Oceanic (18 page)

What was there for Ikat to say on the matter? Should she plead for the project to be taken seriously, as more than a quaint nationalist stunt from a bygone era? Maybe the top brass weren’t Satisfied; maybe they were just embarrassed. The possibility annoyed her. No one who’d been sincere in their work on the Orchid Seed should be ashamed of what they’d done.

Ikat returned Vikram Ali’s call. He responded immediately, and after the briefest of pleasantries came to the point.

“I represent Khamoush Holdings,” he said. “Some time ago, we acquired various assets and obligations of the URC government, including a contractual relationship with you.”

“I see.” Ikat struggled to remember what she might have signed that could possibly be relevant a hundred and twenty years later. Had she promised to do media if asked? Her assistant had verified Khamoush Holding’s bona fides, but all it knew about the Procellarum contract was that Ikat’s copy had been lost in 2145, when an anarchist worm had scrambled three per cent of the planet’s digital records.

“The opportunity has arisen for us to exploit one of our assets,” Ali continued, “but we are contractually obliged to offer you the option of participating in the relevant activity.”

Ikat blinked.
Option?
Khamoush had bought some form of media rights, obviously, but would there be a clause saying they had to run down the ranks of the Orchid Seed team, offering each participant a chance to play spokesperson?

“Am I obliged to help you, or not?” she asked.

Now it was Ali’s turn to be surprised. “Obliged? Certainly not! We’re not slave holders!” He looked downright offended.

Ikat said, “Could we get the whole thing over in a day or two?”

Ali pondered this question deeply for a couple of seconds. “You don’t have the contract, do you?”

“I chose a bad archive,” Ikat confessed.

“So you have no idea what I’m talking about?”

“You want me to give interviews about the Orchid Seed, don’t you?” Ikat said.

“Ultimately, yes,” Ali replied, “but that’s neither here nor there for now. I want to ask you if you’re interested in traveling to Duty, taking a look around, and coming back.”

#

In the lobby of the hotel in Mumbai, Ikat learned that someone else had accepted the offer from Khamoush Holdings.

“I thought you’d be rich and Satisfied by now,” she told Qing.

He smiled. “Mildly rich. Never satisfied.”

They walked together to the office of Magic Beans Inc, Ikat holding her umbrella over both of them against the monsoon rain.

“My children think I’m insane,” Qing confessed.

“Mine too. But then, I told them that if they kept arguing, I’d make it a one-way journey.” Ikat laughed. “Really, they ought to be grateful. No filial obligations for forty years straight. It’s hard to imagine a greater gift.”

In the Magic Beans office, Ali showed them two robots, more or less identical to the ones the Orchid Flower, he hoped, would already have built on the surface of Duty. The original mission planners had never intended such a thing, but when Khamoush had acquired the assets they had begun the relevant R&D immediately. Forty years ago they had transmitted the blueprints for these robots, in a message that would have arrived not long after the Orchid Seed touched down. Now that confirmation of the Flower’s success in its basic mission had reached Earth, in a matter of months they would learn whether the nanomachines had also been able to scavenge the necessary materials to construct these welcoming receptacles.

“We’re the only volunteers?” Qing asked, gazing at his prospective doppelgänger with uneasy fascination. “I would have thought one of the acorporeals would have jumped at the chance.”

“Perhaps if we’d asked them early enough,” Ali replied. “But once you’re immersed in that culture, forty years must seem a very long time to be out of touch.”

Ikat was curious about the financial benefits Khamoush were hoping for; they turned out to revolve largely around a promotional deal with a manufacturer of prosthetic bodies. Although the designs the company sold were wildly different from these robots – even their Extreme Durability models were far more cozily organic – any link with the first interstellar explorers trudging across rugged landscapes on a distant, lifeless world carried enough resonance to be worth paying for.

Back in the hotel they sat in Qing’s room, talking about the old times and speculating about the motives and fates of all their higher-ranked colleagues who’d turned down this opportunity. Perhaps, Ikat suggested, some of them simply had no wish to become acorporeal. Crossing over to software didn’t preclude you from continuing to inhabit a prosthetic body back on Earth, but once you changed substrate the twin lures of virtual experience and self-modification were strong. “That would be ironic,” she mused. “To decline to engage with the physical universe in this way, for fear of ultimately losing touch with it.”

Qing said, “I plan to keep my body frozen, and have my new self wired back into it when I return, synapse by synapse.”

Ikat smiled. “I thought you said
mildly
rich.” That would be orders of magnitude more costly than her own plan: frozen body, prosthetic brain.

“They caught us at just the right stage in life,” Qing said. “Still interested in reality, but not still doting on every new great-great-grandchild. Not yet acorporeal, but old enough that we already feel as if we’ve been on another planet for forty years.”

Ikat said, “I’m amazed that they honored our contracts, though. A good lawyer could have let them hand-pick their travelers.” The relevant clause had simply been a vague offer of preferential access to spin-off employment opportunities.

“Why shouldn’t they want
us?
” Qing demanded, feigning indignation. “We’re seasoned astronauts, aren’t we? We’ve already proved we could live together in Procellarum for three years, without driving each other crazy. Three months – with a whole planet to stretch our legs on – shouldn’t be beyond us.”

Later that week, to Ikat’s amazement, their psychological assessments proved Qing’s point; their basic personality profiles really hadn’t changed since the Procellarum days. Careers, marriages, children, had left their marks, but if anything they were both more resilient.

They stayed in Mumbai, rehearsing in the robot bodies using telepresence links, and studying the data coming back from the Orchid Flower.

When confirmation arrived that the Flower really had built the robots Khamoush Holdings had requested, Ikat sent messages directly to her children and grandchildren, and then left it to them to pass the news further down the generations. Her parents were dead, and her children were tetchy centenarians; she loved them, but she did not feel like gathering them around her for a tearful bon voyage. The chances were they’d all still be here when she returned.

She and Qing spent a morning doing media, answering a minute but representative fraction of the questions submitted by interested news subscribers. Then Ikat’s body was frozen, and her brain was removed, microtomed, and scanned. At her request, her software was not formally woken on Earth prior to her departure; routine tests confirmed its functionality in a series of dreamlike scenarios which left no permanent memories.

Then the algorithm that described her was optimized, compressed, encoded into a series of laser pulses, and beamed across twenty light years, straight on to the petals of the Orchid Flower.

3

Ikat woke standing on a brown, pebbled plain beneath a pale, salmon-colored sky. Prosperity A had just risen; its companion, ten billion kilometers away, was visible but no competition, scarcely brighter than Venus from Earth.

Qing was beside her, and behind him was the Flower: the communications link and factory that the Orchid Seed had built. Products of the factory included hundreds of small rovers, which had dispersed to explore the planet’s surface, and dozens of solar-powered gliders, which provided aerial views and aided with communications.

Qing said, “Punch me, make it real.”

Ikat obliged with a gentle thump on his forearm. Their telepresence rehearsals had included virtual backdrops just like the Flower’s actual surroundings, but they had not had full tactile feedback. The action punctured Ikat’s own dreamy sense of déjà vu; they really had stepped out of the simulation into the thing itself.

They had the Flower brief them about its latest discoveries; they had been twenty years behind when they’d left Earth, and insentient beams of light for twenty more. The Flower had pieced together more details of Duty’s geological history; with plate tectonics but no liquid water, the planet’s surface was older than Earth’s but not as ancient as the moon’s.

Ikat felt a twinge of superfluousness; if the telescope images hadn’t quite made the Orchid Flower redundant, there was precious little left for her and Qing. They were not here to play geologists, though; they were here to be here. Any science they did would be a kind of recreation, like an informed tourist’s appreciation of some well-studied natural wonder back on Earth.

Qing started laughing. “Twenty fucking
light years!
Do you know how long that would take to walk? They should have tried harder to make us afraid.” Ikat reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. She felt a little existential vertigo herself, but she did not believe they faced any great risk. The forty lost years were a fait accompli, but she was reconciled to that.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” she said. “If something goes wrong, they’ll just wake your body back on Earth, with no changes at all.”

Qing nodded slowly. “But you had your brain diced, didn’t you?”

“You know me, I’m a cheapskate.” Non-destructive scanning was more expensive, and Khamoush weren’t paying for everything. “But they can still load the backup file into a prosthesis.”

“Assuming it’s not eaten by an anarchist worm.”

“I arranged to have a physical copy put into a vault.”

“Ah, but what about the nihilist nanoware?”

“Then you and I will be the only survivors.”

Their bodies had no need for shelter from the elements, but the Flower had built them a simple hut for sanity’s sake. As they inspected the spartan rooms together, Qing seemed to grow calm; as he’d said back on Earth, anything had to be easier than the conditions they’d faced on the moon. Food would have been too complex an indulgence, and Ikat had declined the software to grant her convincing hallucinations of five-course banquets every night.

Once they’d familiarized themselves with everything in the base camp, and done a few scripted Armstrong moments for the cameras to satisfy the promotional deal, they spent the morning hiking across the rock-strewn plain. There was a line of purplish mountains in the distance, almost lost in haze, but Ikat declined to ask the Flower for detailed aerial imagery. They could explore for themselves, find things for themselves. The longing to be some kind of irreplaceable pioneer, to be the first pair of eyes and hands, the first scrutinizing intelligence, was impossible to extinguish completely, but they could find a way to satisfy it without self-delusion or charade.

Her fusion-powered body needed no rest, but at noon she stopped walking and sat cross-legged on the ground.

Qing joined her. She looked around at the barren rocks, the delicate sky, the far horizon. “Twenty light years?” she said. “I’m glad I came.”

#

Their days were full of small challenges, and small discoveries. To cross a mountain range required skill and judgment as well as stamina; to understand the origins of each wind-blasted outcrop took careful observation and a strong visual imagination, as well as a grasp of the basic geological principles.

Still, even as they clambered down one treacherous, powdery cliff-face, Ikat wondered soberly if they’d reached the high-tide mark of human exploration. The Orchid Seed’s modest speed and reach had never been exceeded; the giant telescopes had found no hints of life out to a hundred light years, offering little motivation to launch a new probe. The shift to software was becoming cheaper every year, and if that made travel to the stars easier, there were a thousand more alluring destinations closer to home. When you could pack a lifetime of exotic experiences into a realtime hour, capped off with happiness by fiat, who would give up decades of contemporaneity to walk on a distant world? There were even VR games, based on telescope imagery, where people fought unlikely wars with implausible alien empires on the very ground she was treading.

“What are you planning to do when you get home?” she asked Qing that night. They had brought nothing with them from the base camp, so they simply slept on the ground beneath the stars.

“Back to work, I suppose.” He ran his own successful engineering consultancy; so successful that it didn’t really need him. “What else is there? I’m not interested in crawling up a computer’s arse and pretending that I’ve gone to heaven. What about you?”

“I don’t know. I was retired, happily enough. Waiting for death, I suppose.” It hadn’t felt like that, though.

Qing said, “These aren’t the highest mountains on the planet, you know. The ones we’ve just crossed.”

“I know that.”

“There are some that reach into a pretty good vacuum.”

Duty’s atmosphere was thin even on the ground; Ikat had no reason to doubt this assertion. “What’s your point?” she asked.

He turned to her, and gave her his strangest robot smile. “From a mountain like that, a coil gun could land a package of nanomachines on Patience.”

Patience was a third the mass of Duty, and had no atmosphere to speak of. “To what end?”

Qing said, “High vacuum, relativistic launch speeds. What we started doesn’t have to stop here.”

She searched his face, unsure if he was serious. “Do you think the Flower would give us what we needed? Who knows how Khamoush have programmed it?”

“I tested the nanoware, back on Procellarum. I know how to make it give us whatever we ask.”

Ikat thought it over. “Do we know how to describe everything we’ll need? To identify a new target? Plan a whole new mission?” The Orchard Seed had taken thousands of people decades to prepare.