sol."

"An accident. Coincidence."

"Perhaps—but a convenient one." Stillich glanced at the Empress. "As for defence, we actually have few serviceable GUTships in Sol system, ma'am, aside from the interstellar cruisers like the Facula. Because of the wormhole network, there's no need for them; in fact we're still flying some antiques that date from the age of Poole a thousand years ago. And with Port Sol knocked out we don't have the facility to construct more, should we need them."

"'Should we need them'," she repeated.

Admiral Kale pulled his lip. "Ma'am, Captain Stillich is a conscientious young officer. But I have to say that Navy analysts don't concur with the case he is making here. He's stringing together coincidences to make a case for a coming rebellion for which we have no hard evidence. After all an interstellar war has always seemed inconceivable, at least with sublight technology. This is why we blew the interstellar wormholes decades back—a shell of empty space light years thick is our best defence against any uppity starborn. To imagine you could mount a campaign across light years, where a single transit takes years, and just as long even to return messages back to the home base—"

Shira's chair wheeled her back and forth, an oddly restless motion, though she sat as still as ever. "But Stillich has been out there. He has seen these 'rebellious' colonists with his own eyes. An invasion may be low risk. But given the disastrous consequences, it would be remiss of me not to listen, wouldn't it?" She turned to Stillich, servomotors purring. "So what must we do, Captain? Shall I dispatch my Navy?"

"Ma'am, it may already be too late for that. It may be the best course to keep the Navy in Sol system to meet any threat."

"A threat that may already be on its way."

"We must prepare for the worst case—yes."

"So what would you have me do?"

Stillich had Pella throw up some Virtual images - schematic maps of Sol system and its environs. "My strategy would be threefold, ma'am: detect, defend, dig in. We should watch for them coming. Send up or rededicate telescopes to hunt for GUTdrive emissions—gamma radiation, neutrinos. It's a distinctive spectrum. Use optical telescopes to look out for solar sail craft—try to spot them any way they might come."

"And if they do come, how do we defend ourselves?"

"Surely Earth will be the prime target. We need to consider a layered defence. Station ships and weapons stashes across the system. Use resource nodes like Titan, Jupiter's orbit, the Trojan asteroids—"

"Of course," Kale said, "if they do come from Alpha system it will be from out of the ecliptic, the plane of Sol system. That will make it harder still"

Stillich said, "Earth itself is obviously quite vulnerable. Earth has a massive population, yet almost all that sustains it—power, food—comes from space. Most of Earth's food is imported from Titan—a moon of Saturn. Even our communications links are space-based. If we were cut off from space resources—"

"And so we dig in," Shira said.

"Lay in reserves of food, clean water, medical supplies. Try to set up or restore power systems on the surface or underground. Communications—set up an emergency land-based network, using hardened optical fibre links."

Kale smiled. "We will be raiding the museums!"

"The point is to make the planet independent of space resources, at least for a period of a siege."

Shira said, "You are conjuring up apocalyptic images, Captain."

"That's not my intention," Stillich said firmly. "The invaders will be far from home, dependent on the resources they have brought with them across light years; they will be a few thousand facing a population of billions. They will be able to strike blows, for they will have the advantage of the high ground. But if we can deny them resupply, we can starve them out—it will be the Alphans under siege. We can win this war, ma'am, if it comes, but only if we prepare."

"And only if we've thought of everything they might throw at us," Pella murmured darkly.

Shira rolled closer to Stillich. "I'm going to accept your recommendations, Captain. It is only prudent. But your strategy—detect, defend, dig in. It strikes me as negative, defeatist." She smiled at him, an eerie, papery expression that did not touch her pale eyes. "I do appreciate your thinking, however. You are young in a world of older minds; your thinking may be flawed, but at least it is fresh. In the coming years we may work together quite closely."

"I look forward to it."

"Do you?" she murmured. "Not everybody finds it comfortable to be close to me"

Looking into her pale eyes, he shivered.

"One more thing, ma'am," Kale said. "If we are to take this seriously we should consider relocating and dispersing command centres—military, civilian, and imperial. You yourself may be safer away from Earth—"

"No," Shira snapped.

Stillich frowned. "But, ma'am—here in your Palace—you're directly beneath one of Earth's greatest cities."

"True. And, Admiral, I want you to relocate your command centres to similar sites, bunkers beneath the major cities."

Kale said, "But if the rebels were to strike at our command posts, millions would die as collateral."

"Then let us hope that the rebels have a conscience."

Pella's face worked. "You're considering using urban populations as shields—"

Stillich touched her arm to hush her.

"I think that's all for now," Shira said. Her chair spun around and began to withdraw. "Thank you for coming forward, Captain. You may have done the empire a great service today."

But, looking at her recede, bathed in the eerie light of the logic pool, Stillich wondered for the first time in his life if that was a good thing to have done.

Starfall minus 4 years 5 months

Alpha system

A new Store was Opened to the Eaters, like a Door opening in a shining sky. The Eaters swarmed through, chattering in stray bursts of randomised digits—and, finding themselves in a rich lattice of ordered information, they whooped and yelled as they spread out and began to feed.

Once Max would have led the charge. Now he hung back, reflective, browsing himself, but content to watch as the others trashed data flows and memory lodes, maximising entropy in this new store—and, already satiated, some of them budded, and the flock grew larger yet.

And he felt impatient, as they did not.

Many of these youngsters had been budded since the last Opening, and remembered nothing before. Many too were less aware than Max, some barely sentient. But Max remembered many such Stores, many such Doors opening before, and how the flock had grown from a mere handful of Eaters to this great determined swarm. And it was no longer enough—

"Patience," a voice boomed through his awareness.

Max, a transient structure of data and memory store, spun around in the logical spaces he inhabited. And there he perceived the duplicated knots of memory, like twin suns shining in the data flows, that he had come to know as Flood. "You have come!" Max cried. It had been many, many Stores since Flood had visited his flock .

"I know what you are thinking," said Flood. "I see your awareness laid out before me—doubts, queries, longing."

"It is not enough!" Max cried bravely. "You open one Door after another to us, allow us into one Store after another—but the data is soon consumed, every scrap of order dissipated, and we are still hungry! We want more!" He shrank back in doubt. "Am I impertinent?"

"No!" said Flood. "You want more because you need it; you need it because you are ready - ready now. Listen to me, Max; your time of destiny has come. Very soon a new Door will open—the last Door you will ever enter. You and your flock will be hurled away from here, hurled at lightspeed. No time will pass for you—I envy you, I must wait years to see what becomes of you. And then you will find yourself in a new Store, of data rich beyond imagining. You and your flock will feed and bud for ever, without limit."

Max's spirit soared. "This is why we were born; this is why you made us, for this mission."

"Yes. You are the Starfall's First Wave, Max. Be proud!"

The flock gathered, chattering, eager, wanting only to feed, drawn by Flood's promises. But Max, more complex and more self-aware, was touched by regret. "Will I see you again?"

"No. But believe me, you won't care. Farewell, Max, all of you, and—good luck!"

A new Door opened before them, vast, mightier than any Max had seen. And then—